I didn’t say anything, because I knew it was a question that didn’t need an answer.
After a moment she went on:
“See what happened in this case. Atwood robbed the people who employed him. He murdered, and he forged a document which he thought would stand inspection anywhere, bolstered up by his perjured testimony, and that of Ted Sproul. The desert came along and stamped that document as a forgery, so that you and Sheriff Hostler would tell it the minute you saw it. It seems as though it wasn’t just chance. It seems as though there must have been something bigger — something omnipotent that betrayed those men to their undoing.”
I started to say something, but then the wind in the desert changed, and the sand started to stir restlessly, making little whispers.
I settled back, and reached for my blankets. I knew that there wasn’t any use of making an answer — the desert was answering for me.
Gold Blindness
I
Desert Whispers
Oho! So you’re interested in the little yellow pellet, eh? Look again! Virgin gold! It’s a nugget, worn smooth by rubbing around the bottom of a stream. And here’s another. Look! But don’t look too long.
You’ll become gold blind if you’re not careful. Oh, yes, you can. Men get snow blind from the glitter of snow, and they get gold blind from the glitter of gold.
A story connected with it? Rather.
In Ensenada I first heard of the gold. Like all of those things, it came in whispers. The desert’s full of whispers. The sand whispers to the cacti as the wind blows it against the green stalks, and sometimes you’ll even hear the sand whispering to the sand.
Sure, it’s the wind — if you want to figure it that way. I’m not a fool. The sand blows along the desert and gives off a peculiar sound. It’s just the wind, and the sand. But sometimes when you’re asleep in the desert you can hear the sand whispers, and you’ll wake up. Then there’s a minute, just before you get fully awake, that you can hear the sand talking.
But that’s not the whisper I heard about the gold. That came from an old engineer, a mining man, a prospector, an adventurer.
He was dying at the time. We all thought it was TB. He kept wasting away, getting thinner and thinner, and he coughed most of the time.
You know how the beach stretches along the ocean there at Ensenada. There’s the city, then there’s the sand, and then there’s the bay of Todos Santos. By day it’s a deep blue, warm as milk. By night it reflects the stars. There’s not much surf, just a lazy waving of the water that splashes in little sheets of hissing foam.
One night this mining man told me his story. He was pretty far gone, and he had to whisper it.
We sat out on the shore. The stars glittered and reflected from the water. There was a little wind, just enough to make the sand whisper. Tiny waves hissed up on the shore, as though they were whispering back to the sand. And the sand blew along on the warm breeze and whispered to the water, and the engineer whispered to me. Behind us, the lights of the town showed as pin points of brilliance against a jet background.
Of course, I didn’t believe that fellow at first. It was like all those other whispered tales you hear in the desert. The country’s full of them.
He told me of a small trading station up east of the Funeral Range, and of a trader who kept faith with the Indians.
“The Injuns never had a pawn room,” he said. “They paid for everything they bought, provided they could not trade for it. An’ they always paid a little back room, sort of private...”
I waited for the engineer to go on, but he had a fit of coughing that almost laid him out. I wasn’t much interested — not then.
Finally he managed to whisper again.
“I went one night an’ peeked in through a little knot hole,” he said, “an’ saw the trader weighin’ out gold dust. He spoke Injun to the customer an’ asked if he didn’t have anything to trade. The Injun gave him a hard-luck story about how he’d lost all his stuff so the medicine man had let him take the gold. The trader nodded an’ finished weighin’ out the gold.”
That sounded goofy enough, but I nodded real seriously. The man was dying, and there was no call for me to start an argument over something that was none of my business.
He had another spell of coughing. Then he went back to whispering, telling me about how he explored the country where the Indians lived, and finally found a cavern that was gold from grass roots to bed rock, and about how an Indian medicine man shot a little arrow into his shoulder and breathed a curse.
And he told about how he got a stake of gold and started out of the country, and about how he got sick and the gold got heavy, and about booming drums that followed him and sounded inside his ears, and about a snake that followed him wherever he went, and about how he woke up one morning and found the gold gone, and about being sick ever since and being afraid to go back.
I nodded as grave as a judge.
Then this engineer rolled back his shirt and showed me where the arrow struck.
He was all wasted away to skin and bones, but the scar was there, all right. And the funny thing was that he had started to get sick right around that scar. You could see where the flesh had turned a reddish purple and the muscles had shriveled.
That made me think.
Two days later the engineer died.
They buried him out in that big graveyard across the wash. You know the place. It looks bigger than the town. Maybe it is, Ensenada is an old town; lots of people have died there. And the Mexicans keep up graves. They respect the dead that way.
Somehow or other, I couldn’t get him off my mind. Perhaps it was because I spent so much time sitting on the shore near the bay, and the waves whispered as they hissed up the beach, and the sand whispered back to the waves, reminding me of the dead engineer and the story he’d whispered.
Finally I knew I had to go after that whisper, so I packed up my things and started out in my little flivver.
II
A Tight-Mouthed Trader
Maybe you know Death Valley. It’s a desolate stretch. But the engineer had said east of Death Valley. So I went up the Funeral Mountains. I traveled by night so it’d be cooler, both on me and the car.
Rhyolite’s right over the hump on the Funeral Mountains. You know, the Ghost City of Nevada. It was moonlight when I went through, a full moon. At the time I didn’t appreciate the real significance of the full moon. That came afterward.
But the city stood there, desolate, silent, deserted. The white buildings, the banks, the depot, the big schoolhouse, all standing white in the moonlight, looking as though they were swathed in winding sheets.
I went on east and then turned to the south. I didn’t know just where I was going, but I knew the general direction. For two weeks I scouted around the country, through the Pahrump Valley, through the Amargosa sinks.
Daytimes I’d laugh at myself for being a credulous fool. But nighttimes when the wind would blow and the sand would begin to whisper as it drifted along, I’d get to thinking I could hear the whispers of the dead engineer. And when I’d hear those whispers I’d begin to feel it was all right again.
Finally I came to a place where there was a belt of artesian water, and some mountains, and a bit of greenery, and there was a board shack that showed it was a small trading station.
I went in, just as I’d been doing at all the trading posts, and right away something seemed to tell me I was on the right track.
The man that came out to see what I wanted was a thin, dour fellow with little puckered lips and eyes that were not much bigger than peas.