Sand marches on an endless journey, coming from Lord knows where, and going across the desert in a slithering procession of whispering noise that’s as dry as the sound made by a sidewinder when he crawls past your blankets.
It’s at night when the desert’s still and calm and the steady stars blaze down like torches that you can hear the whispers best. Then you’ll lie in your blankets with your head pillowed right on the surface of the desert, and you’ll hear the dry sagebrush swish in the wind. It sounds as though the leaves are whispering. Then you’ll hear the sand rattling against the cactus, and it’ll sound like a different kind of a whisper, a finer, more stealthy whisper.
And then, usually just before you’re getting to sleep, you’ll hear that finest whisper of all, the sand whispering to the sand. Of course, if you’d wake up and snap out of it, you’d know that it was just the sound made by windblown sand drifting across the sandy face of the desert.
But you don’t wake up like that. You just drift off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the sand whispering to the sand.
I’ve never really figured it out, but I guess that’s why the desert is so full of whispers. Strange stories seep through the desert just the way the sounds of the drifting sand seep into your ears. Take a man who has lived a long time in the desert, and his voice gets a dry, husking whisper in it that’s like the sound of a lizard’s feet scratching along the surface of a sun-baked rock.
Everything whispers in the desert, and some of the whispers would sound reasonable anywhere. Some of ’em only sound reasonable when you’re half asleep in the middle of the desert.
Edith Eason first came to me as a whisper.
I was camped up north of Shoshone when I heard of her. And I swear I can’t tell who it was that first told me. It was just a whisper, a casual, seeping whisper. You’d probably laugh if I said so, but, somehow or other, I have an idea it was a sand whisper that first told me about her.
At any rate the name didn’t sound strange to my ears when Humpy Crane gave me the low-down on her. It’s the sort of a name that lends itself to a whisper. Sand drifting over sand or rustling against cactus would give forth a sound like that: “Eason — Eeeeason — Eeeassssssssson — Edith Eassssson!”
Humpy came in to my camp fire up north of Shoshone. I was camped on a slope of the Funeral Range, and it was a typical desert night. Humpy saw my supper fire, and came on over. I could hear him and his burro long before I could see them. Their feet shuffled through the dry sand with a sort of whispering noise that muffled the steps.
“Hello, Humpy,” I said, when the fire lit on his lined face and white hair. “Had anything to eat?”
“Nope. I’m short o’ grub, an’ I saw your fire. Didn’t know it was you, Bob Zane. Got any tea, or tomatoes?”
I opened the pack.
“I got a little of everything here, old-timer. Sit down while I get her ready.”
We ate under the stars. The burros moved around through the dwarf sage.
“Wasn’t you one of the fellows that went in after the lunger that got bumped off in the desert?”
“You mean Sid Grahame, the one that went out with Ortley?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh-huh, I was; why?”
“Nothin’ much. There’s a red-headed girl come out from Denver. Her name’s Eason. Edith Eason. She’s hanging around Randsburg, lookin’ for you, or for Stringy Martin, either one.”
“What’s she want?”
“Don’t know. It’s got something to do with this lunger that got croaked. She grubstaked him or something, and she thinks he found some quartz stuff and was taking Ortley in to show it to him.”
I sipped a graniteware cup of tea.
“That,” I told him, “is different.”
Even then, I began to put two and two together, the weight of the bag when Ortley had lifted it off the burro, the eager way he’d cut the pack ropes to get it loose.
“Eason, Edith Eason — I’ve heard the name somewhere.”
“Maybe. It’s a name that’s easy on the ears. You goin’ in to Randsburg?”
I hadn’t been headed that way, but I didn’t hesitate any when Humpy asked the question.
“I’m goin’ back,” I told him.
Edith Eason had bright red hair and eyes that were a calm gray. She looked like a woman who could manage her own way in the world.
“Sid was working in the office with me when he developed the sickness,” she told me. “The doctors said sunshine and fresh air would cure him, but he was cooped up in a stuffy office, and he wouldn’t quit because he didn’t have anything saved up and be didn’t want to be a burden on any one.
“So I pretended to get awfully interested in mining, and then I told him I didn’t want to be working for wages all of my life, and I was going out in the desert and prospect, or else grubstake some old desert rat. He warned me I’d get stung, and finally I worked the situation around so it seemed logical for me to offer to grubstake him in the desert and let him prospect.
“He was out six months in all, and he started to get well almost from the first. He wrote to me and mailed the letters whenever he came to a post office. Sometimes I’d get three or four of them in one mail. The last batch of letters said he had something that looked awfully good, that he had a capitalist coming in to look it over and that he’d let me know. Then the next I heard was when I read of his death. So I wrote to the sheriff for details, and he told me stuff that brought me out here.”
She let her calm gray eyes bore right into mine, and read my mind.
“You think I’m a fool for giving up my job and trying to come out here, don’t you?”
Out in the desert you get so you shoot straight from the shoulder on most things, or else you get crooked all over.
“Yes,” I told her.
She nodded.
“That’s the way I like men. You and I are going to get along.”
“You talk as though you were considering adopting me,” I said.
“I am,” she said, and her eyes didn’t even twinkle. “You and I are going into the desert together.”
“Huh?”
“Yes. I want to see where Sid’s buried, and I want to try and trail where they went on their expedition.”
“It’s a cold trail.”
“I know it. But I’ve heard a lot about you, Bob Zane. They say you can make the desert talk to you, that there’s nothing in the Mojave you can’t find out.”
I told her straight from the shoulder.
“Yes, ma’am, the desert talks all right. It talks in sand whispers that are easy to believe — in the desert. They don’t sound probable anywhere else. I’m afraid you’ve been listening to sand whispers.”
She shook her head and reached her hand inside the blouse of her suit. When it came out there was a little tissue paper parcel in the palm. She unfolded the paper parcel.
“Look,” she said.
I looked, and then I looked again, and then I rubbed my eyes and looked some more.
They were little nuggets of red metal. They were almost blood-red, but I knew what they were even before I scratched under the red with the point of my knife.
“Gold,” I told her. “It’s a gold that’s alluvial, and it’s been through some chemical or other that’s given it a red coating. You get all sorts of gold here in the desert. They even have a black gold, that’s dead black on the surface.”
She nodded.
“The garage man found these. When Ortley drove off something spilled from his pockets when he took out the money to pay his bill. The garage man found these on the dirt floor.”
I shook my head.
“No. This couldn’t be what Sid discovered. This is a placer deposit. If he found something that needed capital, it would have been quartz. A deposit of this sort of gold could be washed out without requiring enough capital to bother about. A man all by himself could make the claim pay its way.”