Captives of the Desert. Zane Grey
friend’s hand. “Personally,” she said aloud, “I think it’s a lark to break down on the desert. It’s the unexpected that’s fun. Surely other motorists will make the Snake Dance by this trail. They’ll help us.”
There was no response from Mary. Katharine’s gaze followed hers to the boulder some two hundred feet away, where the object of the sigh had halted. The balancing rock against which he stood shaded the tall, lean figure, but the sun, splitting its rays over and under the rock, threw pools of light on his sombrero and spurs, making them exceptionally evident.
“A big hat and a pair of spurs,” murmured Katharine with startling audacity.
“Yes, a big hat and a pair of spurs—and nothing between. That’s what I married,” Mary replied. Her voice was as light and dry as the desert breeze.
“It ain’t so bad, Miss,” the driver explained. “But it’s expert help I need. Now if we could make thet Indian school at Leupp. Still and all, it’s fifteen miles off.”
“Is it likely that a car will pass this way before nightfall?” Katharine asked.
“Might be days before a car’d come by this spot.”
The man’s reply stirred Katharine strangely. She wanted to learn more.
“Then we might be left here to starve or die of thirst?” she asked excitedly. “And our bones to be bleached by the desert sun?”
“No, Marm. Leupp’s too near. Walkin’s good at night if it comes to thet.”
But the driver’s reassurance could not destroy the romance of their situation for the Eastern girl. “Why, we’d enjoy being marooned,” laughed Katharine. “Mrs. Newton and I will be just as dramatic as we please. We’ll find some high place on these boulders where we can watch and pray for help. See, Mary, won’t that make a jolly lookout?”
Mary entered into the spirit of Katharine’s play, and raced with her toward the slope she had indicated.
“Now—what—did—we want to do that for?” panted Mary as they reached their objective. “Running in this sun—when we have a climb—ahead.”
“To put distance between the world and us,” Katharine replied, with a sidelong glance toward Wilbur’s remote figure. How still the man stood, like a painted thing! Was he thinking? If so, what was he thinking about? No, he could not be thinking, for all his usual profound appearance. Mary was right. There was nothing between his hat and his spurs.
The girls climbed the trailless slope, zigzagging between boulders toward the red-rimmed rock of the domineering mound that rose above them. The higher they climbed, the more difficult became their breathing, and they were forced to pause sooner than they had anticipated.
Katharine dropped to a seat on a flat rock. “I’m actually—puffing!” she said.
Then, lost in a transport of joy, she caught her breath. The desert drew and held her eye—leagues and leagues of sand, pink-toned, shimmering, like an opal ocean in dead calm, the dim distant purple cloud banks resting on the rim of the horizon. It seemed that any moment they might lift and disappear.
“Oh, Mary, you were such a dear to include me in this trip!” Katharine declared ecstatically.
“I hope we can inspire you with a love for Arizona, dear. It may happen that you will have to live here always—for Alice’s sake.”
Katharine had never pretended that it was anything but terrifying for her to face the decision to accompany her frail sister to live in Arizona. When the family doctor had declared that Alice might be able to combat the dread tubercular malady which had followed her siege of pneumonia out here, she was sure that she would never have capitulated if Mary’s letters had not been so full of optimism and her own example of courage so radiant. Katharine looked with admiration at the straight, slim figure by her side. There was something of Spartan strength in Mary’s fine features, in her gallant carriage, in the simple, severe way she wore her hair. And five years of a new life had developed Spartan qualities of soul as well. Neither disappointment nor defeat would ever make this brave woman bitter!
“Wilbur isn’t so sociable that he really wanted our company,” said Mary, breaking the silence. “The trip materialized only because Hanley wanted Wilbur to meet him there. Hanley pulls a string and Wilbur dances. What this dance is I don’t know. I reminded Wilbur that four years ago he promised we would make this trip, and therefore he should take me. You were dragged in by the heels.”
“Well, at least I’m being dragged willingly,” said Katharine.
“Oh, I wanted you, dear. But I had to scheme. It would be so nice for me to have company when he conferred with Hanley. You know—that sort of thing. All the while I wanted you just for your precious self, even more than I wanted the trip.”
“For what you could give my ‘precious self,’ ” Katharine corrected her.
Mary turned away with a lithe stride. “Come on, we’ve dawdled long enough. The higher we get, the more beautiful the prospect.”
Katharine labored bravely upward, half-envious of Mary’s ease in action. Manifestly her friend was desert-tried. As she climbed, her excited oh’s and ah’s were punctuated by little puffs of breath.
“Take it easy. You’re not used to it. Don’t mind me,” Mary called over her shoulder.
It was fully twenty minutes before the girls met on the summit of the red-rimmed rock. It had developed greater proportions as they climbed, as had the desert increased in its staggering magnitude. Now the world was a huge irregular bowl, sand-lined and of translucent pink, an uneven purple fresco painted on its broken rim.
“How gorgeous!” Katharine exclaimed, breathing hard.
“To me it is peace—infinite peace,” murmured Mary. She smiled dreamily. “Somehow having you here reminds me of when we were youngsters. Remember our secret places? Remember Desert Island—a huge rock in a meadow of daisies? It was there we confided all our secrets to each other.”
“And how vast that daisy field seemed. How tremendous our island rock!” replied Katharine.
“Our childish troubles, so insurmountable before we reached the rock, vanished like magic once we made it. That’s what happens when I climb a high place on the desert. Desert magic, I call it. And it is one of the things that hold me.”
During the three weeks in which the girls had renewed their friendship, a time when most girls would have enjoyed the delightful intimacy of talking about themselves, Mary conscientiously had avoided personal references. It was of other people she spoke, with an all-consuming interest in detail. It might have been that she was aware that the life she was living spoke for itself. Today was the first time—and for an instant only—that she had opened the door of her heart and let Katharine look in.
When a half-score of years ago Mary left New York to live with relatives in the South because her father feared conflict between his eighteen-year-old daughter and her temperamental stepmother, a girl scarcely five years his daughter’s senior, Katharine had felt that nothing good would come from so cruel a situation. The thought of proud, aloof Mary being thrust upon relatives whom she hardly knew because there was no place for her in her father’s home had seemed impossible to her. Had Mary been trained to economic independence there would have been a chance of escape. But, no, true to a life-long habit of selfishness, her father had chained her to him to satisfy his creature comforts when her mother’s usefulness had ended in death. Small wonder that Mary had met romance too quickly—that she became Mrs. Wilbur Newton before a year had passed. “I’m marrying a Texan,” she had written, “of a branch of one of the oldest Southern families, a man of sterling qualities, not above becoming a rancher to help retrieve the family fortune. It will be such a wonderful opportunity for service, to help him in the upward climb. I’m so wonderfully in love. I’ll never forget how thrilled I was when I met him for the first time. I heard a clink of spurs, and then I turned and a great big sombrero caught my eye, and underneath