PART THREE (continued 3)

Sard could not see how far it stretched on the side towards which he was going, but he judged that he would have to hurry to get round it, so he set off at his best pace along the ridge of what might have been the moraine. As he went along, the air thickened with intensely bitter smoke from the burnt bush. Little floating fiery particles came flying past and settled on his clothes. Every now and then some streamer of flame would blow down on something dry, set it on fire and blow out. He ran for about ten minutes, mostly uphill, and he reached the top of that side of the valley to which he ran. He found that on the other side of the hill the ground tipped very sharply down into a rocky chasm. Beyond this rocky chasm, which contained water, was a hillside covered with scrub, blazing like the Day of Judgment. There was no possibility of getting round the fire. He was shut in on that side, and he hadn’t time to get back. His only chance was to get down to the water.

There was a place where the crag had fallen in a scree of big pieces of stone. He scrambled down this towards the water, but the scrub burning on the other side of the stream was so bright and hot that he had to cover his eyes as he slithered down. Quite close to the lip of the water there was a big shelving stone, worn smooth by floods. It was so hot from the blaze that he could hardly bear his hand upon it. He slithered into the water from it, just as a flame seized the scrub upon the opposite bank, and scorched it into nothing.

In a minute the fury of the fire had passed, and it was running up the hillside away from him, leaving a blackened earth, covered with glowing stalks, which hissed and sighed. It went on, he could see it running up the hill, licking down the scrub and leaving blackness. The wind blew over the burnt tract, bringing soft ash, little fiery particles, and a breath as from a furnace door.

Sard clambered out of the water, which was brackish and quite unfit to drink, and set off upon his course again. He walked, like Satan, on the burning marl, in a desert which had been grim before, but was now terrible. He followed along the course of the chasm for half a mile, and came out above on to a sort of tableland of rock, where the fire had ceased. He paused here to take his bearings, and noticed, for the first time, that a house or hut had been destroyed by the fire, close to where he stood. It must have been almost the last thing burned; so he went to it, thinking that perhaps somebody had been burnt in it. On a sort of shelf at one end of it was a skeleton of a man, gripping a crucifix. It might have been there fifty years. The only other remains were a couple of earthenware ollas of a good size. These were Indian pots of a dull yellow colour, with decorations of black and red. One of them had a thong about its mouth, and had been used as a waterbucket; the other, which was still covered with its earthenware lid, contained parched corn, shrivelled to the dryness and toughness of split peas, but still food. There was nothing to show what the man had been. He was tall for an Indian; the crucifix seemed against his being a miner or prospector. He may have been some hermit, or contemplative.

Sard removed the ollas into the open. After a little search he found the spring where the hermit had got his drinking water. He made a fire and cooked what was left of the woodchuck with the parched corn, and took his bearings while the meal was cooking. In front of him the path of the fire still ran on along the valley. It was already far away, running in little bright flickers of flame, under driven-down smoke. To his left, on the line of his course, there was a mile of scrubless desert of sand and rock, without even a cactus or a prickly pear, stretching to the rocky bulk of the Sierra. By the Sierra, in the direction in which he wished to go, was a chasm or cleft or cañon, it could hardly be called a glen. It ran into the very heart of the hills, for a mile or two, as far as he could see, but beyond it there were crags with pine trees, and beyond those more crags, and beyond those, crags with snow and more crags. To his right he could see very little. Foothills shut in the line of sight on that side. Wherever he looked there was no sign of the works of man, there was desert, rock, desolation and death. Between sixty and seventy miles of unknown country still lay between him and the coast. With some tough tendrils which had escaped the fire he contrived slings for the two ollas. He was now equipped with bread and water for two days.

As he judged that the chasm or cleft would give him an easier path into the hills, he set off towards it. As he drew near to its entrance, it looked like the entrance to hell. He remembered that he had read somewhere, or somebody had told him, that the Indians dreaded these clefts in the mountains, and said that unspeakable things lived in them. Now as he drew near the mouth, he heard far up the cañon something like a voice, which was not a voice, crying in the heart of the rocks. It was a strange, metallic cry of “Ohoy!” The echoes repeated it. It was no beast that he knew. It was not like a beast. It was like the voice of the rock itself. He stopped at the very mouth of the cañon, trying to think what that voice could be. It was not any human voice, and yet it had a human ring. It was not the voice of any beast, and yet it came, as it were, from the strength of a beast. It could not be the voice of a bird, no bird could be big enough, and yet there was something birdlike in its tone. If it were not the voice of a man, beast or bird, what could it be? Though it could not be a bird, it was likest to a bird; there was something spiritual and birdlike about it. It gave him the impression of some giant bird, some bird of poetry, some phœnix or roc, crying from a full heart. Then in its deeper notes it sounded like the voice of some giant who was beating on an anvil, and crying as he struck the blows, “Ohoy!” At these times it came with a pure metallic clang, which thrilled him to the marrow. He stood still to listen to it. Whatever it was, it came from some living thing, it had not the rhythm of any machine. It was not any drill or pile-driver beating into the heart of the rock. Sard’s mind offered many suggestions, one after the other. Now it was like some great bell, but it was not a bell. Now it was like some ringing true blow struck by a gigantic tuning-fork, or like the blow of an axe upon a gong, or like the drilling of some gigantic woodpecker into a musical wood. He could not think what it was. It was not sorrowful nor joyful nor terrible. It was great and strange. It came from the heart of the wilderness of rock, miles from any human dwelling. It was like the rock speaking. Into his mind there came again those words which he had read or heard, “The Indians do not go into the Sierra, nobody goes into the Sierra; there are strange things in the Sierra which do not want to be known.”

He asked himself whether he were not delirious and imagining this noise. But it rang clearly and made an echo.

The cañon was paven with clean dry desert sand. It led into the heart of the hills. The side of the mountain had been snapped asunder there and torn fifty yards apart. Sard could see a great black boulder midway up the cliff, on his right hand, and its other half on his left hand. He saw the patterns of veins and lines, where they once had joined each other. It needed some little resolution to go on towards that noise, but he repeated his proverb, “A danger met is less than a danger expected,” and went forwards toward it.

There were no tracks in the sand, perhaps no human foot had trodden that path for fifty years or five hundred years. “Here,” he thought, “I may come upon some unknown beast or bird or race of men or giants, for there may be anything in a place like this.” Half a mile up the cañon he stopped, for in front of him the walls of the cañon drew together, and there at each side of the chasm the rock had been hewn into a semblance of columns, a hundred feet high. Drawing a little nearer, he saw that the heads of the columns were carven with the heads of monsters which were crushing human skulls between their teeth; blood seemed to be flowing from their mouths; blood spattered the columns; as he drew near, he could hear it dripping on the rocks below. The noise of the great bird, or whatever it was, had been silent for some time; now he heard it much nearer and with a new note, not of joy nor of sorrow, but of laughter that had no feeling in it. Sard stopped; he felt his hair stand on end, while his heart seemed to come up into his throat and thump there till it was as dry as bone.

“All the same, I’ll go on,” he said; “there’s no going back. That thing knows that I’m here. If I’ve got to die, I’ll die, and I may as well get it over.”

All the time the great figures on the columns seemed to chew their quids and the blood spattered down upon the rocks.

“They’re only those streams,” he said, “with iron ore or with red pigment in them, and they’ve led them in channels to those figures’ mouths. That’s all it is.”

It was all that it was, but in the dusk of the cañon and of the day, to one very weak and weary as well as feverish, it was enough. He walked boldly up to the feet of the figures. They stood in blood, like butchers, and the red water splashed Sard as he stood there. Though he had expected much, he had not expected what he saw. The two great columns stood one on each side of a narrow pass, not more than four feet across. Within the pass the cañon widened out again, but not very far. On both sides of it the rocks had been carven into gigantic shapes. It was an avenue of the gods, all of them terrible; they seemed to turn their heads and look at him; the wardens at the gate seemed to turn round upon him after he had passed them. Into his mind, from some forgotten book or speaker, came the phrase of what the Indians in that country had said of these old temples, that their gods come to life at dusk, and are alive all night, and live on men. They seemed to gnash their teeth and lick their lips, and to tremble as he drew near.

He would have thought nothing of it had he had so much as a dog beside him. A lunatic, even a village idiot, would have seemed a comrade and a backing to him. But he had to face it alone. He backed into the rock of the pass and tried to reassure himself, but he kept telling himself, “It was one of these things whom I heard singing. They do come to life at dusk.”

Then he said, “It isn’t so. If these things were beautiful, I would fear them, but they are not, and there is nothing in them that I will recognise as gods. These things are all over this land: I have heard of them. I’ll go on, and if they kill me, they’ll get little glory by it.”

He went on, and as he went a strange moaning music seemed to wind from one god to another. It was the wind striking sharp angles in the rocks at the chasm top, but it sounded like the song of the figure of Memnon in Egypt. Just in such a way should the thoughts of the gods pass to each other, without a movement of the lips.

“Those Indians spoke the truth,” he thought, “when they said that the gods speak in music from dusk to dawn.”

At the head of the cañon was a small stone temple, high up at the top of a flight of steps. The columns and the walls were brightly painted with images of terror and of power, in war and triumph. Bats were flickering out from the temple door. They were the first living things that he had seen since he entered the cañon. They made him feel that he was coming back to life, after walking in the kingdom of death. As he went up the temple steps, which were as perfect as when they had been laid down, centuries before, the voice of the bird, or whatever it was, rose up from somewhere in the mountain not far ahead. It rose up with a new note, it was like laughter with exultation. He could see nothing because the temple shut away all that was in front of him, but he heard above the noise of the laughter the clanking as of enormous wings, slowly rising from the ground and gathering power and moving away and away.

As he entered the temple there came a great rush of many hundreds of bats, whirling past his ears into the air. He passed between walls of carven and painted figures, which were still sharp and bright in detail. He went through a first room, as long as a cricket-pitch, into another, which was pleasant with the sound of water. A pool had been cut in the rock in the midst of this great room; water spouted into it from the tongues of grotesque heads. At the end of the room there were stairs leading up to an altar made of a piece of black obsidian chipped to a point. At the back of this altar there were rooms filled with the murmur of pigeons. These rooms must once have been the priests’ dwellings. They were now dovecotes for the blue rock-pigeons which flew out, on his approach. He clambered out after them on to a terrace cut upon the rock of the mountain for two hundred yards by a people who had no explosives save the will of their rulers. There was no green thing in sight, nothing but rocks and sand. The rocks were of every savagery of splinter, of savage colours, bright blue, yellow, red and black, all spiked and toppled and tumbled, and only brought into order upon this terrace by the unknown priests of dead gods.

He took what he could of the eggs of the rock-pigeons, then shaped his course and went on into the wilderness, until his way was barred by a cliff across his path, eight hundred feet high and more. He walked along it for over a mile, but found no scaling place. At the end of his walk the cliff bowed over so as to make a shelter or cave. Here in some remote time some forgotten tribe had built up a house for themselves by piling a wall of stones without mortar, between the hollow and the light. The path of these men still led to their entrance, a hole in the wall, just big enough for a small man to crawl through. Sard did not dare to try to enter by that door for fear of snakes. There was a sheltered place among the rocks where he lay down to rest. He fell into a deep sleep, and slept until the cold woke him. He felt something pressed against his chest which had not been there before. It was some snake which had crawled there for the warmth. Very cautiously he moved his stiff arms, until he could fling it from him, and leap up in the one motion. He leaped clear of it, and then leaped clear of the place.

It was then about four in the morning and intensely cold. The snake was perhaps too sluggish to attack. He was too miserable with cold to stay longer there. He ate a little of his food, and went on along the face of the cliff, until he found a place of fallen rocks where it was possible to climb.

It seemed to him that he had gone for hours out of his way trying to find a path, and that already he was weaker than he had been from want of proper food and rest. He knew now how easy it would be for him to die up there in the Sierra; why, he might wander for days trying to find food or drink, the way out or the way back. He knew now that he might have been wiser to risk the silver escorts, and follow the railway across the desert.

All that day he wandered on among the mountains, far to the west of his proper course. The crags of a great snowy peak were like a wall upon his right hand, they seemed to edge him off to the west at every point. He would walk for a mile and then think, “Now I can get across to the eastward,” but always when he had scrambled up the screes, he would come to some cliff which he could not climb. He saw no living thing in all this day, except two little birds running among the rocks, and the eagles quartering in the heaven.

At last as he wandered, he saw above him a gash or chimney in the cliff. He scrambled to its very foot and looked up it. There was a percolation of water down the side, which he tasted and found sweet. The rock was very rotten, but he saw that it was a way up this cliff. As it was a possible means of getting back to his course, he set himself to climb it. It took him an hour to reach the top, and as he scrambled up to safety above it, the thongs of his ollas broke, and both jars dropped to the bottom of the chimney and smashed to pieces there.

He found himself on a great heave of rocky mountain which went on to a pine forest. Beyond the pine forest the main crags of the Sierra rose, covered with snow. They were blindingly bright in front of him, rocks as blue as steel and ice as white as death, a wall between him and the sea, which he would have to climb.

At about sunset, when he was entered into the pine forest, he smelled suddenly a smell of smoke. It was the smoke of burning pine-cones or pine-needles. He judged that it came from a little fire, because he so easily lost the scent. He turned towards it, thinking that even the most savage of mountain Indians would be less terrible than that loneliness. Sometimes he lost the scent, then he cast about like a dog, until he picked it up again. Presently he was almost certain that he heard a moan. It seemed the fitting speech for such a place. He went towards it, and soon heard the moaning pass into something much more savage, a cursing and a calling down of vengeance. After a minute of violence, it died again into grief and mourning and lamentation.

He went towards the noise and came round some great rocks on to a scene which he remembered until he died. There was an open space there with the tracks of men and horses on the sandy floor of the pine forest. Someone had kindled a little fire there, and the ground was littered with bits of tamales. Beyond the fire, swinging so that his feet were sometimes covered by gusts of the smoke, a dead man hung from a pine branch. At the foot of the tree, crouched and moaning, was a woman. She was rocking to and fro with her grief. From time to time she stretched her arms abroad and cursed and screamed in a kind of rhythm or poetry of hate. Then the grief again became too strong for her, and she moaned and lamented. One of the dead man’s slippers had fallen into the fire and lay half burnt there. There was a paper pinned upon his chest, with the word “Traitor” drawn on it with a burnt stick. The paper was a coarse paper bag which had once contained chewing tobacco. The man was quite dead; he must have been hanging there since noon. Both he and the woman were Pardos. From the tracks near the fire it was plain that about twenty had been at the hanging. It was the act of justice of some gang. It was a shock to Sard to find man as harsh as that desolation.

The man was of middle stature, very broad and powerfully built, with a big, broad, rugged face and grizzled curly hair. His arms, which had been bound in front of him, were knotted with muscle. Sard cut him down and laid him on the ground and cut loose his hands. He saw that the man had been shot after being hung. He did what he could to compose the body, and asked the woman if there was nobody near at hand who could help to give him burial. The woman did not answer, she was possessed with her grief and continued to rock to and fro, crooning, moaning, and sometimes bursting out into cursing. He asked if there were any place to which he could take her. He motioned that she should go home, and offered to take her thither. At first she did not understand. At last it seemed to enter her head that he was trying to take her from the body or to take the body from her. She rose up, foaming at the mouth, snatched a knife from her belt, and stabbed at him; then stood snarling and cursing at him, while sobs shook her and tears ran down her face. He did not like to leave her there in that wilderness, but she was not in any mood to let him help her or even to know that he wished to help. He asked if he could carry the body for her to the settlement. He was standing at some little distance from her, speaking slowly and distinctly, so that she might understand what he was saying. At the end of his speech he was almost certain that somebody laughed. Glancing sharply to one side, he was almost certain that somebody slipped behind one of the big pine trees.

“Who’s there?” he called. He leaped to one side and caught sight of somebody behind a tree. He saw that behind this person, at some little distance, were two women. They seemed to be negresses. Their faces were covered, and they seemed to be the slaves of this hiding man.

“What are you doing here?” the man said. He spoke the English of an Occidental who had lived for some years in an American port.

“Trying to reach the coast,” Sard answered.

“Well, you want to be getting on. There’s nothing here that concerns you,” the man answered. “You’d best pull out for the coast.”

“Which is the way to the coast?” Sard asked. “Is there no trail that will take me there?”

“Trail? Hell!” said the man, “find your trail yourself. Beat it.”

“I want to beat it,” Sard said. “Can you tell me if I can get across the Sierra, going eastwards from this?”

“No,” said the man, “you can’t. You must go south-eastwards from here, keeping along the line of those peaks there, and after about ten miles you’ll find a gap that they call the pass of Hermita. That’s the only pass in all that range.”

“Can I reach the coast from that pass?” Sard asked.

“You’ll find out what you reach when you get there,” the man said. “Now beat it just like hell, or you’ll reach nothing this side Jordan.”

Sard glanced for just one second or half-second at the two veiled women. They had not stirred during the talk, but in the half-second of his glance he saw one of them start, and in the same half-second he knew that he was in danger and leaped to one side. It was all over in half-a-second, but in that half-second the man had fired from behind his tree. Sard heard the revolver bullet go past him. He dodged to a tree, then away to another tree, then to a third. The man dodged after him, firing whenever he saw a target. The shots came very near: Sard turned and ran.

He went on running for a quarter of a mile, till he was over the brow of the hill. Here he turned at right angles to his track, and ran along the rocky hillside into a glen which had once been wooded with pines, but had been burnt out half a century before. Spikes of charcoal, twelve or fifteen feet high, rose from the ground all over the hillside, like an army of witches. He dodged through this wood and went through it diagonally, keeping uphill. When he reached a bend in the hill, he lay down for breath. He could see no trace of man nor any trace of life, nothing but wilderness, rocks, burnt sand and burnt pikes of trees, the sun looking at it all with indifference, bringing no life to it, and the wind from the icefields floating over it, bringing death.

Sard looked away to the south-east, where the man had said that there was a pass. He could not be sure, and yet it seemed to him that at about that place the hills did seem to fall down into a kind of saddle, as if there might be a pass. Elsewhere he could see nothing but a line of crags, neither sign nor prospect of a pass.

“I may as well die there as in another place,” he said. “Why should the man have lied, when he meant to kill me the next instant? But my only chance to get across that pass is to go now as fast as I can put foot to earth, before he can get there first with his gang to head me off.”

Tired as he was, he set out for that gap or saddle in the Sierra. He went cautiously, taking care not to expose himself upon skylines. Presently the sun went down. He went stumbling on, in the night, keeping his direction by the stars. At about midnight he could go no further. He reckoned that he must have done ten miles. “In the morning,” he thought, “as soon as it is light, I shall see this pass.” There was a brook of water coming down the mountain where he stopped. He was guided to it by its flashing and its tinkle. He came to it and found it slightly brackish but drinkable. He drank a very little, and bathed, cold as it was. In a little flat space near the water he found a patch of grass. It was little better than hay, but there were some green blades pushing among the dead, and he ate some for his only supper.

Then he slept and dreamed that he was in the lazarette of the Pathfinder, surrounded by food, barrels of prime mess beef, barrels of prime mess pork, tanks of new ship’s biscuits, hot out of the oven, casks of split peas, cases of raisins, jams, preserved meats, cheese, butter and pickles. In his dream the steward of the Pathfinder came to his elbow and said, “I’ve put your coffee in the chart-house, Mr. Harker, and I’ve cooked you a few of those rock-cakes that you like.” Then he woke and found himself in the desolation, in the grey of the dawn, with a few blades of grass for his only sustenance. But there in the stream below him was a little clump of plants, bearing still the pods of the seeds of the season before. They were not pods, they were ears, and it was a sort of grain. Most of the grains had been shed abroad, but out of the whole clump he harvested one handful, which he ate almost grain by grain with the husks. They were tasteless but left a slightly bitter after-taste. Hungry as he was, he saved a few with some of the grass for his dinner. It was perhaps five in the morning when he gathered the grain, and only six when he set out to find the pass.

He had not gone very far into the wilderness of rock in which he was before he realised that he was not likely to find any pass. For centuries the great crags of the Sierra had scaled their husks on to these slopes in the heats of the summers. It was a world of tumbled stones, blocks, crags and pinnacles, many of them polished into strange forms by the dancing of the sand about them. He was at that point at which the peaks seemed to come down into a gap or saddle, but he was shut from it by cliffs of a hundred feet, too steep for him to scale. When he had first set out in the morning, he had feared lest his enemies should be waiting for him there, but when he saw the rocks, he knew that no man would be there except himself. Yet he felt sure that there must be some way through the mountains there.

He wandered on, trying to find some point in the cliff which he could scale. With boots nailed in the soles, he might have tried these crags, but he was wearing only the cut-down Bluchers which had been given to him before he left the coast. In these it was quite impossible for him to climb. They slipped aside from under him. This was the first day in which hunger became a torment to him. It had been present in him ever since the first day, but now it possessed him. At about midday he came to a little lake where there was a dead tree growing out of the water. Out of the tree came a piercing and terrible crying from a hawk that seemed to be warning him away. Terrible as the noise was, it was still companionship in that silence. It was something to see and to hear a living thing. The hawk had no fear of him. He walked to within twenty yards of the tree and the hawk looked at him and cried. Presently it rose and circled round and sank away upon the wind, leaving Sard utterly alone. He drank of the water of the lake and pushed on up the hillside to a point where the cliff seemed scaleable. Here as he went he heard noises that made him think that multitudes of men were at work in the mountains near him. There were noises of footsteps and of voices, noises of tools beating upon metals, explosions and the rumblings of machines.

It was now midday, and even at that season the sun had power to loosen stones from the cliff-face. Little stones were falling all round him with little rustling patters like stealthy footsteps. Sometimes a bigger stone would fall, bound for a few feet, and dislodge some other stone. Sometimes little trails of earth and stone came slithering down. Higher up on the great crags boulders fell at intervals, thundering like guns and sending echoes. It was like the laughter of demons.

He reached the summit of the crag and saw beyond him another steep ascent leading to another wall of rock. This ascent was paved with rotten stone, into which his feet sank over the ankles at each step. It was rock made rotten by frost and sun, and it broke like clay under his feet. The sun burned upon his back as he walked, and wind from the icefields blew sand into his face. He persevered until he reached the cliff beyond, only to find that there was no climbing it. It rose up sheer and the point seemed to overhang. When he tried to scale part of it, the foothold and the hand-hold gave way beneath him. It was stone that had ceased to be stone.

In the heat of the day he learnt that there was no pass there across the mountains. The man had misled him, to bring him into a desert from which there could be no escape. There was hardly any sign of life in all that wilderness, except a few evil-looking shrubs about a foot high, so armed with spines that they seemed all teeth. He had read somewhere that all things in the desert are deadly. These shrubs, the hawk, the asp basking in the sun, and the scorpion beneath the rock, were the only dwellers in that waste.

He made up his mind that there was nothing for it but to go back over his tracks and start again at the pine trees. Evil as the men there were, he felt himself drawn towards them, not from companionship nor from a longing for his kind, but by the thought of the bits of tamale and beans which had littered the ground about the hung man. He plodded back across the field of rotten rock, scrambled down again to the lake, and was amazed to find how little that distance was in returning which had seemed so vast in the going. He bathed and drank out of the lake, found some shelter among the rocks from the wind and the sun, made sure that there were neither snakes nor scorpions there nor any nest of hornets. He repeated the sailor’s proverb, “He who has water and sleep has no cause to grumble.”

He slept until the sun went down. He was wakened by the crying of the hawk. Rousing up from his lair, he saw the bird perched on the tree with his wings spread, crying what seemed to be a curse upon all that desolation. Hope suddenly came into Sard, for perhaps there was a nest with eggs within the tree. He had been too tired to think of it before, but now the very thought gave him life. He shook with excitement. He went out and swarmed up the tree, found a nest, and though the hawks beat at him and struck him with wings and talons, he took the two eggs, each bigger than a duck’s egg and of a mottled reddish colour. In the nest was half of a large lizard which the hawk had brought thither. At other times he would have shrunk from such meat, but now he judged that if it would nourish the hawk, it would nourish him. He ate it with the eggs and wished that it had been ten times its size. Having sucked the eggs, he broke and licked the eggshells. He found that he was not thinking of the wilderness. His thoughts were almost continually in a little English country town, at a grocer’s shop, where there were boxes of eggs at the door. He kept thinking of those boxes of hundreds of eggs together, perhaps a thousand eggs in one shop, and of rounds of cheese, weighing a stone apiece. But the eggs were what stirred him most.

Thinking of these eggs, he stumbled and scrambled back over the eleven miles of rock to the pinewood. From his childhood he had been accustomed to take bearings wherever he went, and he had little difficulty in finding his way. In the moonlight he saw the tree with the cut rope still dangling from the bough. Under the tree was the body of the dead man, which had been roughly buried where Sard had laid him. His feet stuck up out of the earth, one bare and one slippered foot. Sard did not think of him, but of the bits of tamale that had been scattered there the day before. To his intense joy they were there still; altogether there were enough bits of tamale and bean pulp to outweigh a ship’s biscuit. Hungry as he was, he determined to save half of his find for the next day. He thought, “I depend on a bandit’s hanging for to-day’s food: to-morrow I need not expect to be so lucky: ‘it is not always May’: still, ‘God will provide.’ ”

He followed the tracks of the bandits till he heard a wolf howling, with a dog answering him howl for howl. Presently, as he went on, he heard horses squealing at each other: he smelt horses. Next he heard a man singing in a shrill falsetto, with many shakes, to the twangle of a guitar.

Following the noise in the moonlight, he came to a flat pan or gully through which a brook, that had made the gully, still passed on its way to the sea. The hills came closely about the pan, giving it shelter from all gales: this (with the water supply) had made it desirable to the Indians in old time.

The Indians had long since gone from it. It was now peopled by the outlaws who had done the hanging in the pine-barren: their tracks led into it; their voices sounded from the midst of it. Sard made out a line of huts stretching irregularly across the pan on the line of a track or trail. The falsetto singer was in the midst of the pan, dancing as he sang. Men were sitting about at the doors of their huts, talking, or at least uttering remarks.

“Such, indeed, is life.”

“Between Sunday and Monday there is ever midnight.”

“She, being a woman, is, as one may say, a woman.”

“The gringos, the accursed: is there anything more accursed?”

“Good wine, good water and good sausage: truly three good things.”

Sard heard these things uttered with all the dignity of a Solomon pronouncing judgments. Dogs were nosing about among the huts, picking bits of tamale. Sard felt that it would be wiser to move boldly down to the village than to stay skulking in the brush till a dog nosed him. He walked boldly down into the gully and passed at the back of the first huts straight into a lover with his lass. Both cursed him under their breath, but were too much interested in themselves to heed him. He muttered an apology as he escaped. A few huts further along the line he came to a corner where an old ruined adobe wall jutting from an occupied hut made shelter for him. He settled into the shelter, meaning to wait till the men were quiet, when he hoped to be able to find food or a pass, perhaps both. He knew that he was in the presence of men who would cut his throat if they found him, yet he listened to what was going on with enjoyment.

Two or three men were sitting on the other side of the adobe hut; they were engaged chiefly in silence, which they sometimes broke with speech, but more often by spitting. The wind blowing from them brought Sard wafts of cigarette smoke.

“Was that someone passing at the back of the house?” one asked.

“No,” another said. “It was some dog.”

“To me,” another said, “the noise was as of a pig.”

“A pig or a dog,” the second replied; “when I said that it was a dog, I meant that it was not a Christian.”

They talked for a while about different kinds of Christians, of which there seemed to be four sorts: themselves, the ricos, the rojos, and the gringos. There seemed to be something not quite-quite, something not of the sincerest milk of the word, about the last three sorts. They talked about pigs when they had finished with the Christians.

“Never will I be as the gringos,” one said, “who will eat of pig, even though it be nourished upon their grandmothers.”

“My uncle, who lived not here,” the second said, “being indeed from Havana, a city of Cuba, sold certain pigs to certain sailors who were gringos. These pigs these gringos greedily ate; their eyes shone, my uncle said. Yet were those pigs, pigs that had eaten many Christians.”

“Lo, now,” the third said, “it is not pigs who eat Christians, but witches, the accursed ones, who take the shape of pigs that they may eat: this also only gringos do.”

“Yet are the gringos fools,” the first answered. “There is Anselmo, who spoke with one but yesterday. Hola, Anselmo, come tell us of the gringo with whom you spoke upon these mountains. Hither, Anselmo. Listen, you, all of you, that you may die with laughter at what Anselmo tells.”

There was a pause while Anselmo came to the group: there were greetings of “How so?”; then the first speaker spoke again.

“Anselmo,” he said, “these have not heard of your meeting with the gringo upon these mountains. Tell them, then.”

“Ah,” Anselmo answered in the voice of him who had shot at Sard the day before. “It is thus; if you will see. I was in the mountains, in the pine-barren, where lately a justice of the people was achieved. I, sauntering there, considering many things, since it is my nature to consider, beheld suddenly a gringo, beastly even beyond the nature of such. For a moment I thought, ‘Lo, now, a prospector.’ Then I saw from certain signs that he was neither this nor that, but an Americano, a Tejano, an Inglés, what matter? This one (I also saw) was lost, as such always are if ever they leave a marked road.

“ ‘Good day, sir,’ I said; since it is ever my custom to be courteous. What, we are not brutes nor Luteranos, I hope; we can be civil one to other. Civility, as they say, costs nothing, yet makes many debtors. I, therefore, did not spit at him as one without faith. ‘Good day, sir,’ I said, ‘I trust that you are well, that your señora is well, that your honoured parents preserve their health, even at their great age.’

“He rolled his eyes upon me like a cow dying of thirst. The gringos have the eyes of cows rather than of men. ‘Tell me,’ he said to me, ‘the way out of these mountains.’

“ ‘Truly, sir,’ I said, ‘you who bring civilisation to our savageries will not so soon leave us. Stay, I entreat you, to dine, or at least to sup, or to sing thus to the piano as do the women of you gringos. Yet, since you must leave us, continue,’ I said, ‘a day’s journey north-eastward, till you reach a place where all the rocks are rotten. There you will find a path over the mountains, good for men, excellent for beasts, having grass, inns, a road, good air, good water and good bells, gravel soil and Holy Communion.’

“He was a big man, even for an Americano. He wore no boots, but slippers, such as women wear.”

“So you sent him to the rotten rocks,” the others said. “But did he go, Anselmo? He surely did not go?”

“Americanos believe all that they are told,” Anselmo said. “He either went to the rotten rocks or to another place far from me, which was my desire in speaking to him. Since there was nothing to be had from him, then plainly it was my task to be rid of him.”

“Long live Anselmo!” the man said. “So he went to the rotten rocks without question. This is it to be a gringo!”

“Without doubt he will be at the rotten rocks, dead?”

“Without doubt.”

The men laughed at this: presently the youngest of them said:

“You say that he had slippers such as women wear? Would it be worth the while to retrieve the slippers for Mariquita?”

“It would not,” Anselmo said. “This man was outcast from the gringos, unable to live even their easy life. His slippers were not women’s slippers, but the wreck of boots cut to that size. He was in all respects ruined: moreover he was lousy.”

They continued to talk of gringos for some little time, though the thought recurred to the youngest of the men that Sard’s body might be worth the rummaging: he asked Anselmo whether Sard had “a belt of the Americans,” or at least “a pouch for tobacco, such as he had seen.”

“No,” Anselmo answered. “This gringo had nothing: even the crows will have nothing from him. Had he had anything, I, Anselmo, would have had it: as it was, let the vultures give Anselmo thanks.”

They talked on, of gringos, gringo women, the women of the district, the recent cock-fights, the ingredients of sausages, the natures of parasites, etc., etc., till Sard, lulled by their drawling low speech, fell asleep. He was in a dangerous place, but danger will not keep men awake so well as love or grief. Besides, few stop to identify a sleeping man. He slept as a sailor will sleep, like a dead man. In his sleep, some two hours later, he shifted about, so as to detach a piece of adobe from his shelter. It fell, with a little clatter which he half heard through his drowsiness. Unfortunately, it roused a little dog within the hut; the dog began to bark. Sard sat up at once, wide awake; his movement knocked down more adobe; the dog barked louder: a man within the hut cursed the dog; but the dog, aware of Sard, would not be silent.

“Listen,” said the man in the hut, “be silent, Chaco. Listen; there is someone there.”

“Who would be there?” a woman asked. “It is but a dog, prowling for bones.”

“I do not know who may be there,” the man answered, “but it is no dog, since dog will answer dog with barking.”

“It is some drunkard or some pig of the poblacion,” the woman said. “Come here, Chaco; down, dog; quiet!”

Unfortunately, Sard in rising to his feet stirred Chaco to bark louder.

“Your drunkard or your dog or your pig,” the man said, “these are likely excuses, are they not? Where are my boots?”

Sard heard him drag his boots to the bedside, muttering.

“What then do you expect to find, Andrés?” the woman asked.

“You know well what I expect to find,” Andrés replied.

“Indeed I know no such matter,” she answered, “since the expectations of a husband are beyond the wit of wives. If you will tell me, then shall I know.”

“Know, then,” Andrés answered, “that I expect to find Martin, your lover, who taps here, like a second Pyramus, and shall die here in his sin, like a second Chico the Blanco.”

Sard did not wish to be the second Chico the Blanco; he slipped up the line of huts as swiftly as he could. He slid round the corner of a hut, under its eaves, into the grey of the wall. He was hardly quiet there when Andrés came rushing past looking for Martin.

“Stay, Martin accursed,” he cried; “we have accounts to settle, offspring of a dog.” He ran, cursing, along the line of huts.

The village or poblacion had not composed itself to sleep: it was perhaps always ready for a row. Sard heard a general rushing to doors, as the inhabitants came to see the fun. Some boys brushed past Sard, who joined them.

“What is it? What is it?” the boys asked.

“Andrés seeks Martin, to kill him,” Sard answered.

“Andrés is killing Martin,” the boys cried. “Come, boys, Andrés has killed Martin.” Sard found himself in the midst of a crowd of men, women and children, hurrying up the line of huts. The crowd stopped towards the end of the line where Andrés was beating with his knife-hilt upon a door.

“Come out, you Martin,” he was crying. “I will have thy liver as a bake meat, yea and I will mince thy heart and eat it with red pepper, without grace.”

There was a general edging back of the crowd at this, to get out of the line of fire from Martin’s door: Sard edged back too, till his back was against a hut wall. He could see Andrés’ wife at her hut door, peering after her husband. All waited for Martin to answer the challenge: Andrés even waited for a reply: none came.

“So, scum of a Martin,” Andrés continued, “half-breed of a toad and a heretic, you justly fear my vengeance. See, now, brothers, this Martin, before I take his skin to be my bed-mat, makes his last prayers: he confesses, he sues for mercy. But I am not one to grant mercy till blood has flown on my front teeth. So come out, Martin, offspring of a dog, till I crack your marrow-bones with nutcrackers and take your marrow for boot-grease.”

Suddenly the door of Martin’s hut was flung open and a woman faced the madman.

“Who is it calls Martin?” she said. “Who is it couples a fine name with the filth of a drunkard’s ravings? You, Andrés? I thought no less. Martin is away, as is well known, or by this your tongue would have been tied round your neck with your own entrails, dog of a drunkard. Away, accursed one, trouble not the houses of the honest. But when Martin returns, then he shall know of this, Andrés, and then, Andrés, shall you be squeezed in the press till we know if your blood be wine or oil.”

Sard expected that Andrés would at least reply, but there was silence. Martin’s wife took up the word once more.

“And you people of the town,” she said, “have you nothing better to do than to watch the antics of this fool? Go, every one to his house, or Martin shall deal with you, even as with him.”

There was silence again for about thirty seconds, then three or four of the children, who had been on the outskirts of the little crowd, edged sheepishly away. They were followed by others. Sard had no time to dodge or hide; any movement of the sort would have betrayed him. He stood where he was, somewhat bent and peering towards Martin’s hut, with his left hand shading his face and eyes. Half-a-dozen people, children and grown-ups, passed him on their way to their huts. They looked at him rather hard, but no one spoke to him. A man and boy, as they passed, looked perhaps harder than the others. After they had passed, Sard heard the man ask under his breath:

“Who was that by the corner of the house?”

The boy said, “Old Ortiz, I thought. Good-night, Ortiz.”

Sard answered and muttered good-night. As he spoke, a couple of lads, who were running, jolted into the two friends and jolted Ortiz out of their minds. Up and down the line of huts people went home and closed their doors. Martin’s wife stood at her door, looking at them. The last to pass was Andrés, who went shambling past, muttering and twitching. Sard heard him mutter, “With my good knife I would have laid him low, I would have laid him low.”

Now from Andrés’ hut came the cry of a woman:

“Where is that creature calling himself a man, to whom the church has bound me in matrimony, who suspects me of infamy? Where is this Andrés, who from the blackness of his heart asperses the whiteness of my honour? Let me see him that I may cast his foul calumny in his teeth. Is it for this, O dog of all the dunghills of Spain, that I redeemed thee from thy life as hangman’s boy and made thee a knight-at-arms?”

Those who had not gone home hurried to watch Andrés receive his wife’s eloquence. Sard saw Andrés enter his home, but then something made him look up suddenly. He saw that Martin’s wife, who had come a few paces from her door, was looking at him with curiosity. It was bright moonlight; no one who looked at him could fail to see that he did not belong there.

“Well, I’m caught now,” Sard thought. “It’s neck or nothing now. Well, the straightest way is the quickest.”

He walked straight up to her.

“Madam,” he said, “I’m not a spy or the police, or anything. I’m lost here in these hills; will you help me out?”

She looked at him for some moments. “Go further up the line,” she said, “the third hut from here is empty. Pass in there and have no fear.”

She closed her own door in his face, and Sard did as he was bid. The third hut from hers was empty. He went into it. At some early time there had been a mud wall across the hut, dividing it into two. This had fallen into a pile of loose earth. Sard got behind this pile and thought, “Well, here I am; and if that woman lifts a finger, my throat will be cut on this doorstep, and that little beast, Chaco, will lick my blood.”

He waited; each minute seemed an hour. At the end hut of the village the man still sang to his mandoline, in his falsetto voice, a poem of intolerable length and folly, which Sard recognised as a rhymed romance of the early 17th century. Footsteps passed up and down outside the door. Once three men came to the door and stopped there, muttering in low voices for two or three minutes. They were smoking cigarettes and spitting. One of the men was carrying harness, which clinked.

One of them said, “Well, sooner or later that’s what it’ll have to come to.”

And another said, “We can count on you then?”

The other replied, “Well, come here, come on inside here; I’ll just give you my reasons.”

He had his hand on the door-latch and the door eight inches ajar, when the other said, “No, not in there, thank you. There are tarantulas in there. Come on up along.”

They moved away. Then for a long time Sard sat there, thinking of what they had said: “There are tarantulas in there.” He heard a queer, regular, clicking noise in one of the corners, two or three yards from him. It was a little dry, slight clicking noise, rather like two wooden skewers being tapped together. Some one had told him, years before, that tarantulas click their mandibles together before they attack. “That’s what it is,” he thought, “it’s a tarantula in the corner.”

He kept himself breathlessly still, and then suddenly he heard a little light pattering. There was a swift, flurrying scutter along the floor, a shrill squeal, something leapt and fell across his feet and writhed away squealing. He heard the thing, whatever it was, rat or mouse, trying to shake itself free in the corner of the room. The squeals soon died to a whimper and the whimper to a sigh, as the tarantula in the darkness sucked his fill. Sard presently heard the corpse sink down, as the insect moved away. He waited with his feet drawn up under him and his hands covering his throat, lest the insect should want more blood and come to him for it.

The time went slowly by, the man with the mandoline ceased his song, somebody who wished to sleep cursed a howling dog until it came indoors. But the wolves out on the mountains crept nearer. From time to time one would cry his cry. Whenever this happened, the dogs in the huts whimpered and were uneasy. Everybody, by this time, had gone to rest in that village of outlaws. Sard thought that it could not be long before the woman redeemed her promise.

Then from somewhere up above he heard the sound of drunken singing, which became louder as the singer came down into the village. Sard presently picked up the words of the song, which was one of the romances of the Moors in Spain. As the drunkard entered the village, every dog in every hut flew to the door barking with all its strength, in spite of the curses and boots of the owners. The drunkard paused outside the row of houses and cried in a loud voice, “Here I am, old Pappa Peppy, and I’m as drunk as I want to be. Come on out, Martin, Tomás, Ramón, Espinello, for I tell you I’m not Pappa Peppy, but an avenging angel of the Day of Doom. I’m the Lord’s second coming and now I’m come.” And at this he let fly with two revolvers at the doors of the huts, in succession. Drunk as he was, he had extraordinary precision. The bullets thudded into the doors as though he were running a stick along palings.

“Come, Tomás,” he cried, “and I’ll shoot the white out of your eye. Come, Ramón, and I’ll see the colour of your blood; for I’m Pappa Peppy, and I’m as drunk as Noah when he got home.”

There came another volley. Sard noticed that none of the bullets came into his door. He thought: “This is that ruffian’s hut, he’ll presently come in here to sleep.” The drunkard went to another hut and beat upon the door with the revolver butt. “Come out, Ramón,” he said, “and let’s shoot, man to man.”

Sard heard the voice of Ramón: “Take another drink, Pappa Peppy, and let us shoot in the morning, for now I’m sober, and how can a sober man hope to shoot like you?” A bottle seemed to be passed through a cautiously opened shutter, and Sard heard Pappa Peppy say, “You’re a Christian gentleman, Ramón. All I ever wanted was a drink, and now I’ve got it.”

Sard heard him take a drink and then come unsteadily to the door of the hut where he lay. He fumbled at the door, opened it, and stood groping there, feeling along the wall as though for a ledge where matches and candle stood.

“The lamp’s gone,” he said; “th’ only lamp I ever loved all gone. They all turn from Pappa Peppy.”

He came fumbling along the wall into the hut, and then went fumbling back and shut the door. Then he said: “Well, I’ve got box o’ matches. First of all, I’ll put the nice brandy up in the corner. I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. I tell you I’ve got a box of matches and then I’ll show them. They aren’t going to fool Pappa Peppy.”

Sard heard him creep back to the door, holding on by the wall, and heard him say: “I’ll just kneel down very carefully and I’ll put down the brandy there, and I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. I know I’ve got a box of matches somewhere. The man who says I haven’t got a box of matches, I’ll shoot the white out of his eye. Who says I haven’t got a box of matches? That’s the sort of skunk they are. They daren’t say it to my face, not one of them. Of course I’ve got a box of matches.”

He proceeded to empty his pockets in the dark, muttering over each thing. “What in the name of all the saints is this? Bit of a cigar. What in the—oh, bit more cigar. That’s a bottle of peppermint, all broken. Ugh! the glass is all broken.” A reek of peppermint liqueur filled the little hut. “No good looking for them in that pocket,” said the man; “there’s cigars in this pocket. There goes the box of matches. I knew I had a box of matches and it’s gone on the floor.”

The box of matches jerked out of the pocket and fell very close to Sard. The drunkard went down on hands and knees, diffusing a warm breath of peppermint liqueur and aniseed brandy. Sard felt as though he was to leeward of one of the Spice Islands. The man began to grope for the box of matches, patting with his great hands and breathing with difficulty. “I know the box of matches isn’t far,” he said. “It’s very stormy to-night. In a wind like this one has to go miles out of one’s way. Oh, the wind’s roaring, the wind’s roaring! And well it might roar, for I’m not Pappa Peppy, I’m the Day of Judgment. I’m the Day of Judgment, and I’m dawning and I’m coming up over the mountains now, just like blood, and if I lay my hands on that box of matches, they’ll be the first thing I’ll blast. I’ll teach ’em to fool the Day of Judgment!”

Presently he paused in his search. He had missed Sard by half inches two or three times. Presently Pappa Peppy stopped not more than a yard from Sard and said in a little, cold, clear voice, “Lord pity the poor sailors on a night like this! That’s ten times I’ve been round this room looking for that drink. It’s been witchcraft. I can see you here, and well I’ve known you were here all the time, and I know you’re doing it with your witchcraft, you black beast. I’ve watched you doing it, but you needn’t think to scare Pappa Peppy. He’s the Lord’s, he is; he isn’t one of yours. He’s a lily for the pure to look to. He fears not Satan nor all his minions. Ah! here’s the bottle. I knew I’d come to it, if I kept to the south far enough.”

Sard heard the cork drawn from the bottle and the gurgle as he drank raw aniseed brandy.

“That was what I wanted,” said Pappa Peppy. “A man like me who takes a lot out of himself has to put it back or go under. And I’ll have another like that—ah! I’ll have another like that. And now I can lie down on the floor without holding on, and let the storm roar itself sick. I don’t care, I don’t care. To-morrow when I get hold of that box of matches, I’ll show it what I think of it.”

The bottle dropped from his hand. It must still have been a third full, for as it rolled away some liquid gurgled out of it. Pappa Peppy gurgled in sympathy or in tune, and composed himself to sleep, sitting up against the wall. He passed into a drunken unconsciousness almost at once, breathing with dreadful difficulty, being in fact at the point of strangulation, through his throat pressing against his collar. After two or three convulsive gasps, he shook himself out of his dangerous position and lapsed sideways. “There’ll be death upon the sea this night,” he murmured; “I’ve known gales, but never anything like this.” After this he slept and the village slept.

It must have been full midnight when the door opened suddenly and the cool night wind blew in from the desert. The woman was there. “Come you,” she said.

Pappa Peppy groaned and fought with his drink. Sard rose up and came to the door. The woman had a little leather bag full of food for him and a leather-covered gourd full of water.

“If you go past the houses,” she said, “and follow up the cañon, to the end, you will come out below the icefields. In all my living here I have only heard of one man who has ever crossed those fields. His name was Gonzalez: he lived a hundred years ago. He crossed them and reached San Agostino in five days.”

“It’s San Agostino that I want to reach,” Sard said.

“Go then,” the woman said, “and may you have that man’s luck. He was my grandfather. But know this: you’re in the land of the bad men, the land of Red Sleeve and the Jacarillos, and not one other soul for thirty miles would have done what I do, not one other soul.”

“Tell me your name,” Sard said, “that if ever I get among my people again, I will think of you with gratitude until I die.”

“We have no names in the Jacarillo country,” she said; “but if ever you come to some church in Christian country, say a prayer to the Virgin for Juanita of the Bolson. And now go.”

She was herself gone on the instant and flitted back like a thief into her hut. Pappa Peppy gurgled in his sleep and cried, “I’ll deal with you if I can get at you!” and then cried, “O God!” and moaned. Sard knelt down, picked up Pappa Peppy’s box of matches, took his two pistols and cartridge belt, loaded both pistols, slung his provisions over his shoulder, and set out with a pistol in each hand from that city of the Jacarillos.

Fifty yards from the huts, he entered the cañon, now stealthy with the noises of the night. Near the mouth of the cañon a sentry lay asleep within the ring of his rope which screened him from snakes. Sard crept past him on tiptoe, but need not have taken such precaution, since the man slept like the dead. Not far away, something large, grey and silent, probably a wolf, which had been creeping up to steal the sentry’s food, glided into the sage brush.

In another fifty yards the trail turned upwards into the hills, out of sight of the gully. Sard went on as hard as he could put foot to ground for three hours. Then coming suddenly round a corner, walking rather carelessly, thinking that he was quite out of the reach of pursuit, the faint smell of smoke crossed his path; immediately he was in sight of three mud huts by the side of the road. He was reassured an instant later by seeing that two of the huts were ruined. There came a rustling from within the third; a hideous old Indian woman came out. She might have been any age from a hundred and twenty downwards. They looked at each other in the grey light in the heart of the wilderness. She mumbled something in reply to his question, but any wits she once had had long since gone.

Sard pointed to the snowy peaks below the stars in the sky. He asked in Spanish, “Is there a trail across the Sierras?” He made signs of a trail and of mountains.

Some memory lit up intelligence in her faded mind. She laughed. “They all go over the mountains,” she said. “All the young men go into the mountains. That’s why all the mountains are white, for all their bones are on the mountains. Your bones will be white on the mountains. I live up here among the mountains and I can hear them. All the round white skulls come rolling down the mountains.” She ran into her hut and returned with the skulls of three white men. “They all rolled down the mountain,” she said, “for they are Indian mountains, and the white men know much, but they don’t know about the mountains. By and by I’ll have your skull. I’ll put him in the ants’ nest to clean and I’ll keep him on the shelf.”

Sard hurried away from her, but for about half a mile she followed him, hugging the skulls. He pushed uphill as hard as he could go, but in the stillness of that glen he could hear her voice for a long time, saying that his skull would roll down the mountain.

There was now no trail, but he fixed his course straight to the frozen crag, which gleamed above him against the sky. Dawn found him still pushing onward and upward in a trackless wilderness that seemed to bear no living thing. When the sun rose, he found some shelter among the rocks, where he might defend himself if attacked. He expected that the Jacarillos would trail him as soon as it was light enough to see tracks, and that with ponies or donkeys they might well be on him before noon. In this he was unjust to the Jacarillos: they did not trail those whom they judged to be already doomed. In his shelter he ate, drank and then slept; he did not wake until the setting sun shone through a crevice among the rocks on to his face. After eating and drinking he set out again into the Sierras.

All littleness was gone from the mountains now. His world was one with the elements, the sky, great stars, and gigantic crags, silent except when now and then there came a roar from something breaking in the glacier, or the thunder of a boulder falling. The moon rose to light his going up a slope of rock, which seemed curtained by other slopes of rock. Here he laid down one of the revolvers which he had taken from Pappa Peppy. He laid it on the rock beside him. Instantly it slithered down, gathering small stones as it went, till it was thundering down the rocky slope far, far below, with an avalanche about it. He saw it flash and presently heard a report, and realised, as he had not realised before, that he might have slipped like the gun and gone gliddering down among the boulders in the same way.

At about midnight he reached a ledge of rock, where he slept until daybreak. When he woke he saw what he took to be three cloaked Indians, sitting on the ledge beside him. He sat up and looked at them. They withdrew their heads from their blankets. They were no Indians, but vultures. They looked at him with interest and without fear. He spoke to them, they muttered a little and moved uneasily.

“So you’re waiting for me to die, are you?” he said. “I’m not dead yet.” They craned and sidled with their bald heads. “Get out of this,” he said, smiting at one. It went sidelong off the ledge, and the others with it. They beat with their wings, recovered their poise, and sailed out into the air. An instant before, they had been squalid, stinking, huddled creatures; now they were floating in the majesty of beauty. Two hovered at a little distance from the ledge, the third rose above it in a short spire. He had never seen any bird of prey circling at such close quarters. He watched the great pinions soar up above him, while the others hovered away and mewed and cried. Suddenly the bird above him launched itself down upon him and beat him with its great wings, so that he was almost over the ledge. Instantly it was up in the air and repeated its swoop. It came down sighing and struck and hissed at Sard, and immediately the two birds who had been waiting, swooped and struck at him. “So you’re going to get me down into the valley and pick my bones,” Sard said. He lay flat down upon the ledge, face upwards, and drew his other revolver. The bird came down on him again, crying and smiting. He fired; the bird went up, poised, went up a few feet further, beat with its wings, mounted yet a little further like a towering partridge, then crumpled up and dropped. Sard saw it strike and roll and lie still. Its companions swayed away to look at it and then descended to the body.

Sard looked down and wondered how he could ever have climbed that crag at night without falling. He knew that he could not go down it by daylight. He looked at the crag which rose up above him from the ledge, and felt that he could not climb it. He had reached a point from which he could neither go nor come. He ate and drank and then thought, “Perhaps when I’m rested I will be able to try this rock. If not, I shall end here.”

He slept on the rock until the beating of the midday sun became unbearable. He twisted to an angle where his head could lie in some shade, and slept again. He was aware in his sleep that someone stood upon that ledge and told him to come on. He sat up, looked at this figure and knew that it was only partly human. In his dream, or fever, it seemed like the spirit of the Pathfinder, fierce, hard, and of great beauty. He told himself, “This is all nonsense. The Pathfinder is a ship, she has not even a figurehead, but a fiddle-head; this is a woman.”

But the figure said, “I am the Pathfinder. I can find a path for you.” She lead on up the rock and Sard followed. He could see her in front of him; he followed where she trod. There was a great star above the crags. The crags were thick with greenish ice, the star shone upon the ice, till it glittered like a crown. Sard said, “I’ll put my hand on the crown of the mountain.”

At daybreak he came out on a wild place near a brook.

There was grass there whistling in the wind. There was a little bird somewhere, not far away, crying a double note that sounded like a curse, continually repeated. Sard drank of the brook, sheltered from the wind and slept; nor did he know when the woman had passed from there. Afterwards, he was puzzled about that part of his march; sometimes it was in his mind all blurred, like the events of a fever, sometimes it seemed the only reality among things dreamed.

When he woke he was out in the snowfields. He thought that he had reached the summit, but he found that he was only on the top of a small shoulder. Beyond and above him were crags, sprinkled, heaped or overwhelmed with snow, some of it dirty from fallings of rock, some of it violet from shadow, the rest of it glittering. There was no sign of any living thing. If he looked up, there were peaks glittering against the sky; if he looked down, there were glittering snowfields, crags and chasms.

He could not see the country from which he had come, because greyness was hiding it from him. Grey shapes, like the leaders of a herd, were moving into it. A herd of mists followed their leaders, so like oxen that he expected them to bellow. They jostled on in myriads till all the lower slopes of the mountains were blotted out. Soon a sea of mist washed all about those miles of Sierras; the peaks stood out of this sea like islands. “If that sea rises,” Sard thought, “I shall be drowned up here. I must move while I have light.”

He had his direction from the sun. He pushed on, now up, now down, over snow of every degree of rottenness. He had a little food left in his wallet. He guarded this, but slaked his thirst with snow and chewed upon a piece of his belt.

In the evening it began to blow bitterly cold with a small snow. In one of the whirls of the gale he found himself upon a piece of a made road. He could hardly believe his eyes; but there was no doubt: it had been made by men. It had been cut out of the side of the crag; the crag at its side had been carven with the figures of the gods. A tall god with his tongue transfixed by a bramble was pouring libation on an altar; beyond the altar was a door leading into the crag. As he stood there, the sun shone out through a rift to light the eyrie he was perched upon. Used as he was to heights, it made him sick to think of the will that had spent men, like water, to hew that rock at that height. The sun shone into the doorway. Looking within, he saw two figures upon a throne. They sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. They were staring straight at him.

“Yes,” he said, “what are you? Who are you there?”

Peering in, he saw that they were the bodies of a king and queen who had been buried there in that mountain tomb, perhaps centuries before the Spaniards came. He crept into the tomb to look at them. Once the door of a slab of stone had been mortared flush with the face of the crag, but it had fallen like most of the road that led to it. The mummies sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. Masks of gold still covered their faces. The masks had, no doubt, been modelled on the dead faces and preserved likenesses of that king and queen. Both were tiny; they looked like children to Sard. They were the rulers who had driven men up the mountain to make that road. All about the walls were paintings of the lives of those two.

“Ah,” Sard thought, “he was a king and when he died the kingdom fell to pieces. She knew that it would be so, so when he died she killed herself.”

The sun, which had been shining, was now suddenly blotted out again. A cloud of intense blackness seemed to rush out of the heaven to engulf the crag. The air was filled with crying and small snow. Sard sat there in the darkness and fell asleep at the feet of the king and queen.

He woke often, because it was so cold. Whenever he woke, he heard the gale full of bells tolling, or voices crying to him: often he answered them. Once or twice he went to the door to answer voices; but no one was there except the gale, full of small snow. He wondered if he were alive, or if this were death; not final death, but the leaving of the body which is the prelude to it.

In the morning the wind dropped: the snow ceased: the storm went bodily off across heaven like an army that had been beaten, in a sullen mass, with rearguards of sulphurous smoke followed fast by the angels of heaven with light. The sun followed hot upon it with fire, till presently it was far, far away, engaged upon the southern horizon.

As Sard came out into the sun, he saw a name cut or scratched upon the lintel of the door of the tomb. The letters were lastingly but rudely graven by a strong illiterate.

Gonzalez Medina.

1795.

“Gonzalez Medina,” he said. “That woman’s grandfather. The only man who ever crossed these mountains. Here I am upon his track. If he blazed his trail thus, I may still find my way out.”

The finding of that blaze was companionship to him all that day, which was a hard day, one of his hardest.

* * * * *

One of the worst of the hardships was the knowledge that all was not well with the Pathfinder. He had put so much of his virtue into that ship, that she was almost part of him. He felt that things were going wrong on board her. Sometimes, as he struggled on, he knew that someone was in his place, making evil, and that Captain Cary wanted him. He kept thinking that Father Garsinton had brought the evil.

He could not remember Father Garsinton clearly, yet he stayed in his mind, like a blur of evil.

* * * * *

Long afterwards, in thinking over his climbing of the Sierra, some things came back into his mind as pictures or dreams or happenings; he never knew really which they were. Often it seemed to him that at this point in his journey he heard a beating of pans and the murmuring of bees: he saw bees swarming and a big Spanish woman beating pans to make them settle. He asked to be allowed to beat pans; afterwards he hived the bees into a straw basket.

Then the woman suggested that he should drink some honey drink, and took him to a house where she and her husband, a much older and much yellower person, gave him drink in a strange cup and asked him what he saw after he had drunk.

He said, “I see a path leading upwards.”

They said, “Go along the path. Now what do you see?”

He said, “I see a little house at the end of the path, shining as though it was made of some white metal.”

They said, “Is the door open?”

He said, “No, the door is locked.”

They said, “Go and put your hand on the sill of the door and see if the key is there.”

He said, “It is there.”

They said, “Open the door and go in.”

He opened the door, but inside all was darkness with a smell of carib leaf which choked his throat and made his head stupid.

They said to him, “What do you see?”

He said, “Nothing but a brazier burning carib leaf, which throws out a thick smoke which chokes me.”

They said, “No; but to right and left of the brazier what do you see?”

He said, “Two pillars and a person bound to each pillar.”

They said, “Look well; who are the people bound to the pillars?”

He looked with all his strength into the thickness of the smoke. It was agony to him not to be able to see clearly, but he said, “One is Juanita de la Torre and the other is myself, and we are being choked by the smoke.”

They said, “It is not the smoke, it is something coming from the brazier.”

Then from the brazier the little tongues of flame, writhing among the carib leaves, changed to red snakes which were arms and hands that came twining about the throats of the two bound figures. The fire in the brazier glowed into the likeness of a human soul with the face of Father Garsinton, who laughed and said, “I crush you lesser spirits as a sacrifice to my master.”

Then all became dim with carib smoke choking and stupefying, but the words, “I crush you lesser spirits” were repeated many times, while the house, the honey-cup, and the Spanish man and woman faded and disappeared.

* * * * *

Soon after this he climbed a spine of rock, expecting to find on the further side a dip of snow with a higher spine beyond it. To his amazement, there was no such dip nor spine; but the slope of the mountain falling below him into a different world. On this ocean side of the Sierra there was no desert. Instead of a chaos of rock blasted by the sun to rottenness, there were heaves of hill flinging their waters to the forests. Forests covered the valleys like a fleece. In places where there was no forest Sard could see little white houses. The smoke of a train ran like a caterpillar along the valley beneath the foothills. Beyond the foothills was a dark mass, like a bar of metal, yet not like a bar of metal, because it seemed to be alive, it gave Sard the thought that it trembled: it was the sea.

Far away, on the brink of this darkness, was a smudge or cloud in which some chimneys stood like stalks. The smoke merged into the air so that a tiny golden dome glittered: it was the cathedral in San Agostino. Almost at once, quite clearly, though faintly, in some chance channel of upper air or freak of sound, the chimes from the dome reached Sard. It was a familiar Spanish chime to which Sard always put the words of the poet:

“Gloria in las alturas,

Cantad in vuestra jaula, criaturas.”

Worn, footsore, more than half-starved as he was, he could not see his goal nor hear that chime without “singing in his cage.” There was his desired haven, within how many hours of march? He could not tell how many hours; perhaps very many hours; but no matter what his pains were, he felt sure that having seen his goal, he could reach it.

Going down was like soul’s delivery after the toils of the last days. In a few miles he was in the timber, going down a glen of great trees towards a smell of honey which came thickly upon the air to him. Sometimes he missed it for a few yards, but it always returned on the next gust. Sometimes it brought to him memories of tea in England, but more often the intense memory of a picnic at Yapavai, where he had sat near a field of the yellow melilotis hovered over by countless blue butterflies.

At the end of the glen he came out on to a heave of the hill, where he found the cause of the honey scent: eleven great trees lay broken on the ground.

Nine of the eleven were hollow from the ground to the upper branches. In all these, for perhaps centuries, the wild bees had nested, till now many hundreds weight of honey lay broken or spilt upon the ground. Over this, in some places, the bees were still flying confusedly, but by this time most of them had gone with their queens to new shelters. Gorged bee-eaters sat on neighbouring boughs. Some small mountain bears boldly foraged in the tree-boles. They clawed out great paws-full of comb which they plastered into their muzzles in spite of the stings. Sard found a piece of broken yellow comb the size of a bathsponge. On this he fed with thoughts of the prophets fed miraculously in the wilderness. After this, the miseries of the wilderness fell from him as though they had never been. Perhaps the honey had in it some drug of excitement or of comfort. He wandered on happily, feeling sure that all his troubles were at an end. He bathed in the pool of a mountain stream on the banks of which wild strawberries grew so thickly that the ground looked like the foot of a red hawthorn tree after a storm in June. After this he went on through a forest of big timber which grew on easy slopes with little undergrowth.

The moon had risen before he came to any trace of men. He came to a clearing and followed wheel-tracks downhill till he saw the lights of huts. Men in the huts were beating tin pans and singing:

“Is that Mr. Riley

Who sets such a styley?

Is that Mr. Riley who keeps the hotel?

Is that Mr. Riley they speak of so highly?

How d’ye do, Mr. Riley, are you doing quite well?”

As he came to the door of the first hut, a man who was tapping out his pipe there, hailed him:

“Hello, sport! where in hell do you come from?”

“Over the mountain.”

“Mountain, hell! Are you looking for a job?”

“No.”

“Doing it for a bet, then?”

“No. Trying to rejoin my ship.”

“Hell!” the man said. “Here, boys, here’s a son of a gun come across the mountain, trying to rejoin his ship. Come in, son, and have one on the house.”

* * * * *

At noon the next day Sard was in San Agostino, washed, shaven, fed, reclad, and with money in his pocket. He walked in the crowded street, listening to speech, hearing the bells. Shops were full of food, drink, shoes and clothes; women were looking into shops; work was going on; men with places in life were filling them.

He had no place. He knew now how little a thing will put a man out of a place, into the wilderness beyond, where to be at all is to be an outlaw.

He stopped on the steps of the Consulate to look at the ships in port: among them was the big English steam yacht, the Yuba, which he had seen in Las Palomas, as it seemed in another life. A man hailed him by name.

“Hullo, Harker!”

It was Billy Binge, his old captain of the main.

“I say, Harker,” he said, “are you ashore here? Yes? What topping luck! Could you take the Yuba to Santa Barbara?”

“Yes.”

“Sir James has sacked his old man for crooking his little finger: going on the jag, in other words. He wants a new old man, muy pronto, and the worst of it is all the masters on the beach here are out at elbows.”

“So am I,” Sard said.

“Only in your gear,” Billy said. “These other fellows are in their souls. I can vouch for you personally. So if you really can take her, come along, I’ll fit you out a bit and then I’ll take you to Sir James.”

“One minute,” said Sard. “Have you heard anything of an abduction case at Las Palomas?”

“Abduction of Miss Kingsborough?” Billy said. “We’ve heard nothing else. She’s been carried clean away.”

“Where to?” Sard asked.

“Search me,” Billy said. “Some damned trader in Eve’s flesh; but there’s a fine old breeze about it. Now come along.”

“What brings you to San Agostino?”

Sard told him in few words.

* * * * *

Billy Binge’s recommendation was sufficient; Sir James engaged Sard to command the Yuba. She sailed late that night, up the coast to the Recalde reef to take some dredgings. After a few days at the reef, she sailed for Santa Barbara, where she arrived at noon just nineteen days from Sard’s going ashore at Las Palomas.

Sir James stood at his side as he brought the Yuba into Santa Barbara harbour.

“You’ve not been here recently, Captain Harker,” he said. “You’ll not know the place; it’s a different place: almost a different city. They’re making this place the Athens of the West: I say they, but it’s really he, the Dictator, Don Manuel. Look at the cathedral; there’ll be nothing so beautiful in the New World when it’s finished. Do you see your ship, the Pathfinder?”

“No, Sir James, she isn’t in the sailing ship berths.”

“That is unfortunate for you,” Sir James said, “as I suppose it means that she has both come and gone; but it is fortunate for me, for I hope it will mean that you will come home with us in the Yuba.”

* * * * *