Hidden Water

CHAPTER XX

THE DROUGHT

For a year the shadowy clouds had flitted past Hidden Water, drifting like flocks of snowy birds to their resting-place against the Peaks, and as the wind raged and the darkness gathered the cattle had raised their heads and bellowed, sniffing the wet air. In Summer the thunder-heads had mounted to high heaven and spread from east to west; the heat lightning had played along the horizon at night, restless and incessant; the sky had turned black and the south wind had rushed up, laden with the smell of distant showers. At last the rain had fallen, graciously, bringing up grass and browse, and flowers for those who sought them. But all the time the water lay in black pools along the shrunken river, trickling among the rocks and eddying around huge snags of driftwood, clear, limpid, sparkling, yet always less and less.

Where the winter floods had scoured the lowlands clear, a fuzz of baby trees sprang up, growing to a rank prosperity and dying suddenly beneath the sun. Along the river’s edge little shreds of watercress took root and threw out sprouts and blossoms; the clean water brought forth snaky eel-grass and scum which fed a multitude of fishes; in the shadows of deep rocks the great bony-tails and Colorado River salmon lay in contented shoals, like hogs in wallows, but all the time the water grew less and less. At every shower the Indian wheat sprang up on the mesas, the myriad grass-seeds germinated and struggled forth, sucking the last moisture from the earth to endow it with more seeds. In springtime the deep-rooted mesquites and palo verdes threw out the golden halo of their flowers until the cañons were aflame; the soggy sahuaros drank a little at each sparse downpour and defied the drought; all the world of desert plants flaunted their pigmented green against the barren sky as if in grim contempt; but the little streams ran weaker and weaker, creeping along under the sand to escape the pitiless sun.

As Creede and Hardy rode out from Hidden Water, the earth lay dead beneath their horses’ feet–stark and naked, stripped to the rocks by the sheep. Even on Bronco Mesa the ground was shorn of its covering; the cloven hoofs of the sheep had passed over it like a scalping knife, tearing off the last sun-blasted fringe of grass. In open spaces where they had not found their way the gaunt cattle still curled their hungry tongues beneath the bushes and fetched out spears of grass, or licked the scanty Indian wheat from the earth itself.

With lips as tough and leathery as their indurated faces, the hardiest of them worked their way into bunches of stick-cactus and chollas, breaking down the guard of seemingly impenetrable spines and munching on the juicy stalks; while along the ridges long-necked cows bobbed for the high browse which the sheep had been unable to reach.

The famine was upon them; their hips stood out bony and unsightly above their swollen stomachs as they racked across the benches, and their eyes were wild and haggard. But to the eye of Creede, educated by long experience, they were still strong and whole. The weaklings were those that hung about the water, foot-sore from their long journeyings to the distant hills and too weary to return. At the spring-hole at Carrizo they found them gathered, the runts and roughs of the range; old cows with importunate calves bunting at their flaccid udders; young heifers, unused to rustling for two; orehannas with no mothers to guide them to the feed; rough steers that had been “busted” and half-crippled by some reckless cowboy–all the unfortunate and incapable ones, standing dead-eyed and hopeless or limping stiffly about.

A buzzard rose lazily from a carcass as they approached, and they paused to note the brand. Then Creede shook his head bodingly and rode into the bunch by the spring. At a single glance the rodéo boss recognized each one of them and knew from whence he came. He jumped his horse at a wild steer and started him toward the ridges; the cows with calves he rounded up more gently, turning them into the upper trail; the orehannas, poor helpless orphans that they were, followed hopefully, leaving one haggard-eyed old stag behind.

Creede looked the retreating band over critically and shook his head again.

“Don’t like it,” he observed, briefly; and then, unlocking the ponderous padlock that protected their cabin from hungry sheepmen, he went in and fetched out the axe. “Guess I’ll cut a tree for that old stiff,” he said.

From his stand by the long troughs where all the mountain cattle watered in Summer, the disconsolate old stag watched the felling of the tree curiously; then after an interval of dreary contemplation, he racked his hide-bound skeleton over to the place and began to browse. Presently the rocks began to clatter on the upper trail, and an old cow that had been peering over the brow of the hill came back to get her share. Even her little calf, whose life had been cast in thorny ways, tried his new teeth on the tender ends and found them good. The orehannas drifted in one after the other, and other cows with calves, and soon there was a little circle about the tree-top, munching at the soft, brittle twigs.

“Well, that settles it,” said Creede. “One of us stays here and cuts brush, and the other works around Hidden Water. This ain’t the first drought I’ve been through, not by no means, and I’ve learned this much: the Alamo can be dry as a bone and Carrizo, too, but they’s always water here and at the home ranch. Sooner or later every cow on the range will be goin’ to one place or the other to drink, and if we give ’em a little bait of brush each time it keeps ’em from gittin’ too weak. As long as a cow will rustle she’s all right, but the minute she’s too weak to travel she gits to be a water-bum–hangs around the spring and drinks until she starves to death. But if you feed ’em a little every day they’ll drift back to the ridges at night and pick up a little more. I’m sorry for them lily-white hands of yourn, pardner, but which place would you like to work at?”

“Hidden Water,” replied Hardy, promptly, “and I bet I can cut as many trees as you can.”

“I’ll go you, for a fiver,” exclaimed Creede, emulously. “Next time Rafael comes in tell him to bring me up some more grub and baled hay, and I’m fixed. And say, when you write to the boss you can tell her I’ve traded my gun for an axe!”

As Hardy turned back towards home he swung in a great circle and rode down the dry bed of the Alamo, where water-worn bowlders and ricks of mountain drift lay strewn for miles to mark the vanished stream. What a power it had been in its might, floating sycamores and ironwoods as if they were reeds, lapping high against the granite walls, moving the very rocks in its bed until they ground together! But now the sand lay dry and powdery, the willows and water-moodies were dead to the roots, and even the ancient cottonwoods from which it derived its name were dying inch by inch. A hundred years they had stood there, defying storm and cloudburst, but at last the drought was sucking away their life. On the mesa the waxy greasewood was still verdant, the gorged sahuaros stood like great tanks, skin-tight with bitter juice, and all the desert trees were tipped with green; but the children of the river were dying for a drink.

A string of cattle coming in from The Rolls stopped and stared at the solitary horseman, head up against the sky; then as he rode on they fell in behind him, travelling the deep-worn trail that led to Hidden Water. At the cleft-gate of the pass, still following the hard-stamped trail, Hardy turned aside from his course and entered, curious to see his garden again before it succumbed to the drought. There before him stood the sycamores, as green and flourishing as ever; the eagle soared out from his cliff; the bees zooned in their caves; and beyond the massive dyke that barred the way the tops of the elders waved the last of their creamy blossoms. In the deep pool the fish still darted about, and the waterfall that fed it was not diminished. The tinkle of its music seemed even louder, and as Hardy looked below he saw that a little stream led way from the pool, flowing in the trench where the cattle came to drink. It was a miracle, springing from the bosom of the earth from whence the waters come. When all the world outside lay dead and bare, Hidden Water flowed more freely, and its garden lived on untouched.

Never had Hardy seen it more peaceful, and as he climbed the Indian steps and stood beneath the elder, where Chupa Rosa had built her tiny nest his heart leapt suddenly as he remembered Lucy. Here they had sat together in the first gladness of her coming, reading his forgotten verse and watching the eagle’s flight; only for that one time, and then the fight with the sheep had separated them. He reached up and plucked a spray of elder blossoms to send her for a keep-sake–and then like a blow he remembered the forget-me-not! From that same garden he had fetched her a forget-me-not for repentance, and then forgotten her for Kitty. Who but Lucy could have left the little book of poems, or treasured a flower so long to give it back at parting? And yet in his madness he had forgotten her!

He searched wistfully among the rocks for another forget-me-not, but the hot breath of the drought had killed them. As he climbed slowly down the stone steps he mused upon some poem to take the place of the flowers that were dead, but the spirit of the drought was everywhere. The very rocks themselves, burnt black by centuries of sun, were painted with Indian prayers for rain. A thousand times he had seen the sign, hammered into the blasted rocks–the helix, that mystic symbol of the ancients, a circle, ever widening, never ending,–and wondered at the fate of the vanished people who had prayed to the Sun for rain.

The fragments of their sacrificial ollas lay strewn among the bowlders, but the worshippers were dead; and now a stranger prayed to his own God for rain. As he sat at his desk that night writing to Lucy about the drought, the memory of those Indian signs came upon him suddenly and, seizing a fresh sheet of paper, he began to write. At the second stanza he paused, planned out his rhymes and hurried on again, but just as his poem seemed finished, he halted at the last line. Wrestle as he would he could not finish it–the rhymes were against him–it would not come right. Ah, that is what sets the artist apart from all the under-world of dreamers–his genius endures to the end; but the near-poet struggles like a bee limed in his own honey. What a confession of failure it was to send away–a poem unfinished, or finished wrong! And yet–the unfinished poem was like him. How often in the past had he left things unsaid, or said them wrong. Perhaps Lucy would understand the better and prize it for its faults. At last, just as it was, he sent it off, and so it came to her hand.

As it had been a thousand years before, so it was that day at Hidden Water. The earth was dead, it gave forth nothing; the sky was clean and hard, without a cloud to soften its asperity. Another month and the cattle would die; two months and the water would fail; then in the last agonies of starvation and thirst the dissolution would come–the Four Peaks would be a desert. Old Don Pablo was right, the world was drying up. Chihuahua and Sonora were parched; all Arizona lay stricken with the drought; in California the cattle were dying on the ranges, and in Texas and New Mexico the same. God, what a thing–to see the great earth that had supported its children for ages slowly dying for water, its deserts first, and then its rivers, and then the pine-topped mountains that gave the rivers birth! Yet what was there for a man to do but take care of his own and wait? The rest was in the hands of God.

On the first morning that Hardy took his axe and went down to the river he found a single bunch of gaunted cattle standing in the shade of the big mesquites that grew against Lookout Point–a runty cow with her two-year-old and yearling, and a wobbly calf with a cactus joint stuck across his nose. His mother’s face showed that she, too, had been among the chollas; there was cactus in her knees and long spines bristling from her jaws, but she could stand it, while it was a matter of life and death to the calf. Every time he came near his mother she backed away, and whenever he began to nudge for milk she kicked out wildly. So Hardy roped him and twitched the joint away with a stick; then he pulled out the thorns one by one and went about his work.

Selecting a fine-leaved palo verde that grew against the point, he cleared a way into its trunk and felled it down the hill. He cut a second and a third, and when he looked back he saw that his labor was appreciated; the runty cow was biting eagerly at the first tree-top, and the wobbly calf was restored to his own. As the sound of the axe continued, a band of tame cattle came stringing down the sandy riverbed, and before the morning was over there were ten or twenty derelicts and water-bums feeding along the hillside. In the afternoon he cut more trees along the trail to Hidden Water, and the next day when he went to work he found a little band of weaklings there, lingering expectantly in the shadow of the cañon wall. As the days went by more and more of them gathered about the water, the lame, the sick, the crippled, the discouraged, waiting for more trees to be felled. Then as the feed on the distant ridges grew thinner and the number of cut trees increased, a great band of them hung about the vicinity of the ranch house constantly–the herds from Hidden Water and the river, merged into one–waiting to follow him to the hills.

For a mile up and down the cañon of the Alamo, the palo verde stumps dotted the hillside, each with its top below it, stripped to the bark and bared of every twig. As the breathless heat of July came on, Hardy was up before dawn, hewing and felling, and each day the long line of cattle grew. They trampled at his heels like an army, gaunt, emaciated; mothers mooing for their calves that lay dead along the gulches; mountain bulls and outlaws, tamed by gnawing hunger and weakness, and the awful stroke of the heat. And every day other bands of outlaws, driven at last from their native hills, drifted in to swell the herd. For a month Hardy had not seen a human face, nor had he spoken to any living creature except Chapuli or some poor cow that lay dying by the water. When he was not cutting trees on the farther ridges, he was riding along the river, helping up those that had fallen or dragging away the dead.

Worn and foot-sore, with their noses stuck full of cactus joints, their tongues swollen from the envenomed thorns, their stomachs afire from thirst and the burden of bitter stalks, the wild cattle from the ridges would stagger down to the river and drink until their flanks bulged out and their bellies hung heavy with water. Then, overcome with fatigue and heat, they would sink down in the shade and lie dreaming; their limbs would stiffen and cramp beneath them until they could not move; and there they would lie helpless, writhing their scrawny necks as they struggled to get their feet under them. To these every day came Hardy with his rawhide reata. Those that he could not scare up he pulled up; if any had died he dragged the bodies away from the water; and as soon as the recent arrivals had drunk he turned them away, starting them on their long journey to the high ridges where the sheep had not taken the browse.

Ah, those sheep! How many times in the fever of heat and work and weariness had Hardy cursed them, his tongue seeking unbidden the wickedest words of the range; how many times had he cursed Jim Swope, and Jasper Swope, the Mexicans, and all who had rushed in to help accomplish their ruin. And as the sun beat down and no clouds came into the sky he cursed himself, blindly, for all that had come to pass. One man–only one–at the mouth of Hell’s Hip Pocket, and the sheep might have been turned back; but he himself had seen the dust-cloud and let it pass–and for that the cattle died. The sheep were far away, feeding peacefully in mountain valleys where the pines roared in the wind and the nights were cool and pleasant; but if the rain came and young grass sprang up on Bronco Mesa they would come again, and take it in spite of them. Yes, even if the drought was broken and the cattle won back their strength, that great army would come down from the north once more and sheep them down to the rocks! But one thing Hardy promised himself–forgetting that it was the bootless oath of old Bill Johnson, who was crazy now and hiding in the hills–he would kill the first sheep that set foot on Bronco Mesa, and the next, as long as he could shoot; and Jasp Swope might answer as he would.

Yet, why think of sheep and schemes of belated vengeance?–the grass was gone; the browse was cleaned; even the palo verde trees were growing scarce. Day by day he must tramp farther and farther along the ridge, and all that patient, trusting army behind, waiting for him to find more trees! Already the weakest were left behind and stood along the trails, eying him mournfully; yet work as he would he could not feed the rest. There was no fine-drawn distinction now–every palo verde on the hillside fell before his axe, whether it was fine-leaved and short-thorned, or rough and spiny; and the cattle ate them all. Mesquite and cat-claw and ironwood, tough as woven wire and barbed at every joint, these were all that were left except cactus and the armored sahuaros. In desperation he piled brush beneath clumps of fuzzy chollas, the thorniest cactus that grows, and burned off the resinous spines; but the silky bundles of stickers still lurked beneath the ashes, and the cattle that ate them died in agony.