CHAPTER XXII
ALTAR TAKES ITS TOLL
Dawn marched over the mountains like a phalanx of Alexander: spearpoints of light on long hafts, which drove at the zenith in solidbundles. Then the mercenaries of the sun trooped across the vacantdesert floor wave on wave and strength following strength. All the deadworld of Altar stirred and set itself for the ordeal of a new day.
The figure of a man that had been Doc Stooder, cynical tinker of life'srusts and corrodings, stirred under the trampling of the light--stirredand stretched its members in dull protest of unconsciousness. Finallywhen the arrows of the new day drove at his eyelids the man opened themand lay staring up into the sky's opalescence. For a long minute theyprobed the marbled colour depths uncomprehendingly, then turned to findthe rim of the iron mountains to the east. Comprehension came at last;with it a distorted memory image of hours of madness and wandering,agony of thirst, despair pressing upon footsteps that carried nowhere.Sleep which had put a period to all this nightmare had also mercifullyrallied the man's nervous forces to a new effort of self-saving. Mendie hard because the instinct locked up in their sub-conscious mindsalways prevails over surrender of the conscious will.
The Doc lifted an arm to shield his eyes and felt something sinuousslide off his body. An instant his heart was chilled, for the feelingwas of a desert serpent trailing over his form. He dared lift his headever so little and let his eyes rove down his body. A queer something,not snake, lay in a curve by his side; a pallid, root-like thing thesize of a man's wrist at one end and tapering to a stringy point. Heraised himself on his elbow and drew the vegetable serpent to him. Justas he did so his eyes discovered the prints of a man's feet in the sandby where he lay.
"Glory be!" came the croak from stiffened lips, and the Docconcentrated all his scattered wits on an examination of the prodigy.Yes, footprints. They came from behind him; they were printed in asemi-circle about him to mark where one had stood hesitantly lookingdown at him while he slept; they marched off in line with theirapproach straight toward the tawny mountains ringing the northernhorizon.
Guadalupe's footprints--the trail he had followed and lost the daybefore! So Stooder thought.
A great sense of security pushed through the daze in his brain. Here,at last, lay the way to salvation. That thought having been dulyrelished, he turned his attention once more to the mysterious vegetablewhip by his side. He never had seen its like. How it came to be therehe had no notion. The thing was unlike any desert growth in hisexperienced observation, wherefore it seemed to represent some prodigyof the desert god dropped by him for a purpose.
He gripped the heavier end of the root between his hands and gave ita twist. The thing broke like an over-ripe radish and a thin spurt ofwater shot from the severed ends. Greedily he thrust one stump intohis mouth and clamped his jaws upon it. Gracious fluid, mildly acrid,drenched the parchment-like membranes of his throat. The Doc sighedonce, then wolfed the whole stub of the root he had broken off. As thepulp was swallowed he felt immediate access of strength and sanity.
From somewhere deep in the corroded heart of him welled an emotionwhose like he had not known during all the years of his warped andweathered manhood. As if a child prompted him the gaunt, half-nakedcreature on the sands lifted his eyes to the glowing blue.
"Thanks, dear God!"
So the sardonic genius of the waste places permitted the cloak ofdivinity to fall upon Ygnacio, fugitive and murderer, for that asurprising charity had prompted him to pause in the night by a ravingman, divide with him his slender store of insurance against death, thenpass on.
The root-of-the-sands which Stooder half devoured quickly restored himto something like the normal. Gone were the deliriums that had doggedhim those hours of horror. He heard no longer the ghost bells of theLost Mission summoning him to treasure buried in the bleak mountainsyonder. Rational thought was his after all the wanderings in Bedlam. Hemapped his strategy against the ever-present menace of the desert.
Here were Guadalupe's tracks--the Papago hound; wait till he could gethands on the devil! Of course they would lead to the village of theSand People on the edge of El Infiernillo. Well and good; but thatmight still be a long way ahead. Could he make it just on what wasleft of this mysterious root? About one chance in ten; and the old Docwasn't taking any more chances. What then?
Why, follow the tracks back to the stalled auto. Water might be there.Surely were cans of tomatoes--about a dozen of 'em. A dozen tomato canswould carry him a hundred miles on foot; he knew because he'd drunkuncooked canned tomatoes many a time--food and drink in small compass.All right; follow the tracks back to the auto, rest up a bit and thenget a fresh start back over those same tracks and straight into theSand People's rancheria.
Stooder wrapped the precious remains of his giant radish in a strip ofhis shirt and started back over the line of blue shadow cups in thesand. As he laboured through the heavy going he reviewed all he couldremember of yesterday's terrors, and a great fear began to build inthe back of his mind. Fear of the leagues upon leagues of blank spaceabout him--land unchanged by time since the waters of a great sea werewithdrawn into a shallow cup now called the Gulf. Fear of latent forceswhich lurked in the naked mountains all about, in the ghostly miragewhich stretched vain beauties before his eyes. Over-mastering all was acorroding fear of his own body.
The Doc's trained intelligence was functioning with deadly precision.It separated his mind from the rest of his being, counting the mind asa rider and the body the beast it rode. The rider willed that the beastcarry it to a certain destination; did that beast stumble and fall therider could cry out never so furiously but it would be lost. And thatburden-bearer of the mind was capable of just so much. Its tissuesand sinews were kept functioning by water and food. So much water andso much food gave so many foot-pounds of energy; no more. Inexorablemathematics!
When sweat began to trickle down into his eyes Stooder could notrepress a shudder. Lost! Water lost from his body. The desertgreasewood is wise enough to coat all its leaves and little stems withcreosote to trick evaporation; the big _sahuaro_ shows only the edgesof its accordion flutings to the sun and greases them with paraffin;man yields water like a stranded jellyfish.
Better take another chew on that water-root dingus to make up for sweatlost. Better give the old pulse a feel to see how it's runnin'.
The sun swam dizzily at meridian so that the footprints the Docfollowed were hard to see--mere shallow spoon marks. On and on towardsthe south!
What was that thing moving over yonder in that bunch of saltbush? Yes,sir, moving!--A coyote, by th' eternal!--Naw, coyotes weren't whitelike this animal; coyotes were a mangy yellow.--But, by criminy! thisthing had the looks of a coyote--sharp nose and baggy tail half way'tween its hind legs, skulkin' like.--An albino coyote! Lookit! Eyespinky like a white rabbit.--Whoever heard of an albino coyote?
No phantom of the imagination that slinking, dirty-white creature whichmatched its pace to the Doc's on parallel course through the low lyingscrub. The desert Ishmael trotted along with a foolish air of beingstrictly about its own business, as if no other creature were in sight.When Stooder stopped to bawl curses at it the albino thing halted andmade a great pretence of snouting at a flea bite, utterly obliviousto his presence. A fragment of dead bush-stock was hurled at it; thecoyote lifted a corner of his lip in a deprecatory smile but did notabate his casual trot.
"Huh, you mangy bag o' bones! Think you're goin' have a feed off'n me,do you? Well, I'm tellin' you, you got a mighty long tromp ahead!"
On through the desert slogged the man and on trotted the freaky animalwhose colour made him outcast even from his own kind. These twain aloneunder the hot sky: two mites of life in a land of death, each blindlyfollowing the call of every life cell in him to live--live!
What had been a piled-up cloud of blue and faint rose to the southwhen the Doc started his hike had unfolded hour by hour into definiteform. Little by little pinnacles sharp as ice splinters lifted from amountain mass and
detached mountains with their tops blown off stoodagainst the horizon like truncated columns of an acropolis. Here werethe mazes of the Pinacate, raw shards of volcanoes and wilderness oflava flows down by the Gulf sandhills; country so fire-scarred andforbidding that even the Indian nomads give it wide berth. Only thebig-horn sheep possess it, living no man knows how.
The undeviating trend of the trail southward towards this ragged masshad perplexed Stooder when first he became conscious of it. The autoshould be lying somewhere off to eastward if he didn't miss his guess;those mountains ahead were strange to him. But he could not know howfar nor where he had wandered the day before; even though he thoughtlong since he should have come upon a second line of footprints--hisown--running along with those of the Papago, yet there was no denyinghe was following the right trail back to the auto and the cachedtomatoes. There sure could not be two lines of footprints here in thisleast-travelled part of Altar.
So ran the mind of him whom the mocking Gog and Magog of the desert'sdiarchy had put on a false trail to desolation. Deeper and deeper intoa waterless scrap-heap of forgotten ages his steps took him. And thealbino coyote was his aloof companion.