Desert Gold

  "My son!" said Warren.

  The day opened for them in a red and green hell of rock and cactus. Like a flame the sun scorched and peeled their faces.  Warren went blind from the glare, and Cameron had to lead him.  At last Warren plunged down, exhausted, in the shade of a ledge.

  Cameron rested and waited, hopeless, with hot, weary eyes gazing down from the height where he sat.  the ledge was the top step of a ragged gigantic stairway.  Below stretched a sad, austere, and lonely valley.  A dim, wide streak, lighter than the bordering gray, wound down the valley floor.  Once a river had flowed there, leaving only a forlorn trace down the winding floor of this forlorn valley.

  Movement on the part of Warren attracted Cameron's attention. Evidently the old prospector had recovered his sight and some of his strength.  for he had arisen, and now began to walk along the arroyo bed with his forked peach branch held before him.  He had clung to the precious bit of wood.  Cameron considered the prospect for water hopeless, because he saw that the arroyo had once been a canyon, and had been filled with sands by desert winds.  Warren, however, stopped in a deep pit, and, cutting his canteen in half, began to use one side of it as a scoop.  He scooped out a wide hollow, so wide that Cameron was certain he had gone crazy.  Cameron gently urged him to stop, and then forcibly tried to make him. But these efforts were futile.  Warren worked with slow, ceaseless, methodical movement.  He toiled for what seemed hours.  Cameron, seeing the darkening, dampening sand, realized a wonderful possibility of water, and he plunged into the pit with the other half of the canteen.  Then both men toiled, round and round the wide hole, down deeper and deeper.  The sand grew moist, then wet.  At the bottom of the deep pit the sand coarsened, gave place to gravel. Finally water welled in, a stronger volume than Cameron ever remembered finding on the desert.  It would soon fill the hole and run over.  He marveled at the circumstance.  The time was near the end of the dry season.  Perhaps an underground stream flowed from the range behind down to the valley floor, and at this point came near to the surface.  Cameron had heard of such desert miracles.

  The finding of water revived Cameron's flagging hopes.  But they were short-lived.  Warren had spend himself utterly.

  "I'm done.  Don't linger," he whispered.  "My son, go–go!"

  Then he fell.  Cameron dragged him out of the sand pit to a sheltered place under the ledge.  While sitting beside the failing man Cameron discovered painted images on the wall.  Often in the desert he had found these evidences of a prehistoric people.  Then, from long habit, he picked up a piece of rock and examined it. Its weight made him closely scrutinize it.  The color was a peculiar black.  He scraped through the black rust to find a piece of gold.  Around him lay scattered heaps of black pebbles and bits of black, weathered rock and pieces of broken ledge, and they showed gold.

  "Warren!  Look!  See it!  Feel it!  Gold!"

  But Warren had never cared, and now he was too blind to see.

  "Go–go!" he whispered.

  Cameron gazed down the gray reaches of the forlorn valley, and something within him that was neither intelligence nor emotion–something inscrutably strange–impelled him to promise.

  The Cameron built up stone monuments to mark his gold strike.  That done, he tarried beside the unconscious Warren.  Moments passed–grew into hours.  Cameron still had strength left to make an effort to get out of the desert.  But that same inscrutable something which had ordered his strange involuntary promise to Warren held him beside his fallen comrade.  He watched the white sun turn to gold, and then to red and sink behind mountains in the west.  Twilight stole into the arroyo.  It lingered, slowly turning to gloom. The vault of blue black lightened to the blinking of stars. Then fell the serene, silent, luminous desert night.

  Cameron kept his vigil.  As the long hours wore on he felt creep over him the comforting sense that he need not forever fight sleep. A wan glow flared behind the dark, uneven horizon, and a melancholy misshapen moon rose to make the white night one of shadows.  Absolute silence claimed the desert.  It was mute.  Then that inscrutable something breathed to him, telling him when he was along.  He need not have looked at the dark, still face beside him.