Desert Gold

  Yaqui tied one end of his lasso to the short, stout stick and, carefully disentangling the coils, he whirled the stick round and round and threw it almost over the first rim of the shelf, perhaps thirty feet up.  The stick did not lodge.  Yaqui tried again. This time it caught in a crack.  He pulled hard.  Then, holding to the lasso, he walked up the steep slant, hand over hand on the rope.  When he reached the shelf he motioned for Gale to follow. Gale found that method of scaling a wall both quick and easy. Yaqui pulled up the lasso, and threw the stick aloft into another crack.  He climbed to another shelf, and Gale followed him.  The third effort brought them to a more rugged bench a hundred feet above the slides.  The Yaqui worked round to the left, and turned into a dark fissure.  Gale kept close to his heels.  They came out presently into lighter space, yet one that restricted any extended view.  Broken sections of cliff were on all sides.

  Here the ascent became toil.  Gale could distance Yaqui going downhill; on the climb, however, he was hard put to it to keep the Indian in sight.  It was not a question of strength or lightness of foot.  These Gale had beyond the share of most men.  It was a matter of lung power, and the Yaqui's life had been spent scaling the desert heights.  Moreover, the climbing was infinitely slow, tedious, dangerous.  On the way up several times Gale imagined he heard a dull roar of falling water. The sound seemed to be under him, over him to this side and to that. When he was certain he could locate the direction from which it came then he heard it no more until he had gone on.  Gradually he forgot it in the physical sensations of the climb.  He burned his hands and knees.  He grew hot and wet and winded.  His heart thumped so that it hurt, and there were instants when his sight was blurred.  When at last he had toiled to where the Yaqui sat awaiting him upon the rim of that great wall, it was none too soon.

  Gale lay back and rested for a while without note of anything except the blue sky.  Then he sat up.  He was amazed to find that after that wonderful climb he was only a thousand feet or so above the valley.  Judged by the nature of his effort, he would have said he had climbed a mile.  The village lay beneath him, with its new adobe structures and tents and buildings in bright contrast with the older habitations.  He saw the green alfalfa fields, and Belding's white horses, looking very small and motionless.  He pleased himself by imagining he could pick out Blanco Sol.  Then his gaze swept on to the river.

  Indeed, he realized now why some one had named it Forlorn River. Even at this season when it was full of water it had a forlorn aspect.  It was doomed to fail out there on the desert–doomed never to mingle with the waters of the Gulf.  It wound away down the valley, growing wider and shallower, encroaching more and more on the gray flats, until it disappeared on its sad journey toward Sonoyta.  That vast shimmering, sun-governed waste recognized its life only at this flood season, and was already with parched tongue and insatiate fire licking and burning up its futile waters.

  Yaqui put a hand on Gale's knww.  It was a bronzed, scarred, powerful hand, always eloquent of meaning.  The Indian was listening. His bent head, his strange dilating eyes, his rigid form, and that close-pressing hand, how these brought back to Gale the terrible lonely night hours on the lava!

  "What do you hear, Yaqui?" asked Gale.  He laughed a little at the mood that had come over him.  But the sound of his voice did not break the spell.  He did not want to speak again.  He yielded to Yaqui's subtle nameless influence.  He listened himself, heard nothing but the scream of an eagle.  Often he wondered if the Indian could hear things that made no sound.  Yaqui was beyond understanding.

  Whatever the Indian had listened to or for, presently he satisfied himself, and, with a grunt that might mean anything, he rose and turned away from the rim.  Gale followed, rested now and eager to go on.  He saw that they great cliff they had climbed was only a stairway up to the huge looming dark bulk of the plateau above.

  Suddenly he again heard the dull roar of falling water.  It seemed to have cleared itself of muffled vibrations.  Yaqui mounted a little ridge and halted.  The next instant Gale stood above a bottomless cleft into which a white stream leaped.  His astounded gaze swept backward along this narrow swift stream to its end in a dark, round, boiling pool.  It was a huge spring, a bubbling well, the outcropping of an underground river coming down from the vast plateau above.

  Yaqui had brought Gale to the source of Forlorn River.