She was the woman of the snakeskin shoes, the woman who had descended from the train at Mojave.
But she had changed.
Her face held none of the eye-puffs, none of the sagging lines, none of the tired droop. Her features were bronzed and they were as firm as the features of a fifteen-year-old child. Her eyes were clear and steady, and the magnificently beautiful lines of her rounded body were hardened to graceful strength.
I lowered the rifle.
“Did you bring Jack?” she asked; and then I saw a great light.
“I tied and gagged him,” I said.
She followed the direction of my pointing finger. I saw her stoop over the form in the blankets. There was the sound of a knife cutting rope, and then two arms came around her.
I walked away, sat down and waited.
It was some time before they came to me, arm in arm. He had given her some of his extra clothes, and she looked uncomfortable. She did the talking.
“I am Jean Stiles,” she said. “It all started with a map an Indian drew for my father years ago. We all took it for a joke, but when I got fed up with civilization and parties and all that, I decided to hunt up the place. I wrote to an acquaintance, and I guess I told him too much. He referred me to ‘Pedro Madrone.’
“There never was any such person. But Sandoval posed as Madrone to me. It was an accomplice who met Jack, sent him out into the desert, and even sold him Sandoval’s rifle, either as a passport to Sandoval or to get rid of a piece of evidence.”
That was a fine bit of Mexican irony!
“Sandoval told me you were the guide,” Melford said to me, “who led Jean into the desert. We were to spy on you, force you to confess.”
The girl went on:
“Sandoval guided me into the desert and kept trying to get the map. I’d only given him a copy of a part of it. I knew he was a dangerous man, and when I got near the gold I left him one night, packed the burro and went on by myself.
“He let me get the gold, then demanded the map and the gold. I’d hidden the map. He shot the burro and left me on foot without provisions, then he shot a hole in the water canteen. He figured thirst would force me into submission.
“He tried to trail me, carrying a canteen of water, figuring to trade me water for gold when my thirst became desperate. But I had four bags of gold. I ran and dropped the gold, and he spent so much time looking for the sacks I’d dropped that it got dark.
“Then a windstorm came up. I guess it blotted out my trail. He never followed me. He had the rest of the burros hidden somewhere. I tried to find them, couldn’t and went back to the place of the gold. There was a spring there, and some food, and the place can’t be found without a map. It’s in a hidden cañon.
“It took all of my strength to get back. And I couldn’t leave the place. There was a store of corn there, and an Indian, an old, old man who taught me to shoot the bow. There was game, there was corn. There were no burros, no means of reaching civilization. I think the Indian could have made it on foot, but he wouldn’t go. He said I had been sent as a Priestess of the Sun.
“I grew to like it. I’ve never felt so well in my life. And I knew, sooner or later, Jack would come... Ugh, these clothes are scratchy. I feel as though my skin were suffocating!”
“You’ll have to get accustomed to them again, Jean,” Melford warned.
She met his eyes.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why... er... why, because! You can’t go back to the city as you were!”
She nodded slowly, raised her face to the moon, and then looked out over the desert, over past the red and purple mountains.
“Listen,” she said dreamily, “and I’ll sing you the Song of the Sun. It’s a whispered song, and it’s to be sung only at sunrise.”
And she laughed nervously. Then, when no one said anything, she started chanting the Song of the Sun. It was pure Indian all right.
When she had finished, the silence of the desert settled on us. Then she began to whisper, after a while.
“There’s life there, health, sunshine, fresh air; gold, lots of gold, all the gold one would want. Back in the city I’d go mad again; and your lungs, Jack...”
Her voice trailed off in a whisper.
I went to my blankets.
“You youngsters sit up and talk all night if you want to. I’ve been dodging sleep for the last three weeks, and having holes shot in my bed roll. I’m going to sleep. In the morning we’ll try and trail Sandoval.”
And I kicked off my boots.
“He thought he was seeing my ghost,” said the girl. Then she added dreamily: “If he hadn’t jumped, I’d have killed him with the arrow.”
“Jean!” exclaimed the tenderfoot in a shocked voice.
She looked at him speculatively. Then she touched his face with the tips of her fingers, and laughed, a low, crooning laugh. It was the laugh I’ve heard an Indian girl give to her lover; I never heard a white woman laugh that way before.
I doubled my coat under my head and dropped off to sleep. When I awoke the east was a long streamer of vermilion with banners of gold. The tops of the red and purple hills were catching enough light to show in color instead of a black outline.
I looked for Melford. His blankets were empty. He had gone. And the girl had gone.
Then I found a pile of clothes. The extra clothes he had given to the girl. They lay in a pile where she had dropped them. They had been too “scratchy.”
Over near my blankets was a sack of skin, filled with gold. There was enough gold in that sack to make a neat little nest egg.
There wasn’t any note. And they hadn’t taken anything with them. I knew that the Priestess of the Sun had gone back to the desert she had learned to love and had taken her mate with her.
I tried to trail Sandoval. He was running the last I saw of his tracks. He hit the slope of the red and purple mountains, and the rocks didn’t show any more tracks.
I waited two nights, waiting for them to come back, the Priestess of the Sun and her man. They didn’t come back. I wanted to give them a chance to change their minds, but they didn’t change ’em.
Daytimes it all seemed like a dream. It seemed that I should go and bring them back. It seemed that a girl had no right to throw herself away from civilization.
Then would come the moonlight, the velvety night, and the sand whispers, and it would seem the most natural thing in the world that the girl should want to stay with the desert. I thought of her as I had seen her get off the train, soft, flabby, tired of mouth, puffs under her eyes.
Then I remembered her as she had drifted into camp, bronzed, graceful, moving with the easy stride of perfect health. And Melford’s lungs needed the desert sunshine.
Often I’ve wondered how they’re making out, the Priestess of the Sun and her mate. Sometimes, just before I drop off to sleep, I think the sand has a message to me, a message directly from them; and there’s always a smile on my lips at what the sand seems to whisper.
Out in the desert we get closer to fundamental truths than you do in the cities.
Golden Bullets
I
Night Summons
Go through the desert in a Pullman car and you’ll be bored. Travel through it in an automobile and you’ll be mildly interested, but disappointed.
“So this is the desert,” you’ll think. “This is the place about which I’ve heard so much! Shucks, it’s nothing much, just sand and mountains, cacti and sunshine; gasoline stations, not quite so handy.”
But get away from the beaten trail in the desert. Get out with your camp equipment loaded on the backs of burros. Or even take a flivver and get off the main roads. See what happens.