Overland Red.

by Henry Herbert Knibbs.

The Road

Through the San Fernando Valley, toward the hills of Calabasas runs that old road, El Camino Real of the early Mission days.

And now replicas of old Mission bells, each suspended in solitary dignity from a rusted iron rod, mark intervals along the dusty way, once a narrow trail worn by the patient feet of that gentle and great padre, Junipero Serra,--a trail from the San Gabriel Valley to the sh.o.r.es of Monterey. A narrow trail then, but, even then, to him it was broad in its potential significance of the dawn of Grace upon the mountain sh.o.r.es of Heaven's lost garden, California.

Not far from one iron-posted bell in the valley, El Camino Real falters, to find, eventually, a lazy way round the low foothills, as though reluctant to lift its winding length over the sharp pitch of the Canajo Pa.s.s, beyond.

Near this lone bell another road, an offspring of old El Camino Real, runs quickly from its gray and patient sire. Branching south in hurried turns and multiple windings it climbs the rolling hills, ever dodging the rude-piled ma.s.ses of rock, with scattered brush between, but forever aspiring courageously through the mountain sage and sunshine toward its ultimate green rest in the shadowy hills.

In the sweet sage is the drone of bees, like the hum of a far city. The thinning, acrid air is tinged with the faint fragrance of sunburnt shrubs and gra.s.ses.

With the sinuous avoidings of a baffled snake the road turns and turns upon itself until its earlier promise of high adventuring seems doubtful. As often as not it climbs a semi-barren dun stretch of sunbaked earth dotted with stubby cacti--pa.s.ses these dwarfed grotesques, and attempts the narrowing crest of the canon-wall, to swing abruptly back to the cacti again, gaining but little in its upward trend.

Impatient, it finally plunges dizzily round a sharp, outstanding angle of rock and down into the unexpected enchantment of Moonstone Canon.

Here the gaunt cliffs rise to great wild gardens, draped with soft rose and poignant red amid drowsy undertones of gray and green and gold. Dots of vivid colors flame and fade and pa.s.s to ledges of dank, vineclad rock and drifts of shale, as the road climbs again.

At the next turn are the indistinct voices of water, commingling in a monotone--and the road ceases to be, as the cool silver of a mountain stream cuts through it, with seemingly inconsequential meanderings, but with the soft arrogance of a power too great to be denied. And the indistinct voices, left behind, fade to unimaginable sounds as the stream patters down its gravelly course, contented beyond measure with its own adventuring.

Patiently the road takes up its way, moving in easier sweeps through a widening valley, but forever climbing.

Again and again, fetlock deep across it runs the stream, gently persistent and forever murmuring its happy soliloquies.

Here and there the road pa.s.ses quickly through a blot of shade,--a group of wide-spreading live-oaks,--and reappears, gray-white and hot in the sun.

And then, its high ambition fulfilled, the road recovers from its last climbing sweep round the base of a shouldering hill and runs straight and smooth to its ultimate green rest in the shade of the sycamores.

Beyond these two huge-limbed warders of the mountain ranch gate, there is a flower-bordered _way_, but it is the road no longer.

The mountain ranch takes its name from the canon below. It is the Moonstone Ranch, the home of Louise, whose ancestors, the Lacharmes, grew roses in old France.

Among the many riders to and from the ranch, there is one, a great, two-fisted, high-complexioned man, whose genial presence is ever welcome. He answers to many names. To the youngsters he is "Uncle Jack,"--usually with an exclamation. To some of the older folk he is "Mr. Summers," or "Jack." Again, the foreman of the Moonstone Ranch seldom calls him anything more dignified than "Red." Louise does sometimes call him--quite affectionately--"Overland."

OVERLAND RED

CHAPTER I

THE PROSPECTOR

For five years he had journeyed back and forth between the little desert station on the Mojave and the range to the north. The townspeople paid scant attention to him. He was simply another "desert rat" obsessed with the idea that gold was to be found in those northern hills. He bought supplies and paid grudgingly. No one knew his name.

The prospector was much younger than he appeared to be. The desert sun had dried his sinews and warped his shoulders. The desert wind had scrawled thin lines of age upon his face. The desert solitude had stooped him with its awesome burden of brooding silence.

Slowly his mind had been squeezed dry of all human interest save the recurrent memory of a child's face--that, and the poignant memory of the child's mother. For ten years he had been trying to forget. The last five years on the desert had dimmed the woman's visioned face as the child came more often between him and the memory of the mother, in his dreams.

Then there were voices, the voices of strange spirits that winged through the dusk of the outlands and hovered round his fire at night.

One voice, soft, insistent, ravished his imagination with visions of illimitable power and peace and rest. "Gold! Lost gold!" it would whisper as he sat by the meager flame. Then he would tremble and draw nearer the warmth. "Where?" he would ask, tempting the darkness as a child, fearfully certain of a reply.

Then another voice, cadenced like the soft rush of waves up the sand, would murmur, "Somewhere away! Somewhere away! Somewhere away!" And in the indefiniteness of that answer he found an inexplicable joy. The vagueness of "Somewhere away" was as vast with pregnant possibilities as his desert. His was the eternity of hope, boundless and splendid in its extravagant promises. Drunk with the wine of dreams, he knew himself to be a monarch, a monarch uncrowned and unattended, yet always with his feet upon the wide threshold of his kingdom.

Then would come the biting chill of night, the manifold rays of stars and silence, silence reft of winds, yet alive with the tense immobility of the crouching beast, waiting ... waiting....

The desert, impa.s.sively withering him to the sh.e.l.l of a man, or wracking him terribly in heat or in storm and cold, still cajoled him day and night with promises, whispered, vague and intoxicating as the perfume of a woman's hair.

Finally the desert flung wide the secret portals of her treasure-house and gave royally like a courtesan of kings.

The man, his dream all but fulfilled, found the taste of awakening bitter on his lips. He counted his years of toil and cursed as he viewed his shrunken hands, claw-like, scarred, crippled.

He felt the weight of his years and dreaded their acc.u.mulated burdens.

He realized that the dream was all--its fulfillment nothing. He knew himself to be a thing to be pointed at; yet he longed for the sound of human voices, for the touch of human hands, for the living sweetness of his child's face. The sirens of the invisible night no longer whispered to him. He was utterly alone. He had entered his kingdom. Viewed from afar it had seemed a vast pleasure-dome of infinite enchantment. He found Success, as it ever shall be, a veritable desert, grudging man foothold, yet luring him from one aspiration to another, only to consume his years in dust.

A narrow canon held his secret. He had wandered into it, panned a little black sand, and found color. Finally he discovered the fountainhead of the h.o.a.rded yellow particles that spell Power. There in the fastness of those steep, purgatorial walls was the hermitage of the two voices--voices that no longer whispered of hope, but left him in the utter loneliness of possession and its birthright, Fear.

He cried aloud for the companionship of men--and glanced fearfully round lest man had heard him call.

He again journeyed to the town beside the railroad, bought supplies and vanished, a ragged wraith, on the horizon.

Back in the canon he set about his labors, finding a numbing solace in toil.

But at night he would think of the child's face. He had said to those with whom he had left the child that he would return with a fortune.

They knew he went away to forget. They did not expect him to return.

That had been ten years ago. He had written twice. Then he had drifted, always promising the inner voice that urged him that he would find gold for her, his child, that she might ever think kindly of him. So he tried to buy himself--with promises. Once he had been a man of his hands, a man who stood straight and faced the sun. Now the people of the desert town eyed him askance. He heard them say he was mad--that the desert had "got him." They were wrong. The desert and its secret was his--a sullen paramour, but _his_ nevertheless. Had she not given him of her very heart?

He viewed his shrunken body, knew that he stooped and shuffled, realized that he had paid the inevitable, the inexorable price for the secret.

His wine of dreams had evaporated.... He sifted the coa.r.s.e gold between his fingers, letting it fall back into the pan. Was it for _this_ that he had wasted his soul?

In the desert town men began to notice the regularity of his comings and goings. Two or three of them foregathered in the saloon and commented on it.

"He packed some dynamite last trip," a.s.serted one.

There was a silence. The round clock behind the bar ticked loudly, ominously.

"Then he's struck it at last," said another.

"Mebby," commented the first speaker.

The third man nodded. Then came silence again and the absolute ticking of the clock. Presently from outside in the white heat of the road came the rush of hoofs and an abrupt stop. A spurred and booted rider, his swarthy face gray with dust, strode in, nodded to the group and called for whiskey.