Yahoya/Chapter 4

HE question, "Who the devil is Tiyo?" had come quite naturally to Northrup's lips when he had first heard the name. But now it had long ago been crowded aside, all but forgotten. In due time he'd know, or else he'd never know, and in the meantime he had other matters to ponder upon.

It had been at a spot some ten miles in a general northeasterly direction from the point indicated on his map by the words "Cañon—Pines—Mountain Ridge," that he had had his mishap. Here Strang had left him. Here So Wuhti had appeared before him like a black witch, to become his good angel.

When he had pushed on again he had found that, day after day, the country unfolding before him became more menacing. He found no water of any description, excepting at those spots where little crosses upon his map indicated it. He slept and woke with the knowledge that should he miss one of these holes, should the Indian have lied to him, should the drifting sands have covered and blotted out a spring, why then the tale was told for Sax Northrup.

And there was another thing, a thing which multiplied a hundredfold the danger which lay about him: While the figures upon his map told him definitely that it was ten or twenty-five miles between water-holes it was, after all, just guesswork—guesswork first on the part of an Indian runner, guesswork on his own part; guesswork where the penalty for a mistake might well be death. No, as he went on, there was not much call to puzzle over the question, "Who is Tiyo?"

"In a race across the desert with the 'Skeleton Old Man' it is well to travel light!" Northrup remembered that bit of advice. From So Wuhti's caves he had brought water, corn-meal, a little dried meat which she informed him was rabbit meat but concerning which he had his doubt. At any rate it was meat.

When he came to a pool in a dry creek-bed, a spring great enough to give life to a little splotch of green stuff under the cliffs, he rested, sometimes a day or two if there was a hard pull ahead of him. Here he found animal life, cotton-tails and jack-rabbits for the most part and a few birds. They were tame, having no doubt never set their bright round eyes upon a thing which walked upright as he did, and they were curious.

What he needed Northrup killed, either with his automatic or with stones. The meat had but to be tossed over the limb of sage or mesquite for the sun to "jerk" it for him.

But times came when his stomach was empty and he went long without food; when there were no last, precious drops in his canteen and he began to fear that at last his map was lying to him. But always he forged on; never did the thought of turning back come to him. He knew that Strang had gone ahead, Strang for whom he had felt a mild sort of contempt.

He passed successively the points he had marked "Cave Rocks," where he spent two days and a half in interested exploration of the broken remnants of a civilization which must have been many centuries old before the Spaniards came into the New World; Big Skeleton, where, as the Hopi had foretold, he came upon the sun-bleached bones of what must at one time been a veritable giant of a man, now a pile of bones no longer of interest to preying animals where it lay upon the top of an overhanging boulder; Poison Springs where there were more skeletons, these of thirst-tormented, unwary animals; the Sunken Meadows which might have been originally the home of all the world's butterflies, and where many remained, great-winged, incredibly swift, that they might live at all through the eternal warfare which the bird-folk here waged upon them, where humming-birds brightened the air and mocking-birds shook out their cool, clear notes against desert sun and silence; into the ancient realm of cliff-dwellers where he saw countless orifices punctured into the cliffs a hundred, five hundred feet above some spring where he camped.

As the weeks wore on and he entered more deeply into the heart of the unknown, Northrup became possessed of a faith in the undertaking which had not been with him at the outset. Then he had thought, "I'll go and see." Now he felt, "I'll go and find!"

The very fact that every day he had constant proof of the Hopi's truthfulness began to work its spell upon him. Why should the end of the tale then prove fiction? Was he hourly drawing nearer the desert treasure-house?

ACROSS bare, blistering miles he followed his trail that led him to those deathless springs which in old times had made these arid lands an open thoroughfare to moccasined feet. There were times in those long, silent days of utter solitude when, far to right or left, he fancied he saw along high cliffs the remains of an old civilization, man-made trails in the rock, rudely circular holes in the precipices which well may have led into cool, chambered dwellings.

But it was risking too much to seek to investigate here where distances are deceptive and water is not assured. Nor did he have the inclination to linger. His quest had gotten into his blood.

The time came at last when, standing clear and distinct in the north, he saw the line of cliffs marking his journey's end. He traveled now at night, since the moon was at the full. Through the loose sand which seemed one instant to give away as freely as water only to grasp at his ankles and hold him back the next, he plowed on all that night, his face set toward the north star. In the moonlight the desert about him was touched into a softness of beauty which was no attribute of it in the harsh light of day; the distant mountains looked unreal, mystically lovely, the borders of fairyland.

"What sort of people were the men and women who lived this, knew no life but this?" was Northrup's thought over and over. "The warriors, were they as hard as the desert by day? The maidens, were they as savage as their lovers? Or did the softness of desert moonlight, the tenderness of desert colorings seep into their souls?"

Toward dawn, from a gently sloping loma, he saw the clump of trees, mesquite for the most part, betokening the spot where he was to water and rest. From here, when the coolness of another dusk came, he would press on—over the last lap of the quest.

That day he dozed restlessly, dreaming broken dreams from which he started up repeatedly, muttering. The scenes through which he had so long traveled had had their deeper impressions upon him and suggested wild thoughts which in sleep were unchecked. The speculation of what might lay ahead mingled with them.

He felt all night as if he were in the grip of some power other than his own, not to be explained by materialistic mankind. He dreamed that the old peoples who had striven with the desert for existence, who had mastered it and lived through it, were not dead; that they still had their mountain fastnesses; that he moved among them; that strange adventures were his.

Toward late afternoon, too restlessly eager for further rest, he ate, drank, filled his canteens and struck out for the mountains. And before he had gone a mile, before the sun had wheeled down toward the end of the hottest day he had yet experienced, a thing occurred which sent a thrill through the man's physical being, a fresh shock of wonderment into his heart.

Before him were the heat waves trembling over a wide expanse of barren sand. Sand for miles in each direction, the white, loose sand which one finds in wind-tumbled dunes, like the white sand of the seashore, but waterless. Then slowly into the emptiness of burning air there grew a vision. He looked upon it at first with little interest; this sort of thing could hardly interest him after all these years of life upon the fringe of the desert, he thought. But, ten steps further he grew stock still, his heart thumping wildly, the old sense of the supernatural strong upon him.

He saw, woven into the semblance of reality from sunlight and air, hanging in the air close to the ground, like some master's painting suspended by invisible ropes, a scene of rare beauty, of mad beauty, for this bleak stretch of scant vegetation. It was a garden a hundred feet across, with tall, lush, water-loving flowers such as he had never seen before.

In the heart of the garden a pool of water with shade-trees dropping leaves into it, a pool not of nature's making but of man's. For surely its basin was white rock which man's hand had carved and scooped out; surely there stood carven pillars and columns of white stone about it. The water shone at him with a blue laughter, the white of the rock glistened like snow; the grass and plants flung emerald reflections at themselves; the blossoms everywhere were purple and scarlet and deep rose.

Clearer and clearer grew the desert vision until Northrup, seeing a bright-colored parrot drop from a swaying branch like a floating flower, caught his breath in wonderment.

"My God!" cried Northrup sharply. "Have I gone mad?"

He knew the way in which the thirst-torment ends: in forgetfulness of what one has suffered, in delicious delirium, in fancies like this thing which his two eyes told him was physical fabric.

His eyes had followed the gaudy flight of the parrot. And so they came to see what he had not seen before, to trick him into thinking he saw what he would not believe existed.

A hand had been thrown out—never mirage like this if this in sober truth were not magic's masterpiece—a slow-moving, graceful hand, a bare arm of rare perfection. The parrot had perched upon a finger, seeming to cock a suspicious, jealous head toward Northrup. So Northrup had seen the hand, the arm, the maiden herself.

She was lying upon her side, an arm flung out, an arm under her head. He saw the loose hair about her face, saw—or fancied he saw, for his senses were reeling—the face itself, the lips curving to languid laughter, saw the white robe girt about with a broad band of blue, saw the crimson flower set close to the brown throat, saw the little bare feet from which the white moccasins had fallen. And then

Then the air had wavered and shimmered and clouded and cleared, and Sax Northrup found himself staring out across an empty stretch of white sand, drifted here and there by the desert winds.