Black Mesa. Zane Grey
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adobe walls thickly hung with blankets and scarfs. Doors opened into rooms on the right side, and windows on the left let in the light from a patio.
The trader entered the last room. Being at the end of that section of the house it had a window, as well as a door, and consequently was well lighted. It contained a narrow bed covered by a red blanket woven with Indian designs, a washstand, a bureau with a spotted mirror, and a shelf in the corner from which hung a curtain. The floor, like that of the corridor, was of uneven, bare earth covered by thickly woven Indian blankets. The walls and ceiling were adobe, pale brown in hue, cracked in places and stained by water. A small open fireplace of crudely cemented stones and a chimney of like construction completed the interior of the small compartment.
“Here you are,” said Belmont. “A table an’ lamp, with some fixin’ up, will make you comfortable. It’ll be cool in summer an’ warm in winter. An’ that’s luxury out here.”
“It’ll be good enough for me,” replied Manning.
The trader made an excuse for the fact that summer storms flooded the corridor at times, a defect he would remedy, and that when the dust storms raged in the spring it was necessary to keep door and window closed.
Kintell followed them with Paul’s coat and belongings from the wagon.
“Let’s rustle, Belmont,” said the cowboy. “When I count cattle I shore count ’em.”
“Right-o. It’s a big range, but if you’re not too damned good a counter we can finish before sunset. . . . Manning, make yourself at home. Loaf in the post an’ learn Indian ways. My woman will call you when supper is ready.”
Paul lay down on the bed with a sudden realization that the impulse under which he had taken this serious step had evaporated. Like all of his late, restless, unhappy impulses! He had become a rudderless craft.
A faint pungent smell, not unpleasant, assailed his nostrils. It was not the mingled odor of blankets, wool, pelts and other Indian essentials of the desert so thickly charging the atmosphere of the trading post. It entered the open door from outside and permeated his room. Wood smoke, that was it. At the same time he heard the faint wails of a baby and a soft crooning song, somehow poignant and sad, then sounds come from a cabin just beyond the corridor. Paul could see a portion of a peeled log wall and a slanting roof covered with red adobe mud.
There was a mother in that cabin and Paul, keenly susceptible to grief, had caught the note in her voice. No doubt she was the woman Belmont had called Sister, probably a sobriquet for his wife. It seemed to be a young voice, however, sweet and slightly contralto; and it arrested Paul’s wandering interest.
After a while silence prevailed and Paul fell prey to the dark mood he had feared, and against which this decisive step had been directed. He had to bow to what he could not break.
The four dismal walls of the adobe room appeared to press down upon him. They were stained and cracked, somber and inscrutable, like the walls of life which had fallen in upon him. They suited this uncanny place. For a long while he gazed around and upward, discovering much that he had not seen upon first glance. The nests of mason bees and wasps, a black spider spinning his web across a corner, faint Indian marks near the door, and a motionless praying mantis on the windowpane. He could see through those walls to the outside world, with its strife and beauty and passion, or through the ceiling to the blue sky and white clouds. Or he could make out of those blank spaces storied walls of his own conceiving. Did he not intend to go on with his long struggle to write? It all lay in the mind.
“Ah!” he mused bitterly. “That’s it. . . . All in the mind! Happiness or hell, life or death, all in the mind. It is what you think.”
And so the old, familiar, yet somehow inexplicable battle began all over again. He had won it before and he could do so again. And yet, why was it still so difficult to throw off the despair he felt? But to what end? He had struggled up out of the abyss; he had progressed; the beautiful and wonderful thing he had felt was dead; love was dead, hate was dead, vivid and torturing memories were dying. And he believed that he was ready to face the future, with courage and intelligence if not with hope.
Of the hundred and one plans that he had considered since his recovery from his futile debauch of oblivion, nothing had developed. They were futile as well. Still the days had passed. Something had been gained from merely living on.
This desert place of bitter water, this lonely upflung world of rock and earth and sage, this barren wasteland keeping its secret—was this the place that could save him? No! Those four blank walls had told him that. No place could give him back what he had lost. He need go no farther to seek, to search, to find what must be in his own soul, or else unattainable.
Therefore, this last and deliberate move to isolate himself on a forbidding and inhospitable desert was only another hopeless gesture. He would give it up. When Belmont and Kintell returned he would recompense them for their labors and abandon the cattle project. It would be far better to interest himself in lumbering, south of Wagontongue. The altitude was lower, the country one of forested plateaus and canyons, the water pure, the wild game abundant. Why had he not considered that? How infinitely preferable the fragrant, sun-flocked pine forests and the amber brooks to this rock-ribbed region from the bowels of which poured only bitterness! He had been mad to imagine that toil on a bleak, hard range might constitute his salvation.
Nevertheless Paul divined that wherever he went the same problem would present itself, the same shadow would keep step on his trail, the same naked shingle of sorrow would be his beat. Unless he could find something—not a place, nor any labor, nor an anchor to hold to, but some new meaning that would make life worth living!
“I am getting somewhere,” he muttered aloud. “That cowboy—did he hit upon it?”
To alleviate his own trouble by taking up the burden of others! What a splendid prospect! But it was beyond Paul Manning. He was not good enough nor Christian enough to accept such a role. Never again would he pass by a fellow man in distress without lending a kindly hand, but to devote his whole future to benevolence—that was beyond him. What had he wanted before this blow had struck him? To travel, to experience, to know adventure, to achieve, to write the old dreams, to live and to love.
To live and to love! But it had been love which had desolated him. The strangeness of his nature loomed out at that moment; the recollection of more than one direct ancestor who had been ruined by an unrequited passion; the memory of his adoration for his mother; the fact that he recognized a strong feminine strain of tenderness in himself. But perhaps he had made too much of his infatuation for Amy. He was still young and healthy—at least in body, if not in spirit. He would forget in time. And then the old bitterness and despair swept over him. How could any kind of love ever be possible for him again? That was the insupportable truth.
So profound was Paul’s absorption in his self-analysis that he paid no heed to a thumping sound at his door until he was sharply disrupted by a vociferous baby voice: “Da!”
Suddenly he became aware of the fact that the baby he had heard crying a short time ago had entered his door and was crawling over the floor toward the bed.
“Well! Say, youngster, where you going?” burst out Paul, at once amused and concerned.
The baby kept on with a singleness of purpose. He might have been a year or more old, and he was most decidedly pretty, though not robust. Reaching the bed he caught Paul’s leg and elevated himself to a standing position and then, with the manifest delight of conquest, he crowed lustily.
Paul lifted him up to his knee, feeling a queer little thrill at the tight grip of tiny hands. “You’re lost, doggone you. And what am I to do about it?”
Soft footfalls outside were accompanied by an anxious voice: “Tommy . . . Tommy, where are you?”
Paul did not reply as promptly as might have been required of him, and in another moment the quick muffled footsteps entered the corridor. A young girl peered in through the doorway and seeing Paul with his charge, she uttered a little cry of relief and surprise. Then she entered.
“Oh!