LOST BORDERS 
 
 BY 
 
 MARY AUSTIN 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "THE LAND OF LITTLE KAIN" 
 "SANTA LUCIA" ETC. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 HARPER & BROTHERS 
 M - C - M . I X 
 
Copyright, 1909, by HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 
 Alt rights reserved. 
 Published October, 1909. 
 
TO 
 MARION BURKE 
 
 AND THE 
 FRIENDS OF A LONG YEAR 
 
 3464 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE LAND i 
 
 II. THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA .... 12 
 
 III. A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 26 
 
 IV. THE PLOUGHED LANDS 42 
 
 V. THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 52 
 
 VI. THE LAST ANTELOPE 65 
 
 VII. AGUA DULCE 82 
 
 VIII. THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE ... 94 
 
 IX. THE FAKIR . . . in 
 
 X. THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 135 
 
 XI. THE READJUSTMENT . 154 
 
 XII. BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 166 
 
 XIII. THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 179 
 
 XIV. THE WALKING WOMAN 195 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 
 HE SAID, "l HAVE MISSED YOU SO" . . . . Frontispiece 
 
 SHE HAD BECOME A PLAYTHING OF WHICH HE 
 
 WAS EXTREMELY FOND Facing p. 32 
 
 BEFORE GAVIN WAS QUITE HIMSELF AGAIN, 
 
 TIAWA TENDED HIM " 44 
 
 CATAMENEDA LAUGHED AS SHE BRACED HIM 
 
 WITH HER FIRM, YOUNG BODY . . . . " 90 
 "THE MOON WAS HALF HIGH WHEN THE SUN 
 
 WENT DOWN" " 104 
 
 SHE LEANED FORWARD, LOOKING STEADILY 
 
 AND QUIETLY AT LOUIS " 166 K-*-*^ 
 
 "WELL, YOU VE MADE YOUR BED. i GUESS 
 
 YOU WILL LIE IN IT" . " 186 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
Let s have done with stranger faces, let s be quit 
 
 of staring eyes, 
 Let s go back across Mohave where the hills of 
 
 Inyo rise. 
 There s a word we ve lost between us we shall 
 
 never hear again 
 In the mindless clang of engines where they bray 
 
 the hearts of men. 
 Let s go seek it east of Kearsarge where the 
 
 seven-mile shadows run, 
 From the great gray bulk of Williamson heaved 
 
 up against the sun. 
 
 Let s go look for Hassayampa, with your arm 
 across my shoulders, 
 
 Through the canons of lost rivers by the bone- 
 white bleaching bowlders, 
 
 Through the scented glooming hollows where the 
 gray wolf shadows flee 
 
 Where from Sur to Ubhefre only you and I 
 shall be; 
 
 And the Word / cannot name it, but we ll learn 
 its sweetest use 
 
 In the moonlit sandy reaches when the desert 
 wind is loose. 
 
There s a little creek in Inyo, singing by beyond 
 
 the town, 
 Through the pink wild-almond tangle and the 
 
 birches slim and brown, 
 Where all night we ll watch the star-beams in 
 
 the shallow, open rills, 
 And the hot, bright moons of August skulking 
 
 low along the hills; 
 And the Word will wake in Inyo never printed 
 
 in a page 
 With the wind that wakes the morning on a 
 
 thousand miles of sage. 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 i 
 
 THE LAND 
 
 WHEN the Paiute nations broke westward 
 through the Sierra wall they cut off a 
 remnant of the Shoshones, and forced them 
 south as far as Death Valley and the borders 
 of the Mojaves, they penned the Washoes in 
 and around Tahoe, and passing between these 
 two, established themselves along the snow-fed 
 Sierra creeks. And this it was proper they 
 should do, for the root of their name-word is 
 Pah, meaning water, to distinguish them from 
 their brothers the Utes of the Great Basin. 
 
 In time they passed quite through the saw- 
 cut canons by Kern and Kings rivers and 
 possessed all the east slope of the San Joaquin, 
 but chiefly they settled by small clans and 
 family groups where the pines leave off and the 
 sage begins and the desert abuts on the great 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 Sierra fault. On the northeast they touched 
 the extreme flanks of the Utes, and with them 
 and the southerly tribes swept a wide arc about 
 that region of mysterious desertness of which 
 you shall presently hear more particularly. 
 
 The boundaries between the tribes and be 
 tween the clans within the tribe were plainly 
 established by natural landmarks peaks, hill- 
 crests, creeks, and chains of water-holes be 
 ginning at the foot of the Sierra and continuing 
 eastward past the limit of endurable existence. 
 Out there, a week s journey from everywhere, 
 the land was not worth parcelling off, and the 
 boundaries which should logically have been 
 continued until they met the canon of the 
 Colorado ran out in foolish wastes of sand and 
 inextricable disordered ranges. Here you have 
 the significance of the Indian name for that 
 country Lost Borders. And you can always 
 trust Indian names to express to you the largest 
 truth about any district in the shortest phrases. 
 
 But there is more in the name than that. 
 For law runs with the boundary, not beyond it ; 
 it is as fast to the given landmarks as a limpet to 
 its scar on the rock. I am convinced most men 
 make law for the comfortable feel of it, defining 
 them to themselves; they shoulder along like 
 
THE LAND 
 
 blind worms, rearing against restrictions, turn 
 ing thereward for security as climbing plants 
 to the warmth of a nearing wall. They pinch 
 themselves with regulations to make sure of 
 being sentient, and organize within organiza 
 tions. 
 
 Out there, then, where the law and the land 
 marks fail together, the souls of little men fade 
 out at the edges, leak from them as water from 
 wooden pails warped asunder. 
 
 Out there where the borders of conscience 
 break down, where there is no convention, and 
 behavior is of little account except as it gets 
 you your desire, almost anything mijfot hap 
 pen ; does happen, in fact, though I shall have 
 trouble making you believe it. Out there 
 where the boundary of soul and sense is as faint 
 as a trail in a sand-storm, I have seen things 
 happen that I do not believe myself. That is 
 what you are to expect in a country where the 
 names mean something. Ubehebe, Pharanagat, 
 Resting Springs, Dead Man s Gulch, Funeral 
 Mountains these beckon and allure. There 
 is always a tang of reality about them like the 
 smart of wood smoke to the eyes, that warns 
 of neighboring fires. 
 
 Riding through by the known trails, the 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 senses are obsessed by the coil of a huge and 
 senseless monotony; straight, white, blinding, 
 alkali flats, forsaken mesas; skimpy shrubs 
 growing little and less, starved knees of hills 
 sticking out above them; black clots of pines 
 high upon rubbishy mountain -heads days 
 and days of this, as if Nature herself had ob 
 scured the medium to escape you in her secret 
 operations. 
 
 "^ One might travel weeks on end and not come 
 on any place or occasion whereby men may 
 live, and drop suddenly into close hives of them 
 digging* jostling, drinking, lusting, and re 
 joicing. Every story of that country is colored 
 by the fashion of the life there, breaking up in 
 swift, passionate intervals between long, dun 
 stretches, like the land that out of hot sinks 
 of desolation heaves up great bulks of granite 
 ranges with opal shadows playing in their 
 shining, snow-piled curves. Out there beyond 
 the borders are the Shivering Dunes, heaps 
 upon heaps of blinding sand all acrawl in the 
 wind, drifting and reforming with a faint, 
 stridulent rustle, and black, wall-sided box- 
 canons that give the stars at midday, scored 
 
 + over with picture-writings of a forgotten race. 
 There are lakes there of a pellucid clearness like 
 
 4 
 
THE LAND 
 
 ice, closed over with man-deep crystals of pure 
 salt. Long Tom Bassit told me a story of one 
 of these which he had from a man who saw it. 
 It was of an emigrant train all out of its reckon 
 ing, laboring in a long, hollow trough of deso 
 lation between waterless high ranges, arriving 
 at such a closed salt-pit, too much spent to go 
 around it and trusting the salt crust to hold 
 under their racked wagons and starveling teams. 
 But when they had come near the middle of 
 the lake, the salt thinned out abruptly, and, the 
 forward rank of the party breaking through, 
 the bodies were caught under the saline slabs 
 and not all of them recovered. There was a 
 woman among them, and the Man-who-saw had 
 cared cared enough to go back years after 
 ward, when, after successive oven-blast sum 
 mers, the salt held solidly over all the lake, and 
 he told Tom Bassit how, long before he reached 
 the point, he saw the gleam of red in the 
 woman s dress, and found her at last, lying on 
 her side, sealed in the crystal, rising as ice rises 
 to the surface of choked streams. Long Tom 
 wished me to make a story of it. I did once at 
 a dinner, but I never got through with it. 
 There, about the time the candles began to 
 burn their shades and red track of the light 
 
 5 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 on the wine-glasses barred the cloth, with the 
 white, disdainful shoulders and politely in 
 credulous faces leaning through the smoke of 
 cigarettes, it had a garish sound. Afterward 
 I came across the proof of the affair in the 
 records of the emigrant party, but I never 
 tried telling it again. 
 
 That is why in all that follows I have set 
 down what the Borderers thought and felt; 
 for that you have a touchstone in your own 
 heart, but I should get no credit with you if I 
 were to tell what really became of Loring, and 
 what happened to the man who went down 
 into the moaning pit of Sand Mountain. 
 
 Curiously, in that country, you can get any 
 body to believe any sort of a tale that has gold 
 in it, like the Lost Mine of Fisherman s Peak 
 and the Duke o Wild Rose. Young Woodin 
 brought me a potsherd once from a kitchen- 
 midden in Shoshone Land. It might have 
 been, for antiquity, one of those Job scraped 
 himself withal, but it was dotted all over with 
 colors and specks of pure gold from the river 
 bed from which the sand and clay were scooped. 
 Said he: 
 
 " You ought to find a story about this some 
 where." 
 
 6 
 
THE LAND 
 
 I was sore then about not getting myself 
 believed in some elementary matters, such as 
 that horned toads are not poisonous, and that 
 Indians really have the bowels of compassion. 
 Said I: 
 
 "I will do better than that, I will make a 
 story." 
 
 We sat out a whole afternoon under the mul 
 berry-tree, with the landscape disappearing in 
 shimmering heat-waves around us, testing our 
 story for likelihood and proving it. There was 
 an Indian woman in the tale, not pretty, for 
 they are mostly not that in life, and the earthen 
 ware pot, of course, and a lost river bedded with 
 precious sand. Afterward my friend went to 
 hold down some claims in the Coso country, 
 and I north to the lake region where the red 
 firs are, and we told the pot-of-gold story as 
 often as we were permitted. One night when 
 I had done with it, a stranger by our camp-fire 
 said the thing was well known in his country. 
 I said, "Where was that?" 
 
 "Coso," said he, and that was the first I had 
 heard of my friend. 
 
 Next winter, at Lone Pine, a prospector from 
 Panamint-way wanted to know if I had ever 
 heard of the Indian-pot Mine which was lost 
 
 7 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 out toward Pharump. I said I had a piece of 
 the pot, which I showed him. Then I wrote 
 the tale for a magazine of the sort that gets 
 taken in camps and at miners boarding-houses, 
 and several men were at great pains to explain 
 to me where my version varied from the ac 
 cepted one of the hills. By this time, you un 
 derstand, I had begun to believe the story 
 myself. I had a spasm of conscience, though, 
 when Tennessee told me that he thought he 
 knew the very squaw of the story, and when 
 the back of the winter was broken he meant 
 to make a little "pasear" in search of the lost 
 river. But Tennessee died before spring, and 
 spared my confessing. Now it only needs that 
 some one should find another sherd of the gold- 
 besprinkled pot to fix the tale in the body 
 of desert myths. Well it had as much fact 
 behind it as the Gunsight, and is more in 
 teresting than the Bryfogle, which began with 
 the finding of a dead man, clothless as the 
 desert dead mostly are, with a bag of nuggets 
 clutched in his mummied hands. 
 
 First and last, accept no man s statement 
 that he knows this Country of Lost Borders 
 well. A great number having lost their lives 
 in the process of proving where it is not safe to 
 
 8 
 
THE LAND 
 
 go, it is now possible to pass through much of 
 the district by guide - posts and well - known 
 water-holes, but the best part of it remains 
 locked, inviolate, or at best known only to some 
 far -stray ing Indian, sheepherder, or pocket 
 hunter, whose account of it does not get into 
 the reports of the Geological Survey. But a 
 boast of knowledge is likely to prove as hollow 
 as the little yellow gourds called apples of 
 Death Valley. 
 
 Pure desertness clings along the pits of the 
 long valleys and the formless beds of vanished 
 lakes. Every hill that lifts as high as the 
 cloud-line has some trees upon it, and deer and 
 bighorn to feed on the tall, tufted, bunch grass 
 between the boulders. In the year when 
 Tonopah, turning upon itself like a swarm, 
 trickled prospectors all over that country from 
 Hot Creek to the Armagosa, Indians brought 
 me word that the men had camped so close 
 about the water-holes that the bighorn died of 
 thirst on the headlands, turned always in the 
 last agony toward the man-infested springs. 
 
 That is as good a pointer as any if you go 
 waterless in the country of Lost Borders : where 
 you find cattle dropped, skeleton or skin dried, 
 the heads almost invariably will be turned 
 
 9 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 toward the places where water-holes should be. 
 But no such reminders will fend men from its 
 trails. This is chiefly, I am persuaded, because 
 there is something incomprehensible to the 
 man-mind in the concurrence of death and 
 beauty. Shall the tender opal mist betray 
 you ? the airy depth of mountain blueness, the 
 blazonry of painted wind-scoured buttes, the 
 far peaks molten with the alpen glow, cooled 
 by the rising of the velvet violet twilight tide, 
 and the leagues and leagues of stars? As 
 easy for a man to believe that a beautiful 
 woman can be cruel. Mind you, it is men 
 who go mostly into the desert, who love it past 
 all reasonableness, slack their ambitions, cast 
 off old usages, neglect their families because of 
 the pulse and beat of a life laid bare to its 
 thews and sinews. Their women hate with 
 implicitness the life like the land, stretching 
 interminably whity- brown, dim and shadowy 
 blue hills that hem it, glimmering pale waters 
 of mirage that creep and crawl about its edges. 
 There was a woman once at Agua Hedionda 
 but you wouldn t believe that either. 
 
 If ths desert were a woman, I know well 
 what like she would be: deep-breasted, broad 
 in the hips, tawny, with tawny hair, great 
 
 10 
 
THE LAND 
 
 masses of it lying smooth along her perfect 
 curves, full lipped like a sphinx, but not heavy- 
 lidded like one, eyes sane and steady as the 
 polished jewel of her skies, such a countenance 
 as should make men serve without desiring 
 her, such a largeness to her mind as should 
 make their sins of no account, passionate, but 
 not necessitous, patient and you could not 
 move her, no, not if you had all the earth to 
 give, so much as one tawny hair s-breadth 
 beyond her own desires. If you cut very deep 
 ly into any soul that has the mark of the land 
 upon it, you find such qualities as these as I 
 shall presently prove to you. 
 
II 
 
 THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 A^L the trails in this book begin at Lone 
 Pine, winding east by south and east 
 again, though you will look long without find 
 ing the places where things happened in them 
 unless you are susceptible to those influences 
 that contribute to the fixed belief of mining 
 countries, that the hot essences of greed and 
 hate and lust are absorbed, as it were, by the 
 means that provoke them, and inhere in houses, 
 lands, or stones to work mischief to the pos 
 sessor. This is common in new and untamed 
 lands where destinies are worked out in plain 
 sight. Manuel de Borba could not persuade 
 Narcisse Duplin to accept as a gift the knife 
 with which he killed Mariana, and no miner 
 acquainted with its hoodoo will have anything 
 to do with the Minnietta. 
 
 It lies out in the stark, wide light, on the 
 
 12 
 
THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 red flanks of Coso, a crumbling tunnel, a ruined 
 smelter, and a row of sun-warped cabins under 
 tall, skeleton-white cliffs; and no man in these 
 days visits it of his own intention. 
 
 Antone discovered it in a forgotten year. 
 No one knew his other name; at Panimint he 
 was called Dutchy, after the use of mining 
 camps, from which you gather that he might 
 have been a German, a Swede, Norwegian, 
 Dane, or even a Dutchman. He was a for 
 eigner, very sick when he came to the hills, 
 sicker when he left them, and he discovered 
 the ledge in a three weeks prospecting trip, 
 from which he returned to Jake Hogan s cabin 
 with his pockets full of ore, elate, penniless, 
 and utterly overworn. 
 
 He talked it all out with Hogan, on into the 
 night, with the candle guttering in a bottle and 
 the winking specimens spread out on the 
 table between them. The ore was heavy and 
 dull, and had the greasy feel of richness. An 
 tone promised himself great things between 
 the pains of a racking cough. He talked on 
 afterward in his bunk, maunderingly, as his 
 fever rose, to which succeeded the stupor of 
 exhaustion. That was why, three days later, 
 not being able to attend to it himself, Antone 
 
 13 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 asked Hogan to have the ore assayed and 
 bring him the report. And the report was so 
 little in the eye of his expectation that a week 
 later, loathing the filthy cabin and the ill- 
 cooked food, feeling death in his throat, all his 
 thought set toward home, Antone accepted the 
 two hundred dollars which Hogan offered him 
 for all right and interest in his claim. Hogan 
 saw him off considerately on the Mojave stage, 
 and immediately gathered his pack to set out 
 for a certain gully faced by tall, white cliffs, 
 where the outcrop was heavy and dull with a 
 greasy feel. Within a month it was known in 
 all Panimint and Coso and as far north as Cero 
 Gordo that Jake Hogan had made a good strike 
 at the Minnietta. 
 
 Long afterward, when rage had made him 
 drunk, Hogan, as he cursed the Minnietta, his 
 wickedness, as it were, an added poison to his 
 curse, told how one night while Antone lay 
 sick, when the assay er had given him the full 
 count of the ore, amazed by its richness, he had 
 walked long in the one street barred with blocks 
 of light from the dance-houses roaring full of 
 song, and the light of the furnaces glowing low 
 and evilly along the ground, walking up and 
 down and contriving how he might impose on 
 
 14 
 
THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 Antone the report of some other assay, and 
 how, when he had done so successfully, he had 
 bought the claim for a song. That, said Hogan, 
 when he cursed the men who had done him out 
 of the Minnietta, was the sort of man he was, 
 as much as to say, being a toad, he spat venom 
 and was not to be trod upon. But at the time 
 he must have thought more cheerfully of his 
 offence. 
 
 Hogan organized a stock company to open 
 the mine and build a smelter, and began to 
 grow rich amazingly. Jigging burro trains 
 went up and down with water; eigh teen-mule 
 freighters trailed in with supplies in a wake of 
 tawny dust. Beflounced and fluttered women, 
 last indubitable evidence of a prosperous camp, 
 preened themselves in the cabins set askew 
 under the white cliffs. 
 
 It is not given to every man to deal success 
 fully with mining stock-companies. Hogan, 
 prospecting a grub stake, and Hogan, owner 
 of the Minnietta putting out its thousands a 
 week, were much the same person. Because 
 he was ignorant Hogan did not understand his 
 stock-company when he had organized it, and 
 because he had come into his property by 
 stealth, feared to lose it by conspiracy. Before 
 
 15 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 the end of the second year Hogan and the 
 Minnietta Mining and Milling Company were 
 taking away each other s characters openly in 
 court. 
 
 Hogan got a judgment that gave him little 
 less than half that he asked; contumaciously 
 carried it to a higher court and got a rever 
 sal of judgment that gave him nothing at all. 
 So at the last he went out of the Minnietta 
 with little more than he had brought into it 
 folly and shame, you understand, peering with 
 painted faces from the little cabins under the 
 cliff, had had their pickings of him and going, 
 cursed it with fluency and all his might. Tunnel 
 and shaft and winze, he cursed it, sheave and 
 cross-cut, pulley and belt and blast and fall 
 rope under the hoist, as he had made it he 
 cursed it in every part. Those who heard him 
 maintain that in the cursing of Hogan was 
 wrought the Hoodoo of the Minnietta; but, in 
 fact, it began in the fake assay which Hogan 
 carried to Antone in his bed, a villany of which 
 he despoiled himself in his cursing, with the 
 wantonness by which a man, checked in an 
 evil, reveals the iniquity in which he shaped it. 
 
 After that the Minnietta Mining and Milling 
 Company was not uniformly prosperous; the 
 
 16 
 
THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 price of silver went down, or the quality of the 
 ore fell off, and there were months at a time 
 when the mine was shut down while the di 
 rectors settled their private squabbles. Now 
 and then, and always at inopportune moments, 
 the company had streaks of economy. In one 
 of these they happened upon McKenna for 
 superintendent, whose particular qualification 
 was that he was cheap, and being no spender 
 at the best of times, was not always careful to 
 draw his salary at the end of the month. This 
 is very bad business for a mining country, as 
 McKenna came to know when the next shut 
 down found him with a salary some fifteen 
 months in arrears. He said uncomplimentary 
 things about the management, but did not 
 unnecessarily harass the directors, because he 
 held his job on half pay until work began again, 
 all of which was still unpaid when the mine re 
 opened with a small force in April. 
 
 By this time, you understand, the Minnietta 
 Mining and Milling Company was in a rather 
 bad way. When the ore was of high grade, 
 or the price of silver went up a few points, it 
 would work the mine at a profit; when neither 
 of these things happened it ran at a loss, and 
 McKenna was their chief creditor. All this 
 
 17 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 time the flux of mining life slacked throughout 
 that district, slacked and dribbled away down 
 the trails of desolate gulches, poured off quick, 
 as it had come, like the sudden rains that burst 
 over those ranges, leaving it scarred with dump 
 and shaft and track. Houses full of cheap, 
 : garish furniture of the camps warped apart in 
 the sun, rabbits ran in and out of the sagging 
 sills. Five days desolation lay between the 
 world and the Minnietta. 
 
 During the shut-down McKenna stayed and 
 looked after the mine, he said because it owed 
 him so much he could not afford to neglect it; 
 but really because the desert had him, cat-like, 
 between her paws. ^ So he stayed on and tink 
 ered about repairs for the mill and the smelter. 
 After one such session he was observed to go 
 about in the tumultuous silence of a man with 
 a doubtful project, also he ceased to vex the 
 management greatly about his arrears of 
 salary. And that was about a year before the 
 s Minnietta was shut down altogether. 
 
 In the course of time, McKenna, as the chief 
 creditor, brought suit, attached the property 
 of the Company, and got a judgment by default. 
 At that time he could have had the whole dis 
 trict on the same terms, for something had 
 
 18 
 
THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 happened, or was about to happen, in some 
 other quarter which made the value of silver 
 to the ton about half the cost of working it. 
 The first thing McKenna did when he came into 
 possession was to rip up the smelter. 
 
 This was before the cyanide process was dis 
 covered, and the smelter was of the rudest de 
 scription and McKenna had repaired it. Four 
 great bars of virgin silver, half the length of a 
 man s body and of incredible thickness, he took 
 out of it in the way of leakings. McKenna used 
 it to put the property in working order. The 
 thing which was about to happen in Germany, 
 or Argentina, or wherever, had not happened, 
 or if it had, not with the anticipated effect. 
 Silver went up. McKenna looked to the man 
 agement himself, grew sleek, and married a 
 wife. But the Hoodoo worked. 
 
 In the second year Mrs. McKenna had a 
 child, and it died. Did I say somewhere that 
 women mostly hate the desert? Women, un 
 less they have very large and simple souls, 
 need cover; clothes, you know, and furniture, 
 social observances to screen them, conventions 
 to get behind; life when it leaps upon them, 
 large and naked, shocks them into disorder. 
 Mrs. McKenna, at the Minnietta, had the arm- 
 3 19 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 long grave under the skeleton cliffs, and McKen- 
 na, with no screen to his commonness. Her 
 mind travelled back and forth from these and 
 down the gulch to a vista of treeless discolored 
 hills. Finally, for very emptiness, it fixed upon 
 McKenna s assistant. The assistant was also 
 common, but he had a little veil of unfamiliarity 
 and Mrs. McKenna was the only woman 
 within three days. I do not say that what 
 happened wouldn t have happened without 
 the Hoodoo, given the conditions, any woman, 
 and the man; but it served to take McKenna s 
 mind off the mine, and the Hoodoo cut in be 
 tween. After a while Mrs. McKenna and the 
 superintendent went out of the story by way 
 of the Mojave stage, and McKenna, leaving the 
 mine in charge of Jordan, whom he had pro 
 moted from his foreman s job to be superin 
 tendent, was supposed to have gone in search 
 of his wife. Whether he found her, or if the 
 Hoodoo stayed by him in the place where he 
 had gone, nobody ever heard. I think myself 
 it inheres where it was bred, in the hollow of 
 the comfortless thick hills. He was, however, 
 bound to lose the mine in some such case as he 
 had got it. 
 
 Jordan was the man McKenna had to help 
 20 
 
THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 him when he ripped up the smelter; he knew 
 exactly how the Minnietta came into his em 
 ployer s hands and thought well of it. In 
 every mining camp there are men incurably 
 unable to be lessoned by the logic of events. 
 McKenna was certain not to come near the 
 mine again; might reasonably wish to be quit 
 of it. This he might have done profitably, ex 
 cept for the Hoodoo, for the grade of the ore was 
 increasingly rich. Jordan, as a practical miner, 
 was much about the tunnel, and being left to 
 himself too much, had time for thought, and, 
 as I have said, he was the sort of man who 
 admired the sort of thing McKenna had done. 
 Along in the early summer the direction of the 
 work in the main gallery was altered at never 
 so slight an angle, and in due course of time 
 was boarded over. 
 
 Jordan reported to McKenna that as the 
 main lead appeared to be nearly worked out, 
 it would be better to put the mine on the mar 
 ket before the fact became generally known. 
 Eventually this was done. The selling price 
 was not large, but considering what McKenna 
 thought he knew of the property, and what the 
 purchasers tipped by Jordan did know, it was 
 satisfactory to both parties. In some unex- 
 
 21 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 plained way the Minnietta came shortly into 
 the hands of his former foreman, Dan Jordan, 
 who ripped up the siding and uncovered a body 
 of high-grade ore. 
 
 The Minnietta is a nearly horizontal vein in 
 a crumbling country rock that necessitates 
 timbering and an elaborate system of props 
 and siding. The new owner had all the petty, 
 fiddling ways of a man accustomed to days 
 wages. He bought second-hand timbers from 
 abandoned mines, and took unnecessary risks 
 in the matter of siding, and the men grumbled. 
 
 Jordan did not get on well with his men; he 
 gave himself airs, and suspected an attempt to 
 cry down his new dignities. He was swelled 
 and sullen with pride of his prosperity. By 
 this time the conviction of the Hoodoo was 
 well abroad in that country, and men were few 
 and fearful who could be hired to work in the 
 Minnietta. When there was a good twenty 
 thousand on the dump the men refused to go 
 into the tunnel again until certain things were 
 remedied. Jordan, who did not believe in it, 
 cursed the Hoodoo, cursed the hands, and went 
 down into the tunnel, trailing abuse behind him 
 for the men who followed timorously far at his 
 back. 
 
 22 
 
THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 "Better keep this side the cut, sir," said one 
 of them, respectfully enough, "them props 
 ain t no ways safe." Jordan kicked the prop 
 scornfully for all answer and when the men, 
 starting back from the sound of falling, dared 
 to come up with him, they found him quite 
 dead, his skull crushed, and buried under the 
 crumbling rock. 
 
 After that the Minnietta passed in due 
 course to Jordan s heirs, two families of cousins 
 who knew nothing of silver mines except that 
 they were supposed to be eminently desira 
 ble. 
 
 Now, as they had come into the property 
 through no fault of theirs, if the Hoodoo were 
 nothing more than the logical tendency of evil- 
 doing to draw to and consume the evil-doer, 
 they should have been beyond its reach. This 
 would have been the case if, as you suppose, 
 the Hoodoo were a myth begotten of a series 
 of fortuitous events. But you, between the 
 church and the police, whose every emanation 
 of the soul is shred to tatters by the yammer 
 ing of kin and neighbor, what do you know of 
 the great, silent spaces across which the voice 
 of law and opinion reaches small as the rustle 
 of blown sand ? There the castings of a man s 
 
 2 3 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 soul lie in whatever shape of hate and rage he 
 threw them from him. 
 
 There are places in Lost Valley where in the 
 early fifties emigrant trains went through 
 places so void of wind and jostling weather 
 that the wheel - tracks show upon the sand, 
 plain from that single passing; other places 
 where, as at the Minnietta, the reek of men s 
 passions lies in the hollow desertness like an 
 infection, as if every timber had absorbed mis 
 chief instead of moisture, and every bolt gives 
 it off in lieu of rust. 
 
 If it were not so there is no reason why the 
 heirs of Dan Jordan should have gone to law 
 about it while the price of silver went down 
 and down. They stripped themselves in liti 
 gation while the timbers sagged in the tunnel 
 and the cuts choked with rubble. The ore 
 on the dump, by no means worth twenty thou 
 sand by this time, went to a lawyer who had 
 been a very decent sort until he became disso 
 lute through prosperity and neglected his 
 family. The battens of the mill, warped 
 through successive summers, fell off, and the 
 boards shrunk from each other and curled at 
 the edges like the lips of men dead and sun- 
 dried in the desert. But if they should come 
 
 24 
 
THE HOODOO OF THE MINNIETTA 
 
 together, or the price of silver go up, say three 
 points, unless they be able to charge the en 
 terprise with some counter-passion of nobility 
 or sacrifice, they stand a chance to prove, in 
 their own persons, how the Hoodoo works. 
 
 It is curious, though, and if we considered 
 it long enough would no doubt be terribly dis 
 concerting, to see how little account, when it 
 deals with men singly, the desert takes of 
 nobility as we conceive it between the walls. 
 Clear out beyond the Borders the only unfor 
 givable offence is incompetence; and con 
 science, in as far as it is a hereditary prejudice 
 in favor of a given line of behavior, is no sort 
 of baggage to take into the wilderness, which 
 has its own exigencies and occasions, and will 
 not be lived in except upon its own conditions. 
 The case of Saunders is in point. 
 
Ill 
 
 A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 SAUNDERS was an average Englishman 
 with a lung complaint. He tried Ash- 
 fork, Arizona, and Indio, and Catalina. Then 
 he drifted north through the San Jacinta 
 mountains and found what he was looking for. 
 Back in England he had left so many of the 
 things a man wishes to go on with, that he 
 bent himself with great seriousness to his cure. 
 He bought a couple of pack-burros, a pair of 
 cayaques, and a camp kit. With these, a 
 Shakespeare, a prayer-book, and a copy of 
 Jngoldsby Legends, he set out on foot to explore 
 the coast of Lost Borders. The prayer-book 
 he had from his mother; I believe he read it 
 regularly night and morning, and the copy of 
 Ingoldsby Legends he gave me in the second 
 year of his exile. It happened about that time 
 I was wanting the Ingoldsby Legends, three hun- 
 
 26 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 dred miles from a library, and book money hard 
 to come by. Now there is nearly always a 
 copy of Ingoldsby Legends in the vicinity of an 
 Englishman. Englishmen think them amus 
 ing, though I do not know why. So I asked 
 my friend, the barkeeper at the Last Chance, 
 to inquire for it of the next Englishman who 
 hit the town. I had to write the name out 
 plainly so the barkeeper could remember it. 
 The first who came was an agent for a London 
 mining syndicate, and he left an address of a 
 book-shop where it could be bought. The next 
 was a remittance man, and of course he hadn t 
 anything. If he had he would have put it in 
 soak. That means he would have put the book 
 up for i s value in bad drink, and I write it as 
 a part of our legitimate speech, because it says 
 so exactly what had occurred: that particu 
 lar Englishman had put everything, includ 
 ing his honor and his immortal soul, in soak. 
 And the third was Saunders. He was so de 
 lighted to find an appreciator of the Ingoldsby 
 Legends in the wilderness, that he offered to 
 come to the house and render the obscure 
 passages, and that was the beginning of my 
 knowing about what went on later at Ubehebe. 
 Saunders had drifted about from water-hole 
 27 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 to water-hole, living hardily, breathing the 
 driest, cleanest air, sleeping and waking with 
 the ebb and flow of light that sets in a mighty 
 current around the world. He went up in 
 summer to the mountain heads under the fox 
 tail pines, and back in winter to watch the 
 wild almond bloom by Resting Springs. He 
 saw the Medicine dance of the Shoshones, and 
 hunted the bighorn on Funeral Mountains, and 
 dropped a great many things out of his life 
 without making himself unhappy. But he 
 kept the conscience he had brought with him. 
 Of course it was a man s conscience that al 
 lowed him to do a great many things that by 
 the code and the commandments are as wrong 
 as any others, but in the end the wilderness 
 was too big for him, and forced him to a viola 
 tion of what he called his sense of duty. 
 
 In the course of time, Saunders came to a 
 range of purplish hills lying west from Lost 
 Valley, because of its rounded, swelling, fair 
 twin peaks called Ubehebe (Maiden s Breast). 
 It is a good name. Saunders came there in 
 the spring, when the land is lovely and alluring, 
 soft with promise and austerely virgin. He 
 lingered in and about its pleasant places until 
 the month of the Deer-Star, and it was then, 
 
 28 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 when he would come up a week s journey to J 
 Lone Pine, for supplies, he began to tell me 
 about Turwhase, the gray-eyed Shoshone. He 
 thought I would be interested, and I was, 
 though for more reasons than Saunders at first 
 supposed. There is a story current and con 
 firmed, I believe, by proper evidence, that a 
 man of one of the emigrant trains that suffered 
 so much, and went so far astray in the hell 
 trap of Death Valley, wandering from his 
 party in search of water, for want of which he 
 was partly crazed, returned to them no more 
 and was accounted dead. But wandering in 
 the witless condition of great thirst, he was 
 found by the Shoshones, and by them carried 
 to their campody in the secret places of the 
 hills. There, though he never rightly knew 
 himself, he showed some skill and excellences 
 of the white men, and for that, and for his 
 loose wit, which was fearful to them, he was 
 kept and reverenced as a Coyote-man and a 
 Medicine-maker of strange and fitful powers. 
 And at the end of fifteen years his friends found 
 him and took him away. As witness of his 
 sojourning, there is now and then born to the 
 descendants of that campody a Shoshone with 
 gray eyes. 
 
 29 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 When Saunders began to tell me about Tur- 
 whase, I knew to what it must come, though 
 it was not until his mother wrote me that I 
 could take any notice of it. Some too solicitous 
 person had written her that Saunders had be 
 come a squaw-man. She thought he had mar 
 ried Turwhase, and would bring home a hand 
 ful of little half-breeds to inherit the estate. 
 
 She never knew how near Saunders came to 
 doing that very thing, nor to say truth did I 
 when I wrote her that her son was not married, 
 and that she had nothing to fear; but with 
 the letter I was able to get out of Saunders as 
 much as I did not already know of the story. 
 
 I suppose at bottom the things a man loves 
 a woman for are pretty much the same, though 
 it is only when he talks to you of a woman not 
 of his own class that he is willing to tell you 
 what those things are. Saunders loved Tur 
 whase: first, because he was lonely and had 
 to love somebody; then because of the way the 
 oval of her cheek melted into the chin, and for 
 the lovely line that runs from the waist to the 
 knee, and for her soft, bubbling laughter; and 
 kept on loving her because she made him 
 comfortable. 
 
 I suppose the white strain that persisted in 
 30 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 her quickened her aptitude for white ways. 
 Saunders taught her to cook. She was never 
 weary nor afraid. She was never out of tem 
 per, except when she was jealous, and that 
 was rather amusing. Saunders told me him 
 self how she glow r ed and blossomed under his 
 caress, and wept when he neglected her. He 
 told me everything I had the courage to know. 
 When a man has gone about the big wilder 
 ness with slow death and sure camping on his 
 trail, there is not much worth talking about 
 except the things that are. Turwhase* had the 
 art to provoke tenderness and the wish to pro 
 tect, and the primitive woman s capacity for 
 making no demands upon it. And this, in 
 fine, is how these women take our men from 
 us, and why, at the last, they lose them. 
 
 If you ask whether we discussed the ethics 
 of Saunders situation at first there didn t 
 appear to be any. Turwhase was as much 
 married as if Church and State had witnessed 
 it; as for Saunders, society, life itself, had cast 
 him off. He was unfit for work or marrying; 
 being right-minded in regard to his lung com 
 plaint, he drank from no man s cup nor slept 
 in any bed but his own. And if society had 
 no use for him, how had it a right to say what 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 he should do out there in the bloomy violet 
 spaces at Maiden s Breast? Yet, at the last, 
 the Englishman found, or thought he found, a 
 moral issue. 
 
 Maiden s Breast virgin land, clear sun, un 
 sullied airs, Turwhase. Isn t there a hint all 
 through of the myth of thej^enewal of life in 
 a virgin embrace? A great many myths come 
 true in the big wilderness. Saunders went 
 down to Los Angeles once in the year to a 
 consulting physician to please his mother, not 
 because he hoped for anything. He came back 
 from one such journey looking like a sleep 
 walker newly awakened. He had been told 
 that the diseased portion of his lung was all 
 sloughed away, and if nothing happened to 
 him in six months more of Ubehebe, he might 
 go home! It was then Saunders conscience be 
 gan to trouble him, for by this time, you under 
 stand, Turwhase had a child a daughter, small 
 and gold-colored and gray-eyed. By a trick 
 of inheritance the eyes were like Saunders 
 mother s, and in the long idle summer she had 
 become a plaything of which he was extremely 
 fond. The mother, of course, was hopeless. 
 She had never left off her blanket, and like all 
 Indian women when they mature, had begun 
 
 3 2 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 to grow fat. Oh, I said he had a man s con 
 science! Turwhase" must be left behind, but 
 what to do about the daughter lay heavily on 
 Saunders mind. 
 
 It made an obstinate ripple in his com 
 placency like a snag in the current of his 
 thought, which set toward England. Out there 
 by the water-holes, where he had expected to 
 leave his bones, life had been of a simplicity 
 that did not concern itself beyond the happy 
 day. Now the old needs and desires awoke 
 and cried in him, and along with them the old, 
 obstinate Anglo-Saxon prejudice that makes 
 a man responsible for his offspring. Saunders 
 must have had a bad time of it with himself 
 before he came to a decision that he must take 
 the child to England. It would be hard on 
 Turwhase; if it came to that, it would be hard 
 on him there would be explanations. As mat 
 ters stood he looked to make a very good mar 
 riage at home, and the half-breed child would 
 be against him. All his life she would be 
 against him. But then it was a question of 
 duty. Duty is a potent fetish of Englishmen, 
 but the wilderness has a word bigger than that. 
 Just how Turwhas6 took his decision about the 
 child I never heard, but as I know Indian 
 
 33 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 women, I suppose she must have taken it 
 quietly at first, said no, and considered it done 
 with; then, as she saw his purpose clear, sat 
 wordless in her blanket, all its folds drawn for 
 ward as a sign of sullenness, her thick hair fall 
 ing on either side to screen her grief; neither 
 moved to attend him, nor ate nor slept; and 
 at last broke under it and seemed to accept, 
 put the child from her as though it was already 
 not hers, and made no more of it. 
 
 If there was in this acquiescence a gleam in 
 her gray eye that witnessed she had found the 
 word, Saunders was not aware of it. 
 
 As to what he felt himself in regard to Tur- 
 whase I am equally uninformed. I ve a notion, 
 though, that men do not give themselves time 
 to feel in such instances ; they just get it over 
 with. All I was told was, that when at last he 
 felt himself strong for it, Saunders put the child 
 before him on the horse she was then about 
 two years old and set out from Ubehebe. He 
 went all of one day down a long box canon, 
 where at times his knees scraped the walls on 
 either side, and over the tortuous roots of the 
 mountain blown bare of the sand. The even 
 ing of the next day saw the contour of the 
 Maiden s Breast purpling in the cast, fading at 
 
 34 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 last in the blurred horizon. He rode all day 
 on glittering pale sands and down steep and 
 utterly barren barrancas. All through that 
 riding something pricked between his shoulders, 
 troubled his sleep with expectancy, haunted 
 him with a suggestion of impossible espionage. 
 The child babbled at first, or slept in his arm; 
 he hugged it to him and forgot that its mother 
 was a Shoshone. It cried in the night and be 
 gan to refuse its food. Great tears of fatigue 
 stood upon its cheeks; it shook with long, 
 quivering sobs, crying silently as Indian chil 
 dren do when they are frightened. Saunders 
 arm ached with the weight of it ; his heart with 
 the perplexity. The little face looked up at 
 him, hard with inscrutable savagery. When 
 he came to the Inyo range and the beaten trail, 
 he distrusted his judgment ; his notion of rear 
 ing the child in England began to look ridicu 
 lous. By the time he had cleared the crest and 
 saw the fields and orchards far below him, it 
 appeared preposterous. And the hint of fol 
 lowing hung like some pestiferous insect about 
 his trail. 
 
 In all the wide, uninterrupted glare no speck 
 as of a, moving body swam within his gaze. By 
 what locked and secret ways the presence kept 
 4 35 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 pace with him, only the vultures hung high 
 under the flaring heaven could have known. 
 
 At the hotel at Keeler that night he began 
 to taste the bitterness he had chosen. Men, 
 white men, mining men, mill superintendents, 
 well-dressed, competent, looked at the brat 
 which had Shoshone written plainly all over 
 it, and looked away unsmiling; being gentle 
 men, they did not so much as look at one an 
 other. Saunders gave money to the women 
 at the hotel to keep his daughter all night out 
 of his sight. Riding next day toward Lone 
 Pine between the fenced lands, farms and farm 
 houses, schools, a church, he began to under 
 stand that there was something more than 
 mere irresponsibility in the way of desert-faring 
 men who formed relations such as this and 
 left them off with the land, as they left the 
 clothes they wore there and its tricks of speech. 
 
 He was now four days from Ubehebe. The 
 child slept little that night; sat up in bed, lis 
 tened; would whisper its mother s name over 
 and over, questioning, expectant; left off, still 
 as a young quail, if Saunders moved or noticed 
 it. It occurred to him that4he child might 
 die, which would be the best thing for it. 
 
 Coming out of his room in the early morning 
 36 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 he stumbled over something soft in a blanket. 
 It unrolled of itself and stood up Turwhase! 
 The child gave a little leap in his arms and was 
 still, pitifully, breathlessly still. The woman 
 stretched out her own arms, her eyes were red 
 and devouring. 
 
 "My baby!" she said. "Give it to me!" 
 Without a word Saunders held it out to her. 
 The little dark arms went around her neck, 
 prehensile and clinging; the whole little body 
 clung, the lines of the small face softened with 
 a sigh of unutterable content. Turwhase drew 
 up her blanket and held it close. 
 
 "Mine!" she said, fiercely. "Mine, not 
 yours!" 
 
 Saunders did not gainsay her; he drew out all 
 the money he had and poured it in her bosom. 
 Turwhase laughed. With a flirt of her blanket 
 she scattered the coins on the ground; she 
 turned with dignity and began to walk desert- 
 ward. You could see by the slope of the 
 shoulders under the blanket and the swing of 
 her hips, as she went, that she was all Indian. 
 
 Saunders reached down to me from the plat 
 form of the train that morning for a last good- 
 by. He was looking very English, smug and 
 freshly shaven. 
 
 37 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 "I am convinced," he said, "that it really 
 wouldn t have done, you know." I believe he 
 thought he had come to that conclusion by 
 himself. 
 
 What I like most about the speech of the 
 campody is that there are no confidences. 
 When they talk there of the essential per 
 formances of life, it is because they are essen 
 tial and therefore worth talking about. Only 
 Heaven, who made my heart, knows why it 
 should have become a pit, bottomless and in 
 satiable for the husks of other people s experi 
 ences, as if it were not, as I declare it, filled to 
 the brim with the entertainment of its own 
 affairs; as if its mere proximity were an ad 
 vertisement for it, there must be always some 
 one letting fall confidences as boys drop stones 
 in wells, to listen afterward in some tale of 
 mine for the faint, reverberating sound. But 
 this is the mark of sophistication, that they 
 always appear as confidences, always with 
 that wistful back-stroke of the ego toward a 
 personal distinction. "I don t Vnow why I 
 am telling you this I shouldn t like to have 
 you repeat it" and then the heart loosening 
 
 38 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 intimacy of speech and its conscious ease 
 ment. 
 
 But in a campody it is possible to speak of 
 the important operations of life without shame- 
 facedness. Mid-afternoons of late fall and 
 winter weather for though you may speak to 
 your brother man without curtailment, it is 
 not well to do so in summer when the snakes 
 are about, for the snakes are two-tongued and 
 carry word to the gods, who, if they are to be 
 of use to you, must not know too much of your 
 affairs in mid-afternoon then, when the women 
 weave baskets and grind at the metate, and 
 the men make nets and snares, there is good 
 talk and much to be learned by it. Such times 
 the sky is hard like polished turquoise set in 
 the tawny matrix of the earth, the creek goes 
 thinly over the stones, and the very waters of 
 mirage are rolled back to some shut fountain 
 in the skies; the plump, plump! of the metate 
 beats on under the talk of the women like the 
 comfortable pulse of not too insistent toil. 
 
 When Indian women talk together, and they 
 are great gossips, three things will surely come 
 to the surface in the course of the afternoon 
 children, marriage, and the ways of the whites. 
 This last appears as a sort of pageant, which, 
 
 39 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 though it is much of it sheer foolishness, is 
 yet charged with a mysterious and compel 
 ling portent. They could never, for example, 
 though they could give you any number of 
 fascinating instances, get any rational explana 
 tion of the effect of their familiar clear space 
 and desertness upon the white man adventuring 
 in it. It was as if you had discovered in your 
 parlor-furniture an inexplicable power of in 
 citing your guest to strange behavior. And 
 what in the conduct of men most interests 
 women of the campody, or women anywhere 
 for that matter, is their relation to women. 
 If this, which appears to have rooted about the 
 time the foundations of the earth were laid, is 
 proved amenable to the lack of shade, scarcity 
 of vegetation, and great spaces disinterested of 
 men not these of course, but the Power 
 moving nakedly in the room of these things it 
 only goes to show that the relation is more in 
 cidental than we are disposed to think it. 
 There is nothing in the weather and the dis 
 tance between water-holes to affect a man s 
 feeling for his children, as I have already ex 
 plained to you in the case of Saunders and Mr. 
 Wills. But there where the Borders run out, 
 through all the talk of the women, white women, 
 
 40 
 
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 too, who get no better understanding of the 
 thing they witness to, through the thin web of 
 their lives moves the vast impersonal rivalry 
 of desertness. But because of what I said in 
 the beginning I can tell you no more of that 
 than I had from Tiawa in the campody of Saca- 
 buete, where there are no confidences. 
 
IV 
 
 THE PLOUGHED LANDS 
 
 TIAWA came from a Shoshone camp of 
 three wickiups somewhere between To- 
 quina and Fish Lake Valley. When she was 
 young and comely she had come out of that 
 country at the heels of a white man, and 
 wrestled with the wilderness for the love of 
 Curly Gavin. Gavin had been swamper for Ike 
 Mallory s eighteen-mule team, and when the 
 news of rich strikes in the Ringold district 
 made red flares like rockets on Mallory s hori 
 zon, he grub-staked Curly to go with Burke and 
 Estes to prospect the Toquina. Gavin had 
 a lot of reddish curls and a lot of good-nature 
 and small vices; the rest of him was sheer grit. 
 The party was out three weeks, made some fair 
 prospects, and had a disagreement. As to that, 
 there was never any clear account, only it be 
 came immensely important to Gavin s own 
 
 42 
 
THE PLOUGHED LANDS 
 
 mind that he should get back to Maverick and 
 record the location of some claims before Burke 
 and Estes had a chance at them. Accordingly 
 he left the others at Mud Springs, and, with 
 one day s ration of water, set out by what he 
 believed to be a short cut for home; and he 
 had never been loose in the wilderness before! 
 It was spring of the year after a winter of strong 
 rains, and a bloom on the world, all the air soft 
 as shed petals. Every inch of the moon- white 
 soil had a flower in it, purple or golden; morn 
 ings the light made a luminous mist about the 
 long wands of the creosote, at noon it slid and 
 shimmered on the slopes as the hills breathed 
 evenly in sleep. It is as easy, I say, to believe 
 that such a land could neglect men to their 
 death, as for man to believe that a lovely 
 woman can be unkind. Gavin, for one, did 
 not believe it. 
 
 By noon of the second day he began to sus 
 pect he had missed the trail by night he was 
 sure of it, and thinking to behave very sensibly 
 walked back by the stars to recover the lost 
 landmarks. By that time his water was quite 
 gone. There came a time soon after that when 
 the one consuming desire of the man was to 
 get shut of the whole affair, the swimming 
 
 43 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 earth that swung and tilted about the pivot 
 of his feet, the hell-bent sun, the tormenting 
 thirst, the glare of the sand that ate into his 
 eyes. He was horribly bored; he wanted the 
 thing to quit, to let him rest. 
 
 "Have done, curse you!" he shouted to it. 
 As if the land had heard him, it reeled and 
 sank; a grateful blackness swallowed all his 
 sense. It was about that time Tiawa s father, 
 hunting chuckwallas, found him and led him 
 to his camp. 
 
 In the interval before Gavin was quite him 
 self again, Tiawa tended him. When he rose 
 in his delirium to go to record those claims, she 
 dropped her strong arms about him and eased 
 him to the ground, rocking him in her bosom. 
 So long as he did not know her, her tenderness 
 had scope and power. But Gavin was annoyed 
 when, as soon as he was able to travel, though 
 not properly fit for it, he asked for a guide and 
 got Tiawa. By the usage of her people it was 
 Tiawa s right, because she loved him. She 
 could do that these gentle savages who will 
 not be seen walking abreast with their women 
 grant them the right to love unasked and un 
 ashamed. They have no place, let me tell you, 
 in the acceptance or rejection of a proffered 
 
 44 
 
THE PLOUGHED LANDS 
 
 love, for the snigger of the sophisticated male. 
 Tiawa was pretty so slim and round of limb, 
 so smoothly brown and lustrous eyed! Gavin 
 had no scruples, you may be sure ; he was merely 
 in the grip of another mistress who might or 
 might not loose his bonds. 
 
 Well do I know the way of that tawny- 
 throated one. If she but turns toward our 
 valley with her hot breath to blow back the 
 winter s rains, you hear the prophecy of that 
 usurpation in the flat trumpeting of the bucks 
 that bell the does ; there will be few young that 
 season in the lairs along Salt Creek, the quail 
 will not mate; and this, mind you, if she no 
 more than turns toward us her fulgent, splendid 
 smiling for the three months between the pinon 
 harvest and the time of taboose. Judge, then, 
 what she would do to man. 
 
 Said Tiawa s father, who knew something of 
 white men, and had looked between Gavin s 
 eyes where the mark of the desert was set: 
 "My daughter, when you have brought him as 
 far as the ploughed lands, best you come home 
 again." 
 
 Tiawa had put on her best bead necklace for 
 the journey, and her cheeks were smooth with 
 vermilion earth. She did not mean to come 
 
 45 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 back. Tiawa told me this at Sacabuete, mid 
 dle aged and fat, smiling above the metate as 
 she paused in her grinding, for she had married 
 a Paiute after Gavin left her, and made him 
 very comfortable. 
 
 "But I did not know then," she said, "that 
 a white man could take service from such as 
 we and not requite it. If I had done the half 
 of that for a Shoshone he would have loved me, 
 for there were not two sticks laid together on 
 that journey that I had not the doing of it." 
 
 They made a dry camp the first night, and 
 when Gavin from sheer weakness lay down 
 along the sand, and Tiawa had brought him 
 food, before the glow was gone from the top of 
 Toquina, when the evening star was lit and 
 the heaven was clear and tender, he turned his 
 back on Tiawa and stretched himself to sleep. 
 On her side of the fire, Tiawa, dry-eyed and hot 
 with shame, lay and pondered the reasons for 
 these things. He was white, therefore he could 
 accept her service without regarding the love 
 that prompted it, and sleep upon it compunc- 
 tionless. In the morning he spoke to her kind 
 ly, and she hoped again, for her desire was 
 toward him and the spring was in her blood; 
 but the obsession of his errand was on Gavin s 
 
 46 
 
THE PLOUGHED LANDS 
 
 mind, and he did not know. The morning wind 
 blew out the strands of her thick hair, and 
 shaped her garments to her loveliest curves 
 as she brushed against him in the trail; every 
 turn of her soft throat and the glint of her 
 lustrous eyes was of love, but the sun-glare was 
 heavy in his eyes, and he did not see. At the 
 end of the third day, being at the end of her 
 woman s devices, Tiawa bethought her of the 
 gods. When it was full dark, before the moon 
 was up, she went a little aside from the camp 
 and made a medicine of songs. She swung and 
 swayed to the postures of desire, beat upon the 
 full, young, aching breast, and sang to the gods 
 for the satisfaction of her love. Her voice 
 reached him heavy with world-old anguish of 
 women. 
 
 "Aw, shut up, can t you!" said Gavin. "I 
 want to go to sleep!" 
 
 The desert had him. He had come into it 
 fearlessly and unguarded, and it struck home; 
 but Tiawa, who did not know any better, 
 thought only that she had lost. She took off 
 her bead collar because it had failed her, and 
 wiped the vermilion from her cheeks. Only 
 service remained, and that flowed from her as 
 naturally as the long wands of the creosote 
 
 47 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 flowed upon the wind. By day she went be 
 fore him in the trails, by night at nameless 
 water-holes she cooked his food. She did not 
 know the places on the map where Gavin 
 wished to go. She had set out by her father s 
 direction for the shortest cut to the Ploughed 
 Lands, and as they neared her heart sank in 
 wardly as she remembered her father s word. 
 For the Ploughed Lands meant the end of her 
 Indian world. It meant white people, towns, 
 farms at least things, the desire of which had 
 hurried Gavin mindlessly along the trail, the 
 comfortable, long-turned furrow in which his 
 life ran wontedly, the Ploughed Lands where he 
 had no need of her. 
 
 Out here toward Toquina in the stark 
 canons, in the thin-sown pastures, she knew 
 the way of subsistence; there in the fat, well- 
 watered fields, unless Gavin accepted her when 
 they came to the Ploughed Lands, she must 
 go back. It is only our pitiful civilization, 
 you understand, that attempts to magnify the 
 love of man by shaming its end. In her own 
 country Tiawa could venture much, as she 
 pitted herself against the wilderness, but in 
 the end she lay all night with her face between 
 her arms weeping tearlessly. About noon of 
 
 48 
 
THE PLOUGHED LANDS 
 
 the last day they sighted the planted fields. 
 From a hill-crest looking down they saw the 
 dark smears of green on the golden valley, and 
 out beyond these the line of willows, the thin 
 gleam of the irrigating ditch like a blade from 
 which the foiled desert started back. The rest 
 of that day s trudging was down and down. 
 Tiawa went before, and Gavin, breathing more 
 evenly in the cooled air, felt the grip of the 
 desert loosen on him with the tension of a 
 spring released. He perceived suddenly that 
 the woman w r as lovely and young. She was 
 not so round by now, for they had come a long 
 way with scant rations; but by the mark of 
 her service upon her, he was suddenly aware 
 that she loved him. 
 
 "Give me that pack," said Gavin; "you ve 
 carried it long enough." 
 
 The intent was kind, but to the girl it was 
 the intimation of dismissal; he had refused 
 her love, and now he would not even have her 
 service. His tongue was freed of the spell of 
 the silent places, and he talked as they went, 
 pointing out this ranch and that as they went 
 down. 
 
 About sunset they came to the out-curve of 
 the canal and the farthest corner of an alfalfa 
 
 49 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 field, and made their camp there. For the last 
 time Tiawa laid the sticks together under the 
 cooking-pot. For the last time; so it seemed 
 to Tiawa. Lights began to come out in the 
 ranch houses, faint and far. Tiawa thought of 
 the little fires by the huts in Toquina ; tears in 
 her heart welled and brimmed about her eyes. 
 Just then Gavin called her. She turned, and 
 by the faint stars, by the dying flicker of their 
 fire, she saw incredibly that he smiled. And 
 to such as Tiawa, you understand, the smile 
 of a white man a man with ruddy curls, broad 
 in the shoulders and young is as the favor of 
 the gods. 
 
 "Tiawa?" 
 
 "Great One!" she whispered. 
 
 Still smiling, he stretched out his arm to her 
 and hollowed it in invitation ... for he had 
 come to the Ploughed Lands. He was his 
 own man again. 
 
 In the end as I have already explained to 
 you Gavin went back to his own kind, and 
 Tiawa married a Paiute and grew fat, for mostly 
 in encounter with the primal forces woman 
 gets the worst of it except now and then, when 
 
 5 
 
THE PLOUGHED LANDS 
 
 there are children in question, she becomes a 
 primal force herself. 
 
 Great souls that go into the desert come out lx 
 mystics saints and prophets declaring un 
 utterable things: Buddha, Mahomet, and the 
 Gallilean, convincing of the casual nature of 
 human relations, because the desert itself has 
 no use for the formal side of man s affairs. 
 What need, then, of so much pawing over prece 
 dent and discoursing upon it, when the open 
 country lies there, a sort of chemist s cup for 
 resolving obligations? Say whether, when all 
 decoration is eaten away, there remains any 
 bond, and what you shall do about it. 
 
V 
 
 THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 
 
 MRS. WILLS had lived seventeen years with 
 Mr. Wills, and when he left her for three, 
 those three were so much the best of her mar 
 ried life that she wished he had never come 
 back. And the only real trouble with Mr. 
 Wills was that he should never have moved 
 West. Back East I suppose they breed such 
 men because they need them, but they ought 
 really to keep them there. 
 
 I am quite certain that when Mr. Wills was 
 courting Mrs. Wills he parted his hair in the 
 middle, and the breast-pocket of his best suit 
 had a bright silk lining which Mr. Wills pulled 
 up to simulate a silk handkerchief. Mrs. Wills 
 had a certain draggled prettiness, and a way 
 of tossing her head which came back to her 
 after Mr. Wills left, which made you think she 
 might have been the prettiest girl of her town. 
 
 52 
 
THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 
 
 They were happy enough at first, when Mr. 
 Wills was a grocery clerk, assistant Sunday- 
 school superintendent, and they owned a cabi 
 net organ and four little Willses. It might 
 have been that Mr. Wills thought he could go 
 right on being the same sort of a man in the 
 West he was clerk at the Bed Rock Emporium, 
 and had brought the organ and the children; 
 or it might have been at bottom he thought 
 himself a very different sort of man, and meant 
 to be it if he got a chance. 
 
 There is a sort of man bred up in close com 
 munities, like a cask, to whom the church, pub 
 lic opinion, the social note, are a sort of hoop 
 to hold him in serviceable shape. Without 
 these there are a good many ways of going to 
 pieces. Mr. Wills way was Lost Mines. 
 
 Being clerk at the Emporium, where miners 
 and prospectors bought their supplies, he heard 
 a lot of talk about mines, and was too new to 
 it to understand that the man who has the 
 most time to stop and talk about it has the 
 least to do with mining. And of all he heard, 
 the most fascinating to Mr. Wills, who was 
 troubled with an imagination, was of the lost 
 mines : incredibly rich ledges, touched and not 
 found again. To go out into the unmapped 
 
 S3 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 hills on the mere chance of coming across some 
 thing was, on the face of it, a risky business; 
 but to look for a mine once located, sampled 
 and proved, definitely situated in a particular 
 mountain range or a certain canon, had a 
 smack of plausibility. Besides that, an or 
 dinary prospect might or might not prove 
 workable, but the lost mines were always amaz 
 ingly rich. Of all the ways in the West for a 
 man to go to pieces this is the most insidious. 
 Out there beyond the towns the long Wilder 
 ness lies brooding, imperturbable ; she puts out 
 to adventurous minds glittering fragments of 
 fortune or romance, like the lures men use to 
 catch antelopes clip! then she has them. If 
 Mr. Wills had gambled or drank, his wife could 
 have gone to the minister about it, his friends 
 could have done something. There was a 
 church in Maverick of twenty-seven members, 
 and the Willses had brought letters to it, but 
 except for the effect it had on Mrs. Wills, it 
 would not be w r orth mentioning. Though he 
 might never have found it out in the East, Mr. 
 Wills belonged to the church, not because of 
 what it meant to himself, but for what it meant 
 to other people. Back East it had meant 
 social standing, repute, moral impeccability. 
 
 54 
 
THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 
 
 To other people in Maverick it meant a weak 
 ness which was excused in you so long as you 
 did not talk about it. Mr. Wills did not, be 
 cause there was so much else to talk about in 
 connection with lost mines. 
 
 He began by grub -staking Pedro Ruiz to 
 look for the Lost Ledge of Fisherman s Peak, 
 and that was not so bad, for it had not been 
 lost more than thirty years, the peak was not 
 a hundred miles from Maverick, and, besides, 
 I have a piece of the ore myself. Then he was 
 bitten by the myth of the Gunsight, of which 
 there was never anything more tangible than 
 a dime s worth of virgin silver, picked up by 
 a Jay hawker, hammered into a sight for a gun; 
 and you had to take the gun on faith at that, 
 for it and the man who owned it had quite dis 
 appeared; and afterward it was the Duke o 
 Wild Rose, which was never a mine at all, mere 
 ly an arrow-mark on a map left by a penniless 
 lodger found dead in a San Francisco hotel. 
 Grub-staking is expensive, even to a clerk at 
 the Bed Rock Emporium getting discounts on 
 the grub, and grub-staked prospectors are about 
 as dependable as the dreams they chase, often 
 pure fakes, lying up at seldom-visited water- 
 holes while the stake lasts, returning with wilder 
 
 55 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 tales and clews more alluring. It was a late 
 conviction that led Mr. Wills, when he put the 
 last remnant of his means into the search for 
 the White Cement mines, to resign his clerk 
 ship and go in charge of the expedition him 
 self. There is no doubt whatever that there is 
 a deposit of cement on Bald Mountain, with 
 lumps of gold sticking out of it like plums 
 in a pudding. It lies at the bottom of a small 
 gulch near the middle fork of Owens River, and 
 is overlaid by pumice. There is a camp kit 
 buried somewhere near, and two skeletons. 
 There is also an Indian in that vicinity who is 
 thought to be able to point out the exact loca 
 tion if he w r ould. It is quite the sort of thing 
 to appeal to the imagination of Mr. Wills, and 
 he spent two years proving that he could not 
 find it. After that he drifted out toward the 
 Lee district to look for Lost Cabin mine, be 
 cause a man who had immediate need of twenty 
 dollars, had, for that amount, offered Wills 
 some exact and unpublished information as to 
 its location. By that time Wills movements 
 had ceased to interest anybody in Maverick. 
 He could be got to believe anything about any 
 sort of a prospect, providing it was lost. 
 The only visible mark left by all this was on 
 56 
 
THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 
 
 Mrs. Wills. Everybody in a mining- town, ex 
 cept the minister and professional gamblers 
 who wear frock-coats, dresses pretty much 
 alike, and Wills very soon got to wear in his 
 face the guileless, trustful fixity of the con 
 firmed prospector. It seemed as if the desert 
 had overshot him and struck at Mrs. Wills, 
 and Richard Wills, Esther Wills, Benjy Wills, 
 and the youngest Wills, who was called Mugsey. 
 Desertness attacked the door-yard and the 
 house ; even the cabinet organ had a weathered 
 look. During the time of the White Cement 
 obsession the Wills family appeared to be in 
 need of a grub-stake themselves. Mrs. Wills* 
 eyes were like the eyes of trail-weary cattle; her 
 hands grew to have that pitiful way of catch 
 ing the front of her dress of the woman not so 
 much a slattern as hopeless. It was when her 
 husband went out after Lost Cabin she fell 
 into the habit of sitting down to a cheap novel 
 with the dishes unwashed, a sort of drugging 
 of despair common among women of the camps. 
 All this time Mr. Wills was drifting about 
 from camp to camp of the desert borders, work 
 ing when it could not be avoided, but mostly 
 on long, fruitless trudges among the unmindful 
 ranges. I do not know if the man was honest 
 
 57 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 with himself; if he knew by this time that the 
 clew of a lost mine was the baldest of excuses 
 merely to be out and away from everything 
 that savored of definiteness and responsibility. 
 The fact was, the desert had got him. All the 
 hoops were off the cask. The mind of Mr. 
 Wills faded out at the edges like the desert 
 horizon that melts in mists and mirages, and 
 finally he went on an expedition from which 
 he did not come back. 
 
 He had been gone nearly a year when Mrs. 
 Wills gave up expecting him. She had grown 
 so used to the bedraggled crawl of life that she 
 might never have taken any notice of the dis 
 appearance of Mr. Wills had not the Emporium 
 refused to make any more charges in his name. 
 There had been a great many dry water-holes 
 on the desert that year, and more than the 
 usual complement of sun-dried corpses^ In a 
 general way this accounted for Mr. Wills, 
 though nothing transpired of sufficient definite- 
 ness to justify Mrs. Wills in putting on a widow s 
 dress, and, anyway, she could not have af 
 forded it. 
 
 Mrs. Wills and the children went to work, 
 and work was about the only thing in Maverick 
 of which there was more than enough. It was 
 
 58 
 
THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 
 
 a matter of a very few months when Mrs. Wills 
 made the remarkable discovery that after the 
 family bills were paid at the end of the month, 
 there was a little over. A very little. Mrs. 
 Wills had lived so long with the tradition that 
 a husband is a natural provider that it took 
 some months longer to realize that she not 
 only did not need Mr. Wills, but got on better 
 without him. This was about the time she 
 was able to have the sitting-room repapered 
 and put up lace curtains. And the next spring 
 the children planted roses in the front yard. 
 All up and down the wash of Salt Creek there 
 were lean coyote mothers, and wild folk of 
 every sort could have taught her that nature 
 never makes the mistake of neglecting to make 
 the child-bearer competent to provide. But 
 Mrs. Wills had not been studying life in the 
 lairs. She had most of her notions of it from 
 the church and her parents, and all under the 
 new sense of independence and power she had 
 an ache of forlornness and neglect. As a mat 
 ter of fact she filled out, grew stronger, had a 
 spring in her walk. She was not pining for Mr. 
 Wills; the desert had him for whatever con 
 ceivable use, it was more than Mrs. Wills could 
 put him to let the desert keep what it had got. 
 
 59 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 It was in the third summer that she regained 
 a certain air that made me think she must 
 have been pretty when Mr. Wills married her. 
 And no woman in a mining-town can so much 
 as hint at prettiness without its being found 
 out. Mrs. Wills had a good many prejudices 
 left over from the time when Mr. Wills had been 
 superintendent of the Sunday-school, and would 
 not hear of divorce. Yet, as the slovenliness 
 of despair fell away from her, as she held up 
 her head and began to have company to tea, 
 it is certain somebody would have broached it 
 to her before the summer was over; but by 
 that time Mr. Wills came back. 
 
 It happened that Benjy Wills, who was 
 fourteen and driving the Bed Rock delivery 
 wagon, had a runaway accident in which he 
 had behaved very handsomely and gotten a 
 fractured skull. News of it went by way of 
 the local paper to Tonopah, and from there 
 drifted south to the Funeral Mountains and the 
 particular prospect that Mr. Wills was working 
 on a grub-stake. He had come to that. Per 
 haps as much because he had found .there was 
 nothing in it, as from paternal anxiety, he came 
 home the evening of the day the doctor had 
 declared the boy out of danger. 
 
 60 
 
THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 
 
 It was my turn to sit up that night, I remem 
 ber, and Mrs. Meyer, who had the turn before, 
 was telling me about the medicines. There 
 was a neighbor woman who had come in by 
 the back door with a bowl of custard, and the 
 doctor standing in the sitting-room with Mrs. 
 Wills, when Mr. Wills came in through the 
 black block of the doorway with his hand be 
 fore his face to ward off the light and perhaps 
 some shamefacedness who knows? 
 
 I saw Mrs. Wills quiver, and her hand went 
 up to her bosom as if some one had struck her. 
 I have seen horses start and check like that as 
 they came over the Pass and the hot blast of 
 the desert took them fairly. It was the stroke 
 of desolation. I remember turning quickly at 
 the doctor s curt signal to shut the door be 
 tween the sitting-room and Benjy. 
 
 "Don t let the boy see you to-night, Wills," 
 said the doctor, with no hint of a greeting ; he s 
 not to be excited." With that he got himself 
 off as quickly as possible, and the neighbor 
 woman and I went out and sat on the back 
 steps a long time, and tried to talk about every 
 thing but Mr. Wills. When I went in, at last, 
 he was sitting in the Morris chair, which had 
 come with soap- wrappers, explaining to Mrs. 
 
 61 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 Meyer about the rich prospect he had left to 
 come to his darling boy. But he did not get 
 so much as a glimpse of his darling boy while 
 I was in charge. 
 
 Mr. Wills settled on his family like a blight. 
 For a man who has prospected lost mines to 
 that extent is positively not good for anything 
 else. It was not only as if the desert had 
 sucked the life out of him and cast him back, 
 but as if it would have Mrs. Wills in his room. 
 As the weeks went on you could see a sort of 
 dinginess creeping up from her dress to her 
 hair and her face, and it spread to the house 
 and the doorway. Mr. Wills had enjoyed the 
 improved condition of his home, though he 
 missed the point of it ; his wife s cooking tasted 
 good to him after miner s fare, and he was 
 proud of his boys. He didn t want any more 
 of the desert. Not he. "There s no place 
 like home," said Mr. Wills, or something to 
 that effect. 
 
 But he had brought the desert with him on 
 his back. If it had been at any other time 
 than when her mind was torn with anxiety for 
 Benjy, Mrs. Wills might have made a fight 
 against it. But the only practical way to 
 separate the family from the blight was to 
 
 62 
 
THE RETURN OF MR. WILLS 
 
 divorce Mr. Wills, and the church to which 
 Mrs. Wills belonged admitted divorce only in 
 the event of there being another woman. 
 
 Mrs. Wills rose to the pitch of threatening, I 
 believe, about the time Mr. Wills insisted on 
 his right to control the earnings of his sons. 
 But the minister called ; the church put out its 
 hand upon her poor, staggered soul that sunk 
 aback. The minister himself was newly from 
 the East, and did not understand that the 
 desert is to be dealt with as a woman and a 
 wanton; he was thinking of it as a place on 
 the map. Therefore, he was not of the slight 
 est use to Mrs. Wills, which did not prevent 
 him from commanding her behavior. And the 
 power of the wilderness lay like a wasting sick 
 ness on the home. 
 
 About that time Mrs. Wills took to novel- 
 reading again; the eldest son drifted off up 
 Tonopah way ; and Benjy began to keep back 
 a part of the wages he brought home. And 
 Mr. Wills is beginning to collect misinforma 
 tion about the exact locality where Peg-leg 
 Smith is supposed to have found the sun 
 burnt nuggets. He does not mention the 
 matter often, being, as he says, done with 
 mines; but whenever the Peg-leg comes up in 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 talk I can see Mrs. Wills chirk up a little, her 
 gaze wandering to the inscrutable grim spaces, 
 not with the hate you might suppose, but with 
 something like hope in her eye, as if she had 
 guessed what I am certain of that in time its 
 insatiable spirit will reach out and take Mr. 
 Wills again. 
 
 And this time, if I know Mrs. Wills, he will 
 not come back. 
 
VI 
 
 THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 THERE were seven notches in the juniper 
 by the Lone Tree Spring for the seven 
 seasons that Little Pete had summered there, 
 feeding his flocks in the hollow of the Ceriso. 
 The first time of coming he had struck his axe 
 into the trunk, meaning to make firewood, but 
 thought better of it, and thereafter chipped it 
 in sheer friendliness, as one claps an old ac 
 quaintance, for by the time the flock has worked 
 up the treeless windy stretch from the Little 
 Antelope to the Ceriso, even a lone juniper has 
 a friendly look. And Little Pete was a friendly 
 man, though shy of demeanor, so that with the 
 best will in the world for wagging his tongue, 
 he could scarcely pass the time of day with 
 good countenance ; the soul of a jolly companion 
 with the front and bearing of one of his own 
 sheep. 
 
 6s 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 He loved his dogs as brothers; he was near 
 akin to the wild things ; he communed with the 
 huddled hills, and held intercourse with the 
 stars, saying things to them in his heart that 
 his tongue stumbled over and refused. He knew 
 his sheep by name, and had respect to signs and 
 seasons; his lips moved softly as he walked, 
 making no sound. Well what would you? a 
 man must have fellowship in some sort. 
 
 Whoso goes a-shepherding in the desert hills 
 comes to be at one with his companions, grow 
 ing brutish or converting them. Little Pete 
 humanized his sheep. He perceived lovable 
 qualities in them, and differentiated the natures 
 and dispositions of inanimate things. 
 
 Not much of this presented itself on slight 
 acquaintance, for, in fact, he looked to be of 
 rather less account than his own dogs. He was 
 undersized and hairy, and had a roving eye; 
 probably he washed once a year at the shearing 
 as the sheep were washed. About his body 
 he wore a twist of sheepskin with the wool out 
 ward, holding in place the tatters of his cloth 
 ing. On hot days when he wreathed leaves 
 about his head, and wove him a pent of twigs 
 among the scrub in the middle of his flock, he 
 looked a faun or some wood creature come out 
 
 66 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 of pagan times, though no pagan, as was clearly 
 shown by the medal of the Sacred Heart that 
 hung on his hairy chest, worn open to all 
 weathers. Where he went about sheep-camps 
 and shearings there were sly laughter and tap 
 ping of foreheads, but those who kept the tale 
 of his flocks spoke well of him and increased his 
 wage. 
 
 Little Pete kept to the same round year by 
 year, breaking away from La Liebre after the 
 spring shearing, south around the foot of Pinos, 
 swinging out to the desert in the wake of the 
 quick, strong rains, thence to Little Antelope 
 in July to drink a bottle for La Quatorze, and so 
 to the Ceriso by the time the poppy fires were 
 burned quite out and the quail trooped at noon 
 about the tepid pools. The Ceriso is not prop 
 erly mesa nor valley, but a long-healed crater 
 miles wide, rimmed about with the jagged edge 
 of the old cone. 
 
 It rises steeply from the tilted mesa, over 
 looked by Black Mountain, darkly red as the 
 red cattle that graze among the honey-colored 
 hills. These are blunt and rounded, tumbling 
 all down from the great crater and the mesa 
 edge toward the long, dim valley of Little An 
 telope. Its outward slope is confused with the 
 
 6 67 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 outlines of the hills, tumuli of blind cones, and 
 the old lava flow that breaks away from it by 
 the west gap and the ravine of the spring; 
 within, its walls are deeply guttered by the 
 torrent of winter rains. 
 
 In its cup-like hollow, the sink of its waters, 
 salt and bitter as all pools without an outlet, 
 waxes and wanes within a wide margin of bleach 
 ing reeds. Nothing taller shows in all the 
 Ceriso, and the wind among them fills all the 
 hollow with an eerie whispering. One spring 
 rills down by the gorge of an old flow on the 
 side toward Little Antelope, and, but for the lone 
 juniper that stood by it, there is never a tree 
 until you come to the foot of Black Mountain. 
 
 The flock of Little Pete, a maverick strayed 
 from some rodeo, a prospector going up to Black 
 Mountain, and a solitary antelope were all that 
 passed through the Ceriso at any time. The 
 antelope had the best right. He came as of old 
 habit; he had come when the lightfoot herds 
 ranged from here to the sweet, mist-watered 
 canons of the Coast Range, and the bucks went 
 up to the windy mesas what time the young ran 
 with their mothers, nose to flank. They had 
 ceased before the keen edge of slaughter that 
 defines the frontier of men. 
 
 68 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 All that a tardy law had saved to the district 
 of Little Antelope was the buck that came up 
 the ravine of the Lone Tree Spring at the set 
 time of the year when Little Pete fed his flock 
 in the Ceriso, and Pete averred that they were 
 glad to see each other. True enough, they 
 were each the friendliest thing the other found 
 there; for though the law ran as far as the 
 antelope ranged, there were hill-dwellers who 
 took no account of it namely, the coyotes. 
 They hunted the buck in season and out, bayed 
 him down from the feeding - grounds, fended 
 him from the pool, pursued him by relay races, 
 ambushed him in the pitfalls of the black rock. 
 
 There were seven coyotes ranging the east 
 side of the Ceriso at the time when Little Pete 
 first struck his axe into the juniper-tree, slink 
 ing, sly-footed, and evil-eyed. Many an even 
 ing the shepherd watched them running lightly 
 in the hollow of the crater, the flash - flash of 
 the antelope s white rump signalling the progress 
 of the chase. But always the buck outran or 
 outwitted them, taking to the high, broken 
 ridges where no split foot could follow his seven- 
 leagued bounds. Many a morning Little Pete, 
 tending his cooking-pot by a quavering sage 
 brush fire, saw the antelope feeding down 
 
 69 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 toward the Lone Tree Spring, and looked his 
 sentiments. The coyotes had spoken theirs 
 all in the night with derisive voices; never was 
 there any love lost between a shepherd and a 
 coyote. The pronghorn s chief recommenda 
 tion to an acquaintance was that he could 
 outdo them. 
 
 After the third summer, Pete began to per 
 ceive a reciprocal friendliness in the antelope. 
 Early mornings the shepherd saw him rising 
 from his lair, or came often upon the warm 
 pressed hollow where he had lain within cry of 
 his coyote-scaring fire. When it was midday in 
 the misty hollow and the shadows drawn close, 
 stuck tight under the juniper and the sage, 
 they went each to his nooning in his own fashion, 
 but in the half light they drew near together. 
 
 Since the beginning of the law the antelope 
 had half forgotten his fear of man. He looked 
 upon the shepherd with steadfastness, he smelled 
 the smell of his garments which was the smell 
 of sheep and the unhandled earth, and the smell 
 of wood smoke was in his hair. They had 
 companionship without speech; they conferred 
 favors silently after the manner of those who 
 understand one another. The antelope led to 
 the best feeding-grounds, and Pete kept the 
 
 70 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 sheep from muddying the spring until the buck 
 had drunk. When the coyotes skulked in the 
 scrub by night to deride him, the shepherd 
 mocked them in their own tongue, and promised 
 them the best of his lambs for the killing; but 
 to hear afar off their hunting howl stirred him 
 out of sleep to curse with great heartiness. At 
 such times he thought of the antelope and wish 
 ed him well. 
 
 Beginning with the west gap opposite the 
 Lone Tree Spring about the ist of August, Pete 
 would feed all around the broken rim of the 
 crater, up the gullies and down, and clean 
 through the hollow of it in a matter of two 
 months, or if the winter had been a wet one, 
 a little longer, and in seven years the man and 
 the antelope grew to know each other very well. 
 Where the flock fed the buck fed, keeping 
 farthest from the dogs, and at last he came to 
 lie down with it. 
 
 That was after a season of scant rains, when 
 the feed was poor and the antelope s flank grew 
 thin; the rabbits had trooped down to the ir 
 rigated lands, and the coyotes, made more keen 
 by hunger, pressed him hard. One of those 
 smoky, yawning days when the sky hugged the 
 earth, and all sound fell back from a woolly 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 atmosphere and broke dully in the scrub, about 
 the usual hour of their running between twilight 
 and mid-afternoon, the coyotes drove the tall 
 buck, winded, desperate, and foredone, to ref 
 uge among the silly sheep, where for fear of the 
 dogs and the man the howlers dared not come. 
 He stood at bay there, fronting the shepherd, 
 brought up against a crisis greatly needing the 
 help of speech. 
 
 Well he had nearly as much gift in that 
 matter as Little Pete. Those two silent ones 
 understood each other; some assurance, the 
 warrant of a free-given faith, passed between 
 them. The buck lowered his head and eased 
 the sharp throbbing of his ribs; the dogs drew 
 in the scattered flocks; they moved, keeping 
 a little cleared space nearest the buck ; he moved 
 with them; he began to feed. Thereafter the 
 heart of Little Pete warmed humanly toward 
 the antelope, and the coyotes began to be very 
 personal in their abuse. That same night they 
 drew off the shepherd s dogs by a ruse and stole 
 two of his lambs. 
 
 The same seasons that made the friendliness 
 of the antelope and Little Pete wore the face 
 of the shepherd into a keener likeness to the 
 weathered hills, and the juniper flourishing 
 
 72 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 greenly by the spring bade fair to outlast them 
 both. The line of ploughed lands stretched 
 out mile by mile from the lower valley, and a 
 solitary homesteader built him a cabin at the 
 foot of the Ceriso. 
 
 In seven years a coyote may learn somewhat ; 
 those of the Ceriso learned the ways of Little 
 Pete and the antelope. Trust them to have 
 noted, as the years moved, that the buck s 
 flanks were lean and his step less free. Put it 
 that the antelope was old, and that he made 
 truce with the shepherd to hide the failing of his 
 powers; then if he came earlier or stayed later 
 than the flock, it would go hard with him. But 
 as if he knew their mind in the matter, the ante 
 lope delayed his coming until the salt pool 
 shrunk to its innermost ring of reeds, and the 
 sun-cured grasses crisped along the slope. It 
 seemed the brute sense waked between him 
 and the man to make each aware of the other s 
 nearness. Often as Little Pete drove in by 
 the west gap he would sight the prongs of the 
 buck rising over the barrier of black rocks at 
 the head of the ravine. Together they passed 
 out of the crater, keeping fellowship as far as 
 the frontier of evergreen oaks. Here Little 
 Pete turned in by the cattle fences to come at 
 
 73 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 La Liebre from the north, and the antelope, 
 avoiding all man-trails, growing daily more 
 remote, passed into the wooded hills on un- 
 guessed errands of his own. 
 
 Twice the homesteader saw the antelope go 
 up to the Ceriso at that set time of the year. 
 The third summer when he sighted him, a 
 whitish speck moving steadily against the fawn- 
 colored background of the hills, the home 
 steader took down his rifle and made haste into 
 the crater. At that time his cabin stood on the 
 remotest edge of settlement, and the grip of 
 the law was loosened in so long a reach. 
 
 * In the end the coyotes will get him. Better 
 that he fall to me," said the homesteader. But, 
 in fact, he was prompted by the love of mastery, 
 which for the most part moves men into new 
 lands, whose creatures they conceive given over 
 into their hands. 
 
 The coyote that kept the watch at the head 
 of the ravine saw him come, and lifted up his 
 voice in the long-drawn dolorous whine that 
 warned the other watchers in their unseen 
 stations in the scrub. The homesteader heard 
 also, and let a curse softly under his breath, for 
 besides that they might scare his quarry, he 
 coveted the howler s ears, in which the law 
 
 74 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 upheld him. Never a tip nor a tail of one 
 showed above the sage when he had come up 
 into the Ceriso. 
 
 The afternoon wore on; the homesteader hid 
 in the reeds, and the coyotes had forgotten him. 
 Away to the left in a windless blur of dust the 
 sheep of Little Pete trailed up toward the cra 
 ter s rim. The leader, watching by the spring, 
 caught a jack-rabbit and was eating it quietly 
 behind the black rock. 
 
 In the mean time the last antelope came 
 lightly and securely by the gully, by the black 
 rock and the lone juniper, into the Ceriso. The 
 friendliness of the antelope for Little Pete be 
 trayed him. He came with some sense of home, 
 expecting the flock and protection of man- 
 presence. He strayed witlessly into the open, 
 his ears set to catch the jangle of the bells. 
 What he heard was the snick of the breech - 
 bolt as the homesteader threw up the sight of 
 his rifle, and a small demoniac cry that ran from 
 gutter to gutter of the crater rim, impossible 
 to gauge for numbers or distance. 
 
 At that moment Little Pete worried the 
 flock up the outward slope where the ruin of the 
 old lava flows gave sharply back the wrangle 
 of the bells. Three weeks he had won up from 
 
 75 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 the Little Antelope, and three by way of the 
 Sand Flat, where there was great scarcity of 
 water, and in all that time none of his kind had 
 hailed him. His heart warmed toward the 
 juniper-tree and the antelope whose hoof-prints 
 he found in the white dust of the mesa trail. 
 Men had small respect by Little Pete, women 
 he had no time for: the antelope was the no 
 blest thing he had ever loved. The sheep 
 poured through the gap and spread fanwise 
 down the gully ; behind them Little Pete twirled 
 his staff, and made merry wordless noises in his 
 throat in anticipation of friendliness. "Ehu!" 
 he cried when he heard the hunting howl, "but 
 they are at their tricks again," and then in 
 English he voiced a volley of broken, incon 
 sequential oaths, for he saw what the howlers 
 were about. 
 
 One imputes a sixth sense to that son of a 
 thief misnamed the coyote, to make up for 
 speech persuasion, concerted movement in 
 short, the human faculty. How else do they 
 manage the terrible relay races by which they 
 make quarry of the fleetest- footed ? It was so 
 they plotted the antelope s last running in the 
 Ceriso: two to start the chase from the black 
 rock toward the red scar of a winter torrent, 
 
 76 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 two to leave the mouth of the wash when the 
 first were winded, one to fend the ravine that 
 led up to the broken ridges, one to start out of 
 the scrub at the base of a smooth upward sweep, 
 and, running parallel to it, keep the buck well 
 into the open; all these when their first spurt 
 was done to cross leisurely to new stations to 
 take up another turn. Round they went in the 
 hollow of the crater, velvet-footed and sly even 
 in full chase, and biding their time. It was a 
 good running, but it was almost done when 
 away by the west gap the buck heard the voice 
 of Little Pete raised in adjuration and the 
 friendly blether of the sheep. Thin spirals of 
 dust flared upward from the moving flocks and 
 signalled truce to chase. He broke for it with 
 wide panting bounds and many a missed step 
 picked up with incredible eagerness, the thin 
 rim of his nostrils oozing blood. The coyotes 
 saw and closed in about him, chopping quick 
 and hard. Sharp ears and sharp muzzles cast 
 up at his throat, and were whelmed in a press 
 of gray flanks. One yelped, one went limping 
 from a kick, and one went past him, returning 
 with a spring upon the heaving shoulder, and 
 the man in the reeds beside the bitter water rose 
 up and fired. 
 
 77 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 All the luck of that day s hunting went to the 
 homesteader, for he had killed an antelope and 
 a coyote with one shot, and though he had a 
 bad quarter of an hour with a wild and loathly 
 shepherd, who he feared might denounce him 
 to the law, in the end he made off with the last 
 antelope, swung limp and graceless across his 
 shoulder. The coyotes came back to the kill 
 ing-ground when they had watched him safely 
 down the ravine, and were consoled with what 
 they found. As they pulled the body of the 
 dead leader about before they began upon it, 
 they noticed that the homesteader had taken 
 the ears of that also. 
 
 Little Pete lay in the grass and wept simply ; 
 the tears made pallid traces in the season s 
 grime. He suffered the torture, the question 
 extraordinary of bereavement. If he had not 
 lingered so long in the meadow of Los Robles, 
 if he had moved faster on the Sand Flat trail 
 but, in fact, he had come up against the in 
 evitable. He had been breathed upon by that 
 spirit which goes before cities like an exhalation 
 and dries up the gossamer and the dew. 
 
 From that day the heart had gone out of the 
 Ceriso. It was a desolate hollow, reddish-hued 
 and dim, with brackish waters, and moreover 
 
 78 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 the feed was poor. His eyes could not forget 
 their trick of roving the valley at all hours ; he 
 looked by the rill of the spring for hoof-prints 
 that were not there. 
 
 Fronting the west gap there was a spot where 
 he would not feed, where the grass stood up 
 stiff and black with what had dried upon it. 
 He kept the flocks to the ridgy slopes where the 
 limited horizon permitted one to believe the 
 crater was not quite empty. His heart shook 
 in the night to hear the long-drawn hunting 
 howl, and shook again remembering that he 
 had nothing to be fearing for. After three 
 weeks he passed out on the other side and came 
 that way no more. The juniper -tree stood 
 greenly by the spring until the homesteader cut 
 it down for firewood. Nothing taller than the 
 rattling reeds stirs in all the hollow of the 
 Ceriso. 
 
 There was a man once who skidded through 
 Lost Borders in an automobile with a balloon 
 silk tent and a folding tin bath-tub, who 
 wrote some cheerful tales about that country, 
 mostly untrue, about rattlesnakes coiling under 
 men s blankets at night, to afford heroic oc- 
 
 79 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 casions in the morning, of which circum 
 stance seventeen years residence failed to fur 
 nish a single instance; about lost mines re 
 discovered, which never happens, and Indian 
 maidens of such surpassing charm that men 
 married them and went out of the story with 
 intimations of ever-after happiness due to 
 arrive. It is true I did know a man who mar 
 ried his mahala, but he was mighty sorry for 
 it, and though it lost him his chance in life the 
 story is not worth telling. 
 
 The fact is that only when men struggle with 
 men do you get triumphs and rejoicings. In 
 any conflict with the immutable forces the 
 human is always the under dog, and when the 
 struggle is sharp enough to be dramatic, he 
 wins death mostly; happiest if he gets out of 
 it some dignity for himself and some sweetness 
 for his friends to remember. I was a long time 
 understanding why a great many people can 
 not abide a story with death in it. To be 
 snatched at the dramatic moment, to be re- 
 absorbed in the vastness of space and the 
 infinitude of silences, to return simply to the 
 native essences that is nothing to make moan 
 about; but when I had once taken part in a 
 proper Christian funeral, after fifteen years 
 
 80 
 
THE LAST ANTELOPE 
 
 without witnessing one such, I was less sur 
 prised at it. 
 
 When one has to think of death in connec 
 tion with strange tiptoeing men felicitating 
 themselves on millinery effects, with the sug 
 gestion of what was to be charged for it lurk 
 ing under the discreetly dropped lids, and all 
 the obvious mechanism of modern burial, one 
 can understand that what happened at Agua 
 Dulce is quite another matter. 
 
. 
 
 VII 
 
 AGUA DULCE 
 
 THE Los Angeles special got in so late that 
 day that if the driver of the Mojave stage had 
 not, from having once gone to school to me, 
 acquired the habit of minding what I said, I 
 should never have made it. I hailed him from 
 the station, and he swung the four about in 
 the wide street as the wind swept me toward 
 the racked old coach in a blinding whirl of 
 dust. 
 
 It wrapped my skirts about the iron gear of 
 the coach as I climbed to the seat beside the 
 driver, and as we dropped the town behind us, 
 lifted my hat and searched out my hairpins. 
 But it was the desert wind, and the smell it 
 carried was the smell of marrow-fat weed and 
 gilias after the sun goes down; so, because I 
 had been very unhappy away from it, and was 
 now drunk with the joy of renewal, and as in 
 
 82 
 
AGUA DULCE 
 
 my case there would be no time for a toilet 
 proper to the road until we came to the Eigh 
 teen-mile house, I was satisfied merely to cling 
 to the pitching front of the coach and let the 
 wind do what it would. (The sky was alight 
 and saffron-tinted, the mountains bloomed with 
 violet shadows; as we came whirling by the 
 point of Dead-Man, we saw the wickiups of the 
 Paiutes and the little hearth-fires all awink 
 among the sage. ^ They had a look of home. 
 
 There s some," said the driver to the desert 
 at large, "that thinks Indians ain t properly 
 folks, but just a kind of cattle." Then, as we 
 jolted forward in a chuck, he swore deeply and 
 brought the team about, putting back my in 
 stinctive motion to steady the lurching stage 
 with a gesture so sharp and repellant that I 
 sat up suddenly in offence. 
 
 "Don t you go for to mind me," he said, 
 only half mindful himself of what he had done, 
 and went on staring after the hearth-fires of 
 the Paiutes. By which I knew there was a 
 story there that had something to do with the 
 twilight fires and the homey look of the little 
 huts. Hours later, when we came out on the 
 mesa above Red Rock, white star-froth fleck 
 ing the black vault over us, and the road white 
 
 7 83 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 between the miles of low black sage before, we 
 had got to this point in it. 
 
 "It was out there," he said, waving his whip 
 toward the gulf of blackness, when I was doin 
 assessment work for McKenna, nigh to the 
 end of nowhere, I ... took up with an Indian 
 woman." He hurried past this admission with 
 intent to cover it from possible reproach, tell 
 ing how McKenna had dumped him with three 
 months grub by a water- hole called Agua Dulce, 
 distant a mile or two from the claims he was 
 expected to work. 
 
 "Because," he said, "it was cheaper than 
 packin water, me bein* alone, and McKenna, 
 for some reason, I never rightly guessed, keen 
 to keep the business on the quiet. McKenna 
 would be visitin me once a month or so, 
 and I lowed I wouldn t lonesome much," he 
 laughed, "and I didn t after I ... took up with 
 Catameneda. 
 
 Seems like white women can t get to under 
 stand why a man takes up with a mahala. 
 They think it s just badness, and so they re 
 down on it ... Maybe it is with some . . . but 
 not when they are like . . . like me ... and 
 Catameneda. . . . There s something away down 
 in a man that his own women folks never 
 
 84 
 
AGUA DULCE 
 
 understand . . . an you spend all your life try 
 ing to keep them from understanding . . . 
 though when there s one that does she plays 
 hell with you. ... It ain t badness. ... I don t 
 know rightly what, only it ain t all bad . . . but 
 Catameneda . . . she understood . . . and I 
 was glad to have her." 
 
 The wind died along the sage, and there 
 was no sound under heaven louder than the 
 gride of the wheels and the clink of the harness, 
 chains. Presently he returned upon his track 
 to say that he had been a month at Agua Dulce, 
 going and returning from the mines each day 
 to his little camp kit, laid under a square of 
 canvas with stones upon it to keep it from the 
 wind. He had cached the bulk of his supplies 
 behind the spring, and congratulated himself 
 on it when at the close of one day he found a 
 camp of Indians at Agua Dulce. 
 
 "You know how it is with these desert tribes," 
 said the stage-driver: "every camp looks as if 
 it might have been there for a hundred years, 
 and when they go there s no more left than a 
 last year s bird-nest. They just scramble up 
 out of nothing and melt away in the sand like 
 a horned toad. But they was friendly . . . sort 
 of ... when you got to know them . . . and the 
 
 85 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 men talked English considerable. . . . Evenings 
 when a kind of creepy chill comes on, they get 
 around their litttle fires and crack their jokes 
 . . . good jokes, too . . . there was one old buck 
 real comical, ... he used to explain them in 
 English afterward. And when they sang their 
 songs . . . when the fires were lit and the voices 
 came out of the dark, and you couldn t see the 
 dirt nor the color of their skins, you would 
 sort of forget they wasn t your own folks. 
 
 "And so," he said, after a longer silence, 
 "when the camp went on another pasear . . . 
 Catameneda . . . she stayed." That was all I 
 was ever to know of that phase of it. "Cata 
 meneda stayed." That and the flicker in his 
 voice cast up from the things in him that only 
 the Indian woman could understand, that lit 
 the situation through his scanty speech like the 
 glow of those vanished fires. 
 
 It was a sort of pretty place at Agua Dulce," 
 said he. "The spring came out from the black 
 rock into a basin with a gurgly sound. There 
 was a pink flowering bush behind it, and a 
 smitch of green where it ran over into the sand 
 . . . and the rest was sage-bush, little and low ; 
 and crumply, colored hills. There were doves 
 came and built in the flowering shrubs, for they 
 
 86 
 
AGUA DULCE 
 
 hadn t no fear of man . . . and Maneda, she fed 
 them." 
 
 He was silent, letting his whip-lash trail out 
 side in the sand, and I had a long time in which 
 to consider how young he was, and how much 
 younger he must have been when he drank 
 sweet water out there at Agua Dulce, before he 
 began again. 
 
 "She was mighty lovin ," he said; and sud 
 denly I saw the whole tale as I had constructed 
 it ahead of his halting speech fall apart, and 
 rebuild itself to a larger plan as he went on to 
 say how, when he came from the mine at night 
 and had no caress for her, she would begin to 
 droop and to grieve, to flood with tears and 
 heavy sobbing like a hurt child, which he could 
 still in a moment with a hand upon her hair ; and 
 how he would pretend a harshness at times to see 
 her flash and glow with the assurance of tender 
 ness renewed, which he laughed at her for never 
 learning. Sweet water, indeed, at Agua Dulce! 
 
 By this I knew the story had come to some 
 uncommon end that lifted it beyond the vulgar 
 adventure of satiety and desertion, for there 
 was no yellowness in the boy that he should 
 blab upon the tenderness of women. There 
 was a good hour yet until we came to Coyote 
 
 87 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 Holes, and I meant to have it all out of him 
 by then. The end had come very quickly. It 
 began in their growing careless through happi 
 ness and neglecting the cache. Then one day, 
 when he was at the mine, and Catameneda 
 setting snares for quail in the black rock, a 
 thieving prospector rifled it and left them wo- 
 fully short of food. Five days of desertness lay 
 between them and any possible base of supplies, 
 and McKenna was not due until the twenty- 
 ninth. They took stock and decided to hold 
 out on short rations until he came. They were 
 very merry about it, being so young, and 
 Catameneda knew the way to piece out their 
 fare with roots and herbs. She promised him 
 he should learn to eat lizards yet, as Indians 
 do. And then suddenly the boy fell sick of a 
 dysentery which he thought might have come 
 from some mistaken economy of Catameneda s 
 in the matter of canned food; and while he 
 was prostrated with that came the sand-storm. 
 The girl had sensed it, Indian fashion, days be 
 fore it came, but he was loggy with weakness 
 and the want of proper care, and let her warn 
 ing pass. Then came a night of gusty flaws; 
 the morning showed a wall of yellow cloud ad 
 vancing from the south. 
 
 88 
 
AGUA DULCE 
 
 All that country around Agua Dulce is solid 
 rock and fluctuant sand that moves before the 
 wind with a small, shrill rustle, and no trail can 
 lie in it when the wind blows more than twenty- 
 four hours. On this occasion it blew for three 
 days. 
 
 "Time was," said the driver, "I d lie awake 
 nights to mill it over and over. Times I d 
 think I could have done better, times again I 
 didn t know as I could. I was too sick to 
 think much, and Maneda was mighty uneasy, 
 all for gettin forward on the trail to meet 
 McKenna, who would be comin toward us. 
 She calculated he would stop at Beeman s till 
 the storm was past, not knowin we were short. 
 And the wind would blow three days. I don t 
 know how she knew, but she knew. She kept 
 holding up her fingers to show me how many 
 days, and forgetting what English I had taught 
 her ; and between that and me being fair locoed 
 with sickness, I gave in. I don t know if we 
 wouldn t have done better to stick it out at 
 Agua Dulce. And, again, I don t know as we 
 would." 
 
 They took the canteen and such food as they 
 had and set out for the next water-hole; by 
 noon the sand-storm overtook them. The 
 
 89 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 push of the wind was steady, and they tacked 
 along the edge of it without too much dis 
 comfort. The boy was pitifully weak, and 
 Catameneda laughed as she braced him with 
 her firm, young body. The dark fell early, the 
 wind increased and roared against them; the 
 boy, chilled in the night, grew feverish, and 
 Catameneda was reduced to hiding the canteen 
 to save their scanty drink. By all counts they 
 should have reached the first water-hole that 
 day, but did not until the next noon. And the 
 storm had been before them. The sand lay 
 clean white and drifted smooth over all that 
 place. Come another winter, the spring would 
 work its way to the surface perhaps, but now 
 they could not so much as guess where to dig 
 for it. They walked on and on, Catameneda 
 leading with his hand in hers. This day they 
 faced the wind. The girl s hair blew back, and 
 he held it to his eyes to shield them from the 
 tormenting sting of the sand. The water and 
 food held out better than he expected. 
 
 He said that he thought Catameneda must 
 have waked him in the night, when there was 
 a lull in the wind, for he seemed to remember 
 crawling long distances on hands and knees, 
 and other times he leaned upon her body and 
 
 QO 
 
CATAMENEDA LAUGHED AS SHE BRACED HIM WITH 
 HER FIRM YOUNG BODY 
 
AGUA DULCE 
 
 heard her voice, but did not seem to see her. 
 Always they travelled in a fury of wind and a 
 biting smother of sand. 
 
 "I don t know how Maneda pulled me 
 through, he said, but she did. All I remem 
 ber was the beginning of the basalt wall at the 
 root of Black Mountain, and right away after 
 that the drip of the spring, though it s two mile 
 from where the rock begins. I was long past 
 bein hungry, but I jest naturally wallowed 
 in that water, and it ain t any great water 
 neither, not like the water at Agua Dulce. But 
 Catameneda she didn t seem to care for none." 
 
 He paused so long here that if I had not 
 known his kind very well, I should have thought 
 it all the story he meant to let me have ; but at 
 last: 
 
 "I reckon I was light-headed," he said, 
 "else I should have sensed what was the mat 
 ter; but I don t know but it was best as it was. 
 I couldn t have done nothin . We lay on the 
 sand far spent and sick, the wind was going 
 down, and we could breathe better under the 
 wall. I heard her kind of choke up every lit 
 tle, and by-and-by she was talking quiet like, 
 in her own language, and I made out she 
 wanted her mother . . . she wasn t more than 
 
 9 1 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 seventeen, I should think. ... It was cold, too, 
 and I d lost my blanket somewhere back on 
 the trail, not bein able to say where. ... I 
 snuggled her up in my arms, kind of shivery 
 like . . . and by-and-by ... she knew me, puttin 
 her hand up to my face, a way she had . . . and 
 say in in English, as I had taught her, Vera 
 good boy, mucha like. And it didn t seem no 
 time at all after that when it was broad morn 
 ing and the wind was down . . . her hair on my 
 face . . . and she was heavy on my arm. 
 
 " I sat up and laid her on the sand. ... It 
 was too much for her . . . all she had been 
 through . . . bein so young . . . and she had given 
 me all the food and all the water . . . though I 
 hadn t felt to know it before. I knew it as 
 soon as I looked at her ... I reckon she had a 
 hemorrhage or something . . . there was blood 
 on her face and sleeves like she wiped it from 
 her mouth." 
 
 Out in the blackness toward Agua Dulce a 
 coyote howled and night freshened for a sign 
 of morning. 
 
 "McKenna came through by noon, and we 
 buried her," he finished, simply, "under a pink 
 flowering bush, because she loved it. I worked 
 on a ranch in the valley for two years after 
 
 92 
 
AGUA DULCE 
 
 that. ... I couldn t seem to abide the desert 
 for a spell . . . nor the little fires . . . but I got 
 over that . . . you know how that is." 
 
 "Yes, I know how that is." 
 
 "But I don t suppose anybody knows," he 
 went, on, reflectively, "how it is that I don t 
 think of her dead any more, nor any of that 
 hard time we had . . . only sometimes when it s 
 spring like this, and I smell sage-brush burning 
 ... it reminds me ... of some loving way she 
 had out there ... at Agua Dulce." 
 
 A man s story like that is always so much 
 more satisfactory because he tells you all the 
 story there is, what happened to him, and how 
 he felt about it, supposing his feelings are any 
 part of the facts in the case ; but with a woman 
 it is not so. She never knows much about her 
 feelings, unless they are pertinent to the story, 
 and then she leaves them out. 
 
VIII 
 THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 I HAD long wished to write a story of Death 
 1 Valley that should be its final word. It was 
 to be so chosen from the limited sort of in 
 cidents that could occur there, so charged with 
 the still ferocity of its moods that I should at 
 length be quit of its obsession, free to concern 
 myself about other affairs. And from the mo 
 ment of hearing of the finding of Lang s body 
 at Dead Man s Spring I knew I had struck upon 
 the trail of that story. 
 
 It was a teamster who told it, stopping over 
 the night at McGee s, a big, slow man, face and 
 features all of a bluntness, as if he had been 
 dropped before the clay was set. He had a 
 big, blunt voice through which his words rolled, 
 dulled along the edges. The same accident that 
 had flattened the outlines of his nose and chin 
 must have happened to his mind, for he was 
 
 94 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 never able to deliver more than the middle of 
 an idea, without any definiteness as to where 
 it began or ended and what it stood next to. 
 He called the dead man Long, and failed to 
 remember who was supposed to have killed 
 him, and what about. 
 
 We had fallen a-talking round the fire of Con 
 vict Lake, and the teamster had handed up 
 the incident of Dead Man s Spring as the only 
 thing in his experience that matched with the 
 rooted horror of its name. He had been of the 
 party that recovered the body, and what had 
 stayed with him was the sheer torment of the 
 journey across Death Valley, the aching heat, 
 the steady, sickening glare, the uncertainty as 
 to whether there was a body in the obliterated 
 grave, whether it was Lang s body, and whether 
 they would be able to prove it; and then the 
 exhuming of the dead, like the one real inci 
 dent in a fever dream. He was very sure of 
 the body, done up in an Indian blanket striped 
 red and black, with a rope around it like a 
 handle, convenient for carrying. But he had 
 forgotten what set the incident in motion, or 
 what became of Lang after that, if it really 
 were Lang in the blanket. 
 
 Then I heard of the story again between 
 95 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 Red Rock and Coyote Holes, about moon-set, 
 when the stage labored up the long gorge, 
 waking to hear the voices of the passengers run 
 on steadily with the girding of the sand and 
 the rattle of harness-chains, run on and break 
 and eddy around Dead Man s Springs, and 
 back up in turgid pools of comment and specu 
 lation, falling in shallows of miner s talk, lost 
 at last in a waste of ledges and contracts and 
 forgotten strikes. Waking and falling asleep 
 again, the story shaped itself of the largeness 
 of the night; and then the two men got down 
 at Coyote Holes an hour before dawn, and I 
 knew no more of them, neither face nor name. 
 But what I had heard of the story confirmed it 
 exactly, the story I had so long sought. 
 
 Those who have not lived in a mining country 
 cannot understand how it is possible for whole 
 communities to be so disrupted by the failure 
 of a lode or a fall in the price of silver, that I 
 could live seven years within a day s journey 
 of Dead Man s Spring and not come upon any 
 body who could give me the whole of that 
 story. I went about asking for it, and got 
 sticks and straws. There was a man who had 
 kept bar in Tio Juan at the time, and had been 
 the first to notice Whitmark s dealing with the 
 
 96 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 Shoshone who was supposed to have stolen the 
 body after it was dug up. There was a Mexican 
 who had been the last to see Lang alive and 
 might have told somewhat, but death got him 
 before I did. Once, at a great dinner in San 
 Francisco, a large, positive man with a square 
 forehead and a face below it that somehow 
 implied he had shaped it so butting his way 
 through life, across the table two places down, 
 caught at some word of mine, leaning forward 
 above the bank of carnations that divided the 
 cloth. 
 
 "Queer thing happened up in that country 
 to a friend of mine, Whitmark " But the 
 toast-master cut him off. All this time the 
 story glimmered like a summer island in a 
 mist, through every man s talk about it, grew 
 and allured, caressing the soul. It had warmth 
 and amplitude, like a thing palpable to be 
 stroked. There was a mine in it, a murder and 
 a mystery, great sacrifice, Shoshones, dark and 
 incredibly discreet, and the magnetic will of a 
 man making manifest through all these; there 
 were lonely water-holes, deserted camps where 
 coyotes hunted in the streets, fatigues and 
 dreams and voices of the night. And at the 
 last it appeared there was a woman in it. 
 
 97 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 Curiously, long before I learned of her con 
 nection with the story, I had known and liked 
 her for a certain effect she had of being warmed 
 and nourished from within. There was about 
 her a spark, a nuance that men mistook never 
 more than once, as the stage-driver told me 
 confidently a vitality that had nothing, abso 
 lutely nothing, but the blank occasionless life 
 of the desert to sustain it. She was one of the 
 very few people I had known able to keep a 
 soul alive and glowing in the wilderness, and I 
 was to find out that she kept it so against the 
 heart of my story. Mine! I called it so by 
 that time; but hers was the right, though she 
 had no more pertinence to the plot than most 
 women have to desert affairs. 
 
 She was the Woman of the Eighteen-Mile 
 House. She had the desert mark upon her 
 lean figure, wasted bosom, the sharp, upright 
 furrow between the eyes, the burned, tawny 
 skin, with the pallid streak of the dropped 
 eyelids, and of course I suppose she knew her 
 husband from among the lean, sidling, vacuous- 
 looking Borderers; but I couldn t have identi 
 fied him, so like he was to the other feckless 
 men whom the desert sucks dry and keeps 
 dangling like gourds on a string. Twenty-five 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 years they had drifted from up Bodie way, 
 around Panimint, toward Mojave, worse housed 
 and fed than they might have been in the 
 ploughed lands, and without having hit upon 
 the fortune which is primarily the object of 
 every desert adventure. And when people have 
 been as long as that among the Lost Borders 
 there is not the slightest possibility of their 
 coming to anything else. And still the Woman s 
 soul was palpitant and enkindled. At the last, 
 Mayer that was the husband s name had 
 settled at the Eighteen-Mile House to care for 
 the stage relays, and I had met the Woman, 
 halting there with the stage or camping nights 
 on some slower passage. 
 
 At the time I learned of her connection with 
 the Whitmark affair, the story still wanted 
 some items of motive and understanding, a 
 knowledge of the man himself, some account of 
 his three months pasear into the hills beyond 
 Mesquite, which certainly had to do with the 
 affair of the mine, but of which he would never 
 be persuaded to speak. And I made perfectly 
 sure of getting the rest of it from the Woman 
 at the Eighteen-Mile. 
 
 It was full nine o clock before the Woman s 
 household was all settled and she had come out 
 s 99 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 upon the stoop of the Eighteen-Mile House to 
 talk, the moon coming up out of Shoshone 
 land, all the hollow of the desert falling away 
 before us, filled with the glitter of that sur 
 passing wonder, the moon-mirage. Never mind 
 what went before to draw her to the point 
 of talking; it could have come about as sim 
 ply as my saying, "I mean to print this story 
 as I find it," and she would have had to talk 
 to save it. Consider how still it was. Off to 
 the right the figures of my men under their 
 blankets stretched along the ground. Not a 
 leaf to rustle, not a bough to creak. No grass 
 to whisper in the wind, only stiff, scant shrubs 
 and the sandy hills like shoals at the bottom 
 of a lake of light. I could see the Woman s 
 profile, thin and fine against the moon, and 
 when she put up her hand to drag down the 
 thick, careless coil of her hair, I guessed we 
 were close upon the heart of the story. And 
 for her the heart of the story was the man, 
 Whitmark. 
 
 She had been, at the time he came into the 
 country seventeen years before, that which the 
 world knows so little what to do with that it 
 mostly throws away a good woman with 
 great power and possibilities of passion. Whit- 
 
 100 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE. EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 mark stood for the best she had known, I should 
 have said from all I learned, just a clean- 
 minded, acute, tolerably cultivated American 
 business man with an obsession for accom 
 plishing results. 
 
 He had been sent out to look after a mine to 
 which the title was not clear, and there were 
 counter - machinations to take it away from 
 him. This much may be told without breach, 
 for, as it turned out, I was not to write that 
 story, after all; at least, not in the lifetime of 
 the Woman at the Eighteen-Mile. And the 
 crux of the story to her was one little, so little, 
 moment, that owing to Whitmark s having 
 been taken with pneumonia within a week 
 afterward, was rendered fixed beyond change 
 or tarnish of time. 
 
 When all this was going forward the Mayers 
 kept a miner s boarding-house at Tio Juan, 
 where Whitmark was in and out; and the 
 Woman, who from the first had been attracted 
 by the certain stamp of competency and power, 
 began to help him with warnings, intimations 
 of character and local prejudice, afterward with 
 information which got him the reputation of 
 almost supernatural penetration. 
 
 There were reasons why, during his darkest 
 101 
 
LOST S&RDERS 
 
 time, Whitmark could find nobody but the 
 Indians and the Woman to trust. Well, he 
 had been wise enough to trust her, and it was 
 plain to see from her account of it that this 
 was the one occasion in life when her soul had 
 stretched itself, observed, judged, wrought, 
 and felt to the full of its power. 
 
 She loved him; yes, perhaps I do not know 
 if you call love that soul service of a good 
 woman to a man she may not touch. Whit- 
 mark had children back East, and a wife whom 
 he had married for all the traditions of nice- 
 ness and denial and abnegation which men 
 demand of the women they expect to marry, 
 and find savorless so often when they are mar 
 ried to it. He had never known what it meant 
 to have a woman concerned in his work, run 
 ning neck and neck with it, divining his need, 
 supplementing it not with the merely feminine 
 trick of making him more complacent with him 
 self, but with vital remedies and aids. And 
 once he had struck the note of the West, he 
 kindled to the event and enlarged his spirit. 
 The two must have had great moments at 
 the heart of that tremendous coil of circum 
 stance. All this the Woman conveyed to me 
 by the simplest telling of the story as it hap- 
 102 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 pened : "I said . . . and he did . . . the Indian 
 went . . ." 
 
 I sat within the shallow shadow of the eaves 
 experiencing the full-throated satisfaction of 
 old prospectors over the feel of pay dirt, rub 
 bing it between the thumb and palm, swearing 
 over it softly below the breath. It was as good 
 as that. And I was never to have it! For 
 one thing the Woman made plain to me in 
 the telling was the guilt of Whitmark. Though 
 there was no evidence by which the court could 
 hold him, though she did not believe it, though 
 the fulness of her conviction intrigued me into 
 believing that it did not matter so much what 
 he was the only way to write that story suc 
 cessfully was to fix forever against Whitmark s 
 name its damning circumstance. The affair 
 had been a good deal noised about at the time, 
 and through whatever illusion of altered name 
 and detail, was bound to be recognized and 
 made much of in the newspapers. The Woman 
 of the Eighteen-Mile saw that. Suddenly she 
 broke off the telling to show me her poor heart, 
 shrivelling as I knew hearts to warp and shrink 
 in the aching wilderness, this one occasion ren 
 dering it serviceable like a hearth-fire in an 
 empty room. 
 
 103 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 "It was a night like this he went away," 
 said the Woman, stirring to point to the solemn 
 moonlight poured over all the world. 
 
 That was after twenty-two months of strug 
 gle had left Whitmark in possession of the 
 property. He was on his way then to visit 
 his family, whom he had seen but once in that 
 time, and was to come again to put in opera 
 tion the mine he had so hardly won. It was, 
 it should have been, an hour ripe with satis 
 faction. 
 
 "He was to take the stage which passed 
 through Bitter Wells at ten that night," said 
 she, "and I rode out with him he had asked 
 me from Tio Juan, to bring back the horses. 
 We started at sunset and reached the Wells a 
 quarter of an hour before the time. 
 
 "The moon was half high \vhen the sun went 
 down, and I was very happy, because it had 
 all come out so well, and he was to come again 
 in two months. We talked as we rode. I told 
 you he was a cheerful man. All the time when 
 it looked as if he might be tried for his life, 
 the worse it looked the more his spirits rose. 
 He would have laughed if he had heard he 
 was to be hung. But that night there was a 
 trouble upon him. It grew as we rode. His 
 104 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 face drew, his breath came sighing. He seemed 
 always on the point of speaking and did not. 
 It was as if he had something to say that must 
 be said, and at the moment of opening his lips 
 it escaped him. In the moonlight I saw his 
 mouth working, and nothing came from it. If 
 I spoke the trouble went out of his face, and 
 when I left off it came again, puzzled wonder 
 and pain. I know now!" said the Woman, shak 
 ing forward her thick hair, that it was a warn 
 ing, a presentiment. I have heard of such 
 things, and it seems as if I should have felt it 
 too, hovering in the air like that. But I was 
 glad because it had all come out so well and 
 I had had a hand in it. Besides, it was not for 
 me." She turned toward me then for the first 
 time, her hair falling forward to encompass all 
 her face but the eyes, wistful with the desire 
 to have me understand how fine this man was 
 in every worldly point, how far above her, and 
 how honored she was to have been the witness 
 of the intimation of his destiny. I said quickly 
 the thing that was expected of me, which was 
 not the thing I thought, and gave her courage 
 for going on. 
 
 "Yet," she said, "I was not entirely out of 
 it, because because the thing he said at the 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 last, when he said it, did not seem the least 
 strange to me, though afterward, of course, 
 when I thought of it, it was the strangest good 
 bye I had ever heard. 
 
 "We had got down and stood between the 
 horses, and the stage was coming in. We 
 heard the sand fret under it, and the moon 
 light was a cold weight laid upon the world. 
 He took my hand and held it against his breast 
 so and said Oh, I am perfectly sure of 
 the words; he said, I have missed you so. 
 Just that, not good-bye, and not shall miss 
 you, but I have missed you so. 
 
 "Like that," she said, her hands still clasped 
 above her wasted bosom, the quick spirit glow 
 ing through it like wine in a turgid glass 
 "like that," she said. But, no; whatever the 
 phrase implied of the failure of the utterly safe 
 and respectable life to satisfy the inmost hun 
 ger of the man, it could never have had in it 
 the pain of her impassioned, lonely years. If 
 it had been the one essential word the Desert 
 strives to say it would have been pronounced 
 like that. 
 
 "And it was not until the next day," she 
 went on, "it occurred to me that was a strange 
 thing to say to a woman he had seen two or 
 T 06 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 three times a week for nearly two years. But 
 somehow it seemed to me clearer when I heard 
 a week later that he was dead. He had taken 
 cold on the way home, and died after three 
 days. His wife wrote me; it was a very nice 
 letter; she said he told her I had been kind to 
 him. Kind ! She broke off, and far out under 
 the moon rose the thin howl of coyotes running 
 together in the pack. "And that," said the 
 Woman, "is why I made you promise at 
 the beginning that if I told you all I knew 
 about Whitmark and Lang you would not 
 use it." 
 
 I jumped. She had done that, and I had 
 promised light-heartedly. People nearly al 
 ways exact that sort of an assurance in the 
 beginning of confidences, like a woman wanting 
 to be told she is of nobler courage at the mo 
 ment of committing an indiscretion, a con 
 cession to the sacredness of personal experience 
 which always seems so much less once it is 
 delivered, they can be persuaded to forego the 
 promise of inviolateness. I always promise and 
 afterward persuade. But not the Woman of the 
 Eighteen-Mile. If Whitmark had lived he 
 would have come back and proved his worth, 
 cleared himself by his life and works. As it 
 107 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 stood, by the facts against him, he was most 
 utterly given over to ill-repute. The singu 
 larity of the incident, the impossibility of its 
 occurring in any place but Death Valley, con 
 spired to fix the ineffaceable stain upon his 
 wife and his children, for, by the story as I 
 should write it, he ought to have been hung. 
 No use to say modestly that the scratchings of 
 my pen would never reach them. If it were 
 not the biggest story of the desert ever written, 
 I had no wish to write it. And there was the 
 Woman. The story was all she had, absolutely 
 all of heart-stretching, of enlargement and sus 
 tenance. What she thought about it was that 
 that last lusive moment when she touched the 
 forecast shadow of his destiny was to bind her 
 to save his credit for his children s sake. One 
 must needs be faithful to one s experiences 
 when there are so few of them. 
 
 She said something like that, gathering up 
 her hair in both hands, standing before me in 
 the wan revealing light. The mark of the 
 desert was on her. Heart of desolation! But 
 I knew what pinchings of the spirit went to 
 make that mark! 
 
 "It was a promise," she said. 
 
 "It is a promise." 
 
 108 
 
THE WOMAN AT THE EIGHTEEN-MILE 
 
 But I caught myself in the reservation that 
 it should not mean beyond the term of her 
 life. 
 
 Every now and then arises some city-sur 
 feited demand for a great primitive love- 
 story: it is usually a Professor in the Eng 
 lish Department or some young man on the 
 Daily News at fifteen per who dreams of writing 
 it. Only those who have learned it at first 
 hand understand that there is no such thing; 
 that primitive love is the most complaisant, 
 that is to say, the most serviceable to Life of 
 all human passions. 
 
 But when we magnify it with bonds it chafes 
 itself to dramatic proportions. Love is Life s 
 own way of reducing the clash of human con 
 tacts in order that the pair may turn a more 
 opposing front to the adversary, the Wilderness. 
 
 It springs up, oh, it springs up, as Life 
 divinely meant it, wherever, in the press of 
 existence, men and women come together; re 
 quires, when the conditions are of a simpleness 
 called primitive, no other inducement. But Life 
 did not invent Society, seems somehow never 
 to be properly aware of it; though it justifies 
 109 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 itself of Love, cannot yet square with Respect 
 ability, with the Church and Property. Thread 
 ing through these, Love weaves the fascinating 
 intricacy of story, but here in the Borders, 
 where the warp runs loose and wide, the pattern 
 has not that richness it should show in the 
 close fabric of civilization. If it lived next 
 door to you, you probably, wouldn t have any 
 thing to do with it. 
 
PT 
 
 IX 
 
 HE 
 
 WHENEVER I come up to judgment, and 
 am hard pushed to make good on my own 
 account (as I expect to be) , I shall mention the 
 case of Netta Saybrick, for on the face of it, 
 and by all the traditions in which I was bred, 
 I behaved rather handsomely. I say on the 
 face of it, for except in the matter of keeping my 
 mouth shut afterward, I am not so sure I had 
 anything to do with the affair. It was one of 
 those incidents that from some crest of sheer 
 inexplicableness seems about to direct the 
 imagination over vast tracts of human experi 
 ence, only to fall away into a pit of its own 
 digging, all fouled with weed and sand. But, 
 by keeping memory and attention fixed on its 
 pellucid instant as it mounted against the sun, 
 I can still see the Figure shining through it as 
 I saw it that day at Posada, with the glimmering 
 in 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 rails of the P. and S. running out behind it, 
 thin lines of light toward the bar of Heaven. 
 
 Up till that time Netta Saybrick had never 
 liked me, though I never laid it to any other 
 account than Netta s being naturally a little 
 fool ; af terward she explained to me that it was 
 because she thought I gave myself airs. The 
 Say bricks lived in the third house from mine, 
 around the corner, so that our back doors over 
 looked each other, and up till the coming of 
 Doctor Challoner there had never been anything 
 in Netta s conduct that the most censorious of 
 the villagers could remark upon. Nor after 
 ward, for that matter. The Saybricks had been 
 married four years, and the baby was about two. 
 He was not an interesting child to anybody 
 but his mother, and even Netta was sometimes 
 thought to be not quite absorbed in him. 
 
 Saybrick was a miner, one of the best drillers 
 in our district, and consequently away from 
 home much of the time. Their house was 
 rather larger than their needs, and Netta, to 
 avoid loneliness more than for profit, let out a 
 room or two. That was the way she happened 
 to fall into the hands of the Fakir. 
 
 Franklin Challoner had begun by being a 
 brilliant and promising student of medicine. 
 
 112 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 I had known him when his natural gifts proph 
 esied the unusual, but I had known him rather 
 better than most, and I was not surprised to 
 have him turn up five years later at Maverick 
 as a Fakir. 
 
 It had begun in his being poor, and having 
 to work his way through the Medical College 
 at the cost of endless pains and mortification 
 to himself. Like most brilliant people, Chal- 
 loner was sensitive and had an enormous 
 egotism, and, what nearly always goes with it, 
 the faculty of being horribly fascinating to 
 women. It was thought very creditable of 
 him to have put himself through college at his 
 own charge, though in reality it proved a great 
 social waste. I have a notion that the courage, 
 endurance, and steadfastness which should have 
 done Frank Challoner a lifetime was squeezed 
 out of him by the stress of those overworked, 
 starved, mortifying years. His egotism made 
 it important to his happiness to keep the centre 
 of any stage, and this he could do in school by 
 sheer brilliance of scholarship and the distinc 
 tion of his struggles. But afterward, when he 
 had to establish himself without capital among 
 strangers, he found himself impoverished of 
 manliness. Always there was the compelling 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 need of his temperament to stand well with 
 people, and almost the only means of accomplish 
 ing it his poverty allowed was the dreadful 
 facility with which he made himself master of 
 women. I suppose this got his real ability dis 
 credited among his professional fellows. Be 
 tween that and the sharp need of money, and 
 the incredible appetite which people have for 
 being fooled, somewhere in the Plateau of 
 Fatigue between promise and accomplishment, 
 Frank Challoner lost himself. Therefore, I was 
 not surprised when he turned up finally at 
 Maverick, lecturing on phrenology, and from 
 the shape of their craniums advising country 
 people of their proper careers at three dollars a 
 sitting. He advertised to do various things in 
 the way of medical practice that had a dubious 
 sound. 
 
 It was court week when he came, and the 
 only possible lodging to be found at Netta 
 Saybrick s. Doctor Challoner took the two 
 front rooms as being best suited to his clients 
 and himself, and I believe he did very well. 
 I was not particularly pleased to see him, on 
 account of having known him before, not wish 
 ing to prosecute the acquaintance; and about 
 that time Indian George brought me word that 
 114 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 a variety of redivivus long sought was blooming 
 that year on a certain clayey tract over toward 
 Waban. It was not supposed to flower oftener 
 than once in seven years, and I was five days 
 finding it. That was why I never knew what 
 went on at Mrs. Saybrick s. Nobody else did, 
 apparently, for I never heard a breath of 
 gossip, and that must have been Doctor Chal- 
 loner s concern, for I am sure Netta would 
 never have known how to avoid it. 
 
 Netta was pretty, and Saybrick had been 
 gone five months. Challoner had a thin, 
 romantic face, and eyes even I had to admit 
 the compelling attraction of his eyes; and his 
 hands were fine and white. Saybrick s hands 
 were cracked, broken-nailed, a driller s hands, 
 and one of them was twisted from the time he 
 was leaded, working on the Lucky Jim. If it 
 came to that, though, Netta s husband might 
 have been anything he pleased, and Challoner 
 would still have had his way with her. He always 
 did with women, as if to make up for not having 
 it with the world. And the life at Maverick was 
 deadly, appallingly dull. The stark houses, 
 the rubbishy streets, the women who went about 
 in them in calico wrappers, the draggling speech 
 of the men, the wide, shadowless table-lands, 
 9 115 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 the hard, bright skies, and the days all of one 
 pattern, that went so stilly by that you only 
 knew it was afternoon when you smelled the 
 fried cabbage Mrs. Mulligan was cooking for 
 supper. 
 
 At this distance I cannot say that I blamed 
 Netta, am not sure of not being glad that she 
 had her hour of the rose- red glow if she had it. 
 You are to bear in mind that all this time I 
 was camping out in the creosote belt on the 
 slope of Waban, and as to what had really 
 happened neither Netta nor Challoner ever 
 said a word. I keep saying things like this 
 about Netta s being pretty and all, just as if I 
 thought they had anything to do with it ; truth 
 is, the man had just a gift of taking souls, and 
 I, even I, judicious and disapproving but you 
 shall hear. 
 
 At that time the stage from Maverick was a 
 local affair going down to Posada, where pas 
 sengers from the P. and S. booked for the 
 Mojave line, returning after a wait of hours on 
 the same day. 
 
 It happened that the morning I came back 
 
 from Waban, Doctor Challoner left Maverick. 
 
 Being saddle weary, I had planned to send on the 
 
 horses by Indian George, and take the stage 
 
 116 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 where it crossed my trail an hour out from 
 Posada, going home on it in the afternoon. I 
 remember poking the botany -case under the 
 front seat and turning round to be hit straight 
 between the eyes, as it were, by Netta Say brick 
 and Doctor Challoner. The doctor was wearing 
 his usual air of romantic mystery ; wearing it a 
 little awry or perhaps it was only knowing 
 the man that made me read the perturbation 
 under it. But it was plain to see what Netta 
 was about. Her hat was tilted by the jolting 
 of the stage, white alkali dust lay heavy on the 
 folds of her dress, and she never would wear 
 hair-pins enough; but there was that in every 
 turn and posture, in every note of her flat, 
 childish voice, that acknowledged the man 
 beside her. Her excitement was almost febrile. 
 It was part of Netta s unsophistication that she 
 seemed not to know that she gave herself away, 
 and the witness of it was that she had brought 
 the baby. 
 
 You would not have believed that any 
 woman would plan to run away with a man like 
 Frank Challoner and take that great, heavy- 
 headed, drooling child. But that is what Netta 
 had done. I am not sure it was maternal 
 instinct, either; she probably did not know 
 117 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 what else to do with him. He had pale, pro 
 truding eyes and reddish hair, and every time 
 he clawed at the doctor s sleeve I could see the 
 man withhold a shudder. 
 
 I suppose it was my being in a manner con 
 founded by this extraordinary situation that 
 made it possible for Doctor Challoner to renew 
 his acquaintance with more warmth than the 
 facts allowed. He fairly pitched himself into an 
 intimacy of reminiscence, and it was partly to 
 pay him for this, I suppose, and partly to gratify 
 a natural curiosity, that made me so abrupt with 
 him afterward. I remember looking around, 
 when we got down, at the little station where I 
 must wait two hours for the return stage, at 
 the seven unpainted pine cabins, at the eating- 
 house, and the store, and the two saloons, in the 
 instant hope of refuge, and then out across the 
 alkali flat fringed with sparse, unwholesome 
 pickle-weed, and deciding that that would not 
 do, and then turning round to take the situa 
 tion by the throat, as it were. There was Netta, 
 with that great child dragging on her arm and 
 her hat still on one side, with a silly conscious 
 ness of Doctor Challoner s movements, and he 
 still trying for the jovial note of old acquaint 
 ances met by chance. In a moment more I had 
 118 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 him around the corner of the station-house and 
 out with my question. 
 
 "Doctor Challoner, are you running away 
 with Netta Saybrick?" 
 
 "Well, no," trying to carry it jauntily; "I 
 think she is running away with me." Then, 
 all his pretension suddenly sagging on him like 
 an empty cayaque: "On my soul, I don t know 
 what s got into the woman. I was as surprised 
 as you were when she got on the stage with me 
 on my continuing to look steadily at him 
 "she was a pretty little thing . . . and the life 
 is devilish dull there. ... I suppose I flirted a 
 little" blowing himself out, as it were, with 
 an assumption of honesty "on my word, 
 there was nothing more than that." 
 
 Flirted! He called it that; but women do 
 not take their babies and run away from home 
 for the sake of a little flirting. The life was 
 devilish dull did he need to tell me that! 
 And she was pretty well, whatever had hap 
 pened he was bound to tell me that it was 
 nothing, and I was bound to behave as if I 
 believed him. 
 
 "She will go back," he began to say, looking 
 bleak and drawn in the searching light. "She 
 must go back! She must!" 
 119 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 "Well, maybe you can persuade her," said I ; 
 but I relented after that enough to take care of 
 the baby while he and Netta went for a walk. 
 
 The whole mesa and the flat crawled with 
 heat, and the steel rails ran on either side of 
 them like thin fires, as if the slagged track were 
 the appointed way that Netta had chosen to 
 walk. They went out as far as the section- 
 house and back toward the deserted station till 
 I could almost read their faces clear, and 
 turned again, back and forth through the heat- 
 fogged atmosphere like the figures in a dream. 
 I could see this much from their postures, that 
 Challoner was trying to hold to some consistent 
 attitude which he had adopted, and Netta 
 wasn t understanding it. I could see her throw 
 out her hands in a gesture of abandonment, 
 and then I saw her stand as if the Pit yawned 
 under her feet. The baby slept on a station 
 bench, and I kept the flies from him with a 
 branch of pickle-weed. I was out of it, smitten 
 anew with the utter inutility of all the standards 
 which were not bred of experience, but merely 
 came down to me with the family teaspoons. 
 Seen by the fierce desert light they looked like 
 the spoons, thin and worn at the edges. I 
 should have been ashamed to offer them to 
 
 120 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 Netta Saybrick. It was this sense of detached 
 helplessness toward the life at Maverick that 
 Netta afterward explained she and the other 
 women sensed but misread in me. They 
 couldn t account for it on any grounds except 
 that I felt myself above them. And all the 
 time I was sick with the strained, meticulous 
 inadequacy of my own soul. I understood 
 well enough, then, that the sense of personal 
 virtue comes to most women through an in 
 tervening medium of sedulous social guardian 
 ship. It is only when they love that it reaches 
 directly to the centre of consciousness, as if it 
 were ultimately nothing more than the in 
 stinctive movement of right love to preserve 
 itself by a voluntary seclusion. It was not her 
 faithlessness to Saybrick that tormented Netta 
 out there between the burning rails ; it was going 
 back to him that was the intolerable offence. 
 Passion had come upon her like a flame-burst, 
 heaven-sent; she justified it on the grounds of 
 its completeness, and lacked the sophistication 
 for any other interpretation. 
 
 Challoner was a bad man, but he was not bad 
 enough to reveal to Netta Saybrick the vulgar 
 cheapness of his own relation to the incident. 
 Besides, he hadn t time. In two hours the 
 
 121 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 return stage for Maverick left the station, and 
 he could never in that time get Netta Saybrick 
 to realize the gulf between his situation and 
 hers. 
 
 He came back to the station after a while on 
 some pretext, and said, with his back to Netta, 
 moving his lips with hardly any sound: "She 
 must go back on the stage. She must ! " Then 
 with a sudden setting of his jaws, "You ve got 
 to help me." He sat down beside me, and began 
 to devote himself to the baby and the flies. 
 
 Netta stood out for a while expecting him, 
 and then came and sat provisionally on the edge 
 of the station platform, ready at the slightest 
 hint of an opportunity to carry him away into 
 the glimmering heat out toward the station- 
 house, and resume the supremacy of her poor 
 charms. 
 
 She was resenting my presence as an inter 
 ference, and I believe always cherished a 
 thought that but for the accident of my being 
 there the incident might have turned out 
 differently. I could see that Challoner s at 
 titude, whatever it was, was beginning to make 
 itself felt. She was looking years older, and 
 yet somehow pitifully puzzled and young, as 
 if the self of her had had a wound which her 
 
 122 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 intelligence had failed to grasp. I could see, 
 too, that Challoner had made up his mind to be 
 quit of her, quietly if he could, but at any risk 
 of a scene, still to be quit. And it was forty 
 minutes till stage-time. 
 
 Challoner sat on the bare station bench with 
 his arm out above the baby protectingly it 
 was a manner always effective and began to 
 talk about goodness, of all things in the world. 
 Don t ask me what he said. It was the sort of 
 talk many women would have called beautiful, 
 and though it was mostly addressed to me, 
 it was every word of it directed to Netta Say- 
 brick s soul. Much of it went high and wide, 
 but I could catch the pale reflection of it in her 
 face like a miner guessing the sort of day it is 
 from the glimmer of it on a puddle at the bottom 
 of a shaft. In it Netta saw a pair of heroic 
 figures renouncing a treasure they had found 
 for the sake of the bitter goodness by which 
 the world is saved. They had had the courage 
 to take it while they could, but were much 
 too exemplary to enjoy it at the cost of pain 
 to any other heart. He started with the as 
 sumption that she meant to go back to Maverick, 
 and recurred to it with a skilful and hypnotic 
 insistence, painting upon her mind by large and 
 123 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 general inference the picture of himself, helped 
 greatly in his career by her noble renunciation 
 of him. As a matter of fact, Saybrick, if his 
 wife really had gone away with Doctor Chal- 
 loner, would have followed him up and shot him, 
 I suppose, and no end of vulgar and disagree 
 able things might have come from the affair; 
 but Challoner managed to keep it on so high 
 a plane that even I never thought of them until 
 long afterward. And right here is where the 
 uncertainty as to the part I really played begins. 
 I can never make up my mind whether Chal 
 loner, from long practice in such affairs, had 
 hit upon just the right note of extrication, or 
 whether, cornered, he fell back desperately on 
 the eternal Tightness . And what was he, to 
 know lightness at his need ? 
 
 He was terribly in earnest, holding Netta s 
 eyes with his own; his forehead sweated, 
 hollows showed about his eyes, and the dreadful 
 slackness of the corner of the mouth that 
 comes of the whole mind being drawn away 
 upon the object of attack to the neglect of its 
 defences. He was so bent on getting Netta 
 fixed in the idea that she must go back to 
 Maverick that if she had not been a good deal 
 of a fool she must have seen that he had given 
 124 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 away the whole situation into my hands. I 
 believed I hope I did the right thing, but 
 I am not sure I could have helped taking the 
 cue which was pressed upon me ; he was as bad 
 as they made them, but there I was lending 
 my whole soul to the accomplishment of his 
 purpose, which was, briefly, to get comfortably 
 off from an occasion in which he had behaved 
 very badly. 
 
 All this time Challoner kept a conscious at 
 tention on the stage stables far at the other 
 end of the shadeless street. The moment he 
 saw the driver come out of it with the horses, 
 the man s soul fairly creaked with the release 
 of tension. It released, too, an accession of 
 that power of personal fascination for which 
 he was remarkable. 
 
 Netta sat with her back to the street, and the 
 beautiful solicitude with which he took up the 
 baby at that moment, smoothed its dress and 
 tied on its little cap, had no significance for her. 
 It was not until she heard the rattle of the 
 stage turning into the road that she stood up 
 suddenly, alarmed. Challoner put the baby 
 into my arms. 
 
 Did I tell you that all this time between me 
 and this man there ran the inexplicable sense 
 125 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 of being bonded together; the same suggestion 
 of a superior and exclusive intimacy which 
 ensnared poor Netta Saybrick no doubt, the 
 absolute call of self and sex by which a man, 
 past all reasonableness and belief, ranges a 
 woman on his side. He was a Fakir, a common 
 quack, a scoundrel if you will, but there was 
 the call. I had answered it. I was under the 
 impression, though not remembering what he 
 said, when he had handed me that great lump 
 of a child, that I had received a command to 
 hold on to it, to get into the stage with it, 
 and not to give it up on any consideration; 
 and without saying anything, I had promised. 
 
 I do not know if it was the look that must have 
 passed between us at that, or the squeal of the 
 running-gear that shattered her dream, but I 
 perceived on the instant that Netta had had a 
 glimpse of where she stood. She saw herself for 
 the moment a fallen woman, forsaken, despised. 
 There was the Pit before her which Challoner s 
 desertion and my knowledge of it had digged. 
 She clutched once at her bosom and at her 
 skirts as if already she heard the hiss of crawling 
 shame. Then it was that Challoner turned 
 toward her with the Look. 
 
 It rose in his face and streamed to her from 
 126 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 his eyes as though it were the one thing in the 
 world of a completeness equal to the anguish 
 in her breast, as though, before it rested there, 
 it had been through all the troubled intricacies 
 of sin, and come upon the root of a superior 
 fineness that every soul feels piteously to lie 
 at the back of all its own affronting vagaries, 
 brooding over it in a large, gentle way. It was 
 the forgiveness nay, the obliteration of offence 
 and the most Challoner could have known 
 of forgivenesss was his own great need of it. 
 Out of that Look I could see the woman s soul 
 rising rehabilitated, astonished, and on the 
 instant, out there beyond the man and the 
 woman, between the thin fiery lines of the 
 rails, leading back to the horizon, the tall, 
 robed Figure writing in the sand. 
 
 Oh, it was a hallucination, if you like, of the 
 hour, the place, the perturbed mind, the daz 
 zling glimmer of the alkali flat, of the incident 
 of a sinful woman and a common fakir, faking an 
 absolution that he might the more easily avoid 
 an inconvenience, and I the tool made to see 
 incredibly by some trick of suggestion how 
 impossible it should be that any but the chief 
 of sinners should understand forgiveness. But 
 the Look continued to hold the moment in solu- 
 127 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 tion, while the woman climbed out of the Pit. 
 I saw her put out her hand with the instinctive 
 gesture of the sinking, and Challoner take it 
 with the formality of farewell; and as the dust 
 of the arriving stage billowed up between them, 
 the Figure turned, fading, dissolving . . . but 
 with the Look, consoling, obliterating. . . . 
 He too . . . ! 
 
 "It was very good of you, Mrs. Saybrick, 
 to give me so much of a good-bye ..." Chal 
 loner was saying as he put Netta into the stage ; 
 and then to me, "You must take good care of 
 her . . . good-bye." 
 
 "Good-bye, Frank" I had never called 
 Doctor Challoner by his name before. I did 
 not like him well enough to call him by it 
 at any time, but there was the Look; it had 
 reached out and enwrapped me in a kind of 
 rarefied intimacy of extenuation and under 
 standing. He stood on the station platform 
 staring steadily after us, and as long as we had 
 sight of him in the thick, bitter dust, the Look 
 held. 
 
 If this were a story merely, or a story of 
 Franklin Challoner, it would end there. He 
 never thought of us again, you may depend, 
 128 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 except to thank his stars for getting so lightly 
 off, and to go on in the security of his success 
 to other episodes from which he returned as 
 scatheless. 
 
 But I found out in a very few days that 
 whether it was to take rank as an incident or 
 an event in Netta Saybrick s life depended on 
 whether or not I said anything about it. No 
 body had taken any notice of her day s ride to 
 Posada. Say brick came home in about ten 
 days, and Netta seemed uncommonly glad to 
 see him, as if in the preoccupation of his 
 presence she found a solace for her fears. 
 
 But from the day of our return she had 
 evinced an extraordinary liking for my com 
 pany. She would be running in and out of the 
 house at all hours, offering to help me with my 
 sewing or to stir up a cake, kindly offices that 
 had to be paid in kind ; and if I slipped into the 
 neighbors on an errand, there a moment after 
 would come Netta. Very soon it became clear 
 to me that she was afraid of what I might tell. 
 So long as she had me under her immediate eye 
 she could be sure I was not taking away her 
 character, but when I was not, she must have 
 suffered horribly. I might have told, too, by 
 the woman s code; she was really not respect- 
 129 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 able, and we made a great deal of that in 
 Maverick. I might refuse to have anything 
 to do with her and justified myself explaining 
 why. 
 
 But Netta was not sure how much I knew, 
 and could not risk betrayal by a plea. She 
 had, too, the natural reticence of the villager, 
 and though she must have been aching for news 
 of Doctor Challoner, touch of him, the very 
 sound of his name, she rarely ever mentioned 
 it, but grew strained and thinner; watching, 
 watching. 
 
 If that incident was known, Netta would 
 have been ostracized and Saybrick might have 
 divorced her. And I was going dumb with 
 amazement to discover that nothing had come 
 of it, nothing could come of it so long as I kept 
 still. It was a deadly sin, as I had been taught, 
 as I believed of damnable potentiality; and 
 as long as nobody told it was as if it had never 
 been, as if that look of Challoner s had really 
 the power as it had the seeming of absolving 
 her from all soil and stain. 
 
 I cannot now remember if I was ever tempted 
 
 to tell on Netta Saybrick, but I know with the 
 
 obsession of that look upon my soul I never did. 
 
 And in the mean time, from being so much in 
 
 130 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 each other s company, Netta and I became 
 very good friends. That was why, a little more 
 than a year afterward, she chose to have me 
 with her when her second child was born. In 
 Maverick we did things for one another that in 
 more sophisticated communities go to the 
 service of paid attendants. That was the time 
 when the suspicion that had lain at the bottom 
 of Netta s shallow eyes whenever she looked 
 at me went out of them forever. 
 
 It was along about midnight and the worst 
 yet to come. I sat holding Netta s hands, and 
 beyond in the room where the lamp was, the 
 doctor lifted Saybrick through his stressful 
 hour with cribbage and toddy. I could see the 
 gleam of the light on Saybrick s red, hairy 
 hands, a driller s hands, and whenever a sound 
 came from the inner room, the uneasy lift of 
 his shoulders and the twitching of his lip ; then 
 the doctor pushed the whiskey over toward 
 him and jovially dealt the cards anew. 
 
 Netta, tossing on her pillow, came into range 
 with Saybrick s blunt profile outlined against 
 the cheaply papered wall, and I suppose her 
 husband s distress was good to her to see. She 
 looked at him a long time quietly. 
 
 " Henry s a good man," she said at last. 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 "Yes," I said; and then she turned to me 
 narrowly with the expiring spark of anxious 
 cunning in her eyes. 
 
 "And I ve been a good wife to him," said 
 she. It was half a challenge. And I, trapped 
 by the hour, became a fakir in my turn, called 
 instantly on all my soul and answered with 
 the Look "Everybody knows that, Netta"- 
 held on steadily until the spark went out. How 
 ever I had done it I could not tell, but I saw 
 the trouble go out of the woman s soul as the 
 lids drooped, and with it out of my own heart 
 the last of the virtuous resentment of the un- 
 tempted. I had really forgiven her; how then 
 was it possible for the sin to rise up and trouble 
 her more? Mind you, I grew up in a church 
 that makes a great deal of the forgiveness of 
 sins and signifies it by a tremendous particu 
 larity about behavior, and the most I had 
 learned of the efficient exercise of forgiveness 
 iwas from the worst man I had ever known. 
 
 About an hour before dawn, when a wind 
 began to stir, and out on the mesa the coyotes 
 howled returning from the hunt, stooping to 
 tuck the baby in her arms, I felt Netta s lips 
 brush against my hand. 
 
 "You ve been mighty good to me," she said. 
 132 
 
THE FAKIR 
 
 Well if I were pushed for it, I should think 
 it worth mentioning but I am not so sure. 
 
 When Tennessee, after about sixty years of 
 prospecting, grub - staking, and days wages, 
 had made a little strike, he declared himself 
 done with desertness, and of a mind to go down 
 to the city to some recently developed con 
 nections and heirs, to be properly taken care 
 of for the rest of his years. That was along in 
 the beginning of winter, when interest narrowed 
 to watching the snow-line approach and recede 
 along the flank of the Sierras, and the under 
 taking was accounted to him for wisdom. 
 And about two months later, when I was out 
 looking mesaward for the pale tinge of the 
 freshening sage that, however fast you may 
 seek toward it, is no more to be come up with 
 than the mirage, ^suddenly across my prospect 
 bulked the large, lumbering figure of Tennessee. 
 What he said was that in the city he could 
 never step out of the door but there was a house 
 right bung up against his eyes. 
 
 "A man," said Tennessee, "don t have no 
 chance to stretch his vision." 
 
 But when the Rev. William Calvin Gains 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 came down fresh from his seminary somewhere 
 about Oakland to awaken, in the best imitation 
 of a popular city preacher he could manage, our 
 interest in spiritual things, he made just the 
 opposite mistake of not understanding that 
 here the vision stretches beyond the boundary 
 of sense and things. Though the desert has had 
 a reputation in times past for the making of 
 religious leaders, it is no field for converts. 
 Judge how a conventional, pew-fed religion 
 would flourish in the presence of what I am 
 about to relate to you. 
 
X 
 
 THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 THE crux of this story for the Pocket- 
 Hunter was that he had known the two 
 men, Mac and Creelman, before they came into 
 it; known them, in fact, in the beginning of 
 that mutual distrust which grew out of an 
 earlier friendliness into one of those expansive 
 enmities which in the spined and warted hu 
 manity of the camps have as ready an accept 
 ance as the devoted partnerships of which Wells 
 Bassit furnished the pre-eminent example. It 
 was, he believed, in some such relationship 
 their acquaintance had begun, and from which 
 they now drew the sustenance of those separate 
 devils of hate that, nesting in corrosive hollows 
 of their hosts, rose to froth and rage, each at 
 the mere intimation of a merit in the other. 
 
 No one knew what the turn of the screw had 
 been that set them gnashing, but it was sup- 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 posed, on no better evidence, perhaps, than that 
 such trouble is at the bottom of most quarrels 
 in the camps, to have been about a mine. The 
 final crisis, the very memory of which seemed 
 to hold for him a moment of recurrent, hair- 
 lifting horror, was known by the Pocket- 
 Hunter, and by some of the others, to have 
 been brought on by an Indian woman down 
 Parrimint-way. 
 
 She was Mac s woman; though, except as 
 being his, he was not thought to set particular 
 store by her. He used to leave her in his 
 cabin while he was off in the Hills for a three 
 weeks pasear; but the tacit admission of an 
 Indian woman as no fit subject for white men 
 to fight over forbade his being put to the ordi 
 nary provocation on account of her. There 
 fore, when Creelman projected his offence, 
 which was to excite in his enemy the desire for 
 killing without providing him with a sufficient 
 excuse, there was a vague notion moving in the 
 heavy fibre of his mind that there was a species 
 of humor in what he was about to do. But 
 he would probably not have gone on to Tres 
 Pinos and told of it, if he had known how soon 
 it was to come to Mac s ears. 
 
 This, you understand, was long after their 
 136 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 grudge had climbed by inconsiderable occa 
 sions to the point where Mac had several times 
 offered to kill Creelman on no motion but the 
 pleasure of being rid of his company. 
 
 Mac was a sickly man, and by that, and his 
 having had the worst of it in their earlier en 
 counters, his rage so much the more possessed 
 him that, when he had come back to his cabin 
 and the Indian woman had told him her story, 
 he was able by that mere spur of a possession 
 trifled with to take the short leap from intent 
 to performance at a bound. There was no such 
 bodily leap possible, of course ; he had to trudge 
 the whole of one day on foot to Tres Pinos, an 
 old weakness battling with his rage. He was 
 one of those illy-furnished souls whom the 
 wilderness despoils most completely hair, 
 beard, and skin of him burned to one sandy 
 sallowness, the eyelashes of no color, the voice 
 of no timbre, more or less stiffened at the 
 joints by the poison of leaded ores, his very 
 name shorn of its distinguishing syllable; no 
 more of him left, in fact, than would serve as 
 a vehicle for hating Creelman. When he came 
 to Tres Pinos and learned that the other had 
 gone on from there, nobody would tell him 
 where, the rage of bafflement threw him into 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 some kind of a fit, and blood gushed from his 
 nose and mouth. 
 
 All this the Pocket-Hunter was possessed of 
 when he set out shortly after with his pack and 
 burros, prospecting toward the Dry Creek dis 
 trict, where in due time he crossed the trail of 
 Shorty Wells and Long Tom Bassit. There 
 was no particular reason why Wells should 
 have been called Shorty, except that Long 
 Tom was of a stature to give to any average 
 man in his vicinity a title to that adjective. 
 Further than that he gave no other warrant to 
 the virtues, aptitudes, propensities with which 
 Shorty credited him, than the negative one of 
 not denying them, in camps where they were 
 known the opinion gained ground that there 
 was very little to Long Tom but his size and 
 his amiability, which was remarked upon, but 
 that Shorty, having discovered this creditable 
 baggage in his own pack, had laid it to Bassit, 
 not being able to say else how he came by it; 
 but there they were, as inveterate a pair of 
 partners as the camps ever bred, owning to 
 no greater satisfaction than just to be abroad 
 in the hills together following the Golden 
 Hope; and there on a day between Dry Creek 
 and Denman s the Pocket-Hunter found them. 
 
 38 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 The way he came to tell me about it was this. 
 I had laid by for a nooning under the quaking- 
 asp by Peterscreek on the trail from Tunawai, 
 and found him before me with his head under 
 one of those woven shelters of living boughs 
 which the sheep-herders leave in that country, 
 and he moved out to make room for me in its 
 hand s-breadth of shade. 
 
 Understand, there was no more shade to be 
 got there. Straight before us went the meagre 
 sands; to every yard or so of space its foot- 
 high, sapless shrub. Somewhere at the back 
 of us lifted, out of a bank of pinkish- violet mist, 
 sierras white and airy. Eastward where the 
 earth sagged on its axis, in some dreary, beg 
 gared sleep, pale, wispish clouds went up. Now 
 and then to no wind the quaking-asps clattered 
 their dry bones of leaves. 
 
 We had been talking, the Pocket-Hunter and 
 I, of that curious obsession of travel by which 
 the mind, pressing on in the long, open trail 
 ahead of the dragging desert pace, seems often 
 to develop a capacity for going on alone in it, 
 so that it becomes involved in one sliding pict 
 ure, as it were, of what is ahead and what at 
 hand, until, when the body stops for necessary 
 rest and food, it is impossible to say if it is 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 here where it halted, or there where the mind 
 possessed. I had said that this accounted to 
 me not only for the extraordinary feats of en 
 durance in desert travel, but for the great diffi 
 culty prospectors have in relocating places they 
 have marked, so mazed they are by that mixed 
 aspect of strangeness and familiarity that every 
 district wears, which, long before it has been 
 entered by the body, has been appraised by the 
 eye of the mind. 
 
 "But suppose," said the Pocket-Hunter, "it 
 really does go on by itself?" 
 
 "And where," I wished to know, "would be 
 the witness to that, unless it brought back a 
 credible report of what it had seen?" 
 
 "Or done," suggested the Pocket-Hunter, 
 "what it set out to do. That would clinch it, 
 I fancy." 
 
 "But the mind can only take notice," I pro 
 tested. * It can t do anything without its body. 
 
 "Or another one," suggested the Pocket- 
 Hunter. 
 
 "Ah," said I, "tell me the story." 
 
 It was, went on the Pocket- Hunter, after 
 he had told me all that I have set down about 
 140 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 the four men who made the story, about nine 
 of the morning (when (he came to Dry Creek on 
 the way to Jawbone Canon, and the day was 
 beginning to curl up and smoke along the 
 edges with the heat, rocking with the motion 
 of it, and water of mirage rolling like quick 
 silver in the hollows.) What the Pocket-Hunter 
 said exactly was that it was a morning in May, 
 but it conies to the same thing. He had just 
 come out of the wash by Cactus Flat when he 
 was aware of a man chasing about in the heat 
 fog, and making out to want something more 
 than common. Even as early as that in the 
 incident the Pocket-Hunter thought he had 
 encountered some faint, floating films from 
 that coil of inexplicable dreadfulness in which 
 he was so soon to find himself involved, and 
 yet he was not sure that it might not have 
 been chiefly in the extraordinary manner of 
 the man s approach, seeing him caught up in 
 the mirage, drawn out and dwarfed again, 
 "like some kind of human accordion," said the 
 Pocket-Hunter, and now rolled toward him 
 with limbs grotesquely multiplied in a river of 
 mist. 
 
 Presently, however, he got the man between 
 him and the sun, in such a way that he was 
 141 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 able to make out it was himself who was 
 wanted, and when he had slewed the burros 
 round to come up to him, he could see pkinly 
 who it was, and it was Wells. It was altogether 
 so unusual a circumstance to find Shorty Wells 
 anywhere out of eyeshot of Tom Bassit that it 
 was not reassuring, and Shorty himself was so 
 sensible of it that almost before any greeting 
 passed, he had let out with certain swallowings 
 of the throat that Tom was dead. 
 
 It appeared the two of them had come over 
 Tinpah two days before, and Bassit, who had 
 a weakness of the heart that made high places 
 a menace to him, had accomplished the Pass 
 apparently ir good order. But when they 
 had taken the immense drop that carries one 
 from the crest of Tinpah to Dry Creek like a 
 bucket in a shaft, something had gone sudden 
 ly, irretrievably wrong. There had been a half 
 collapse at the foot of the trail, and a complete 
 one a few miles back on the trail to Denman s, 
 toward which they had turned in extremity. 
 Tom had suffered agonizingly, so that if there 
 had been any place nearer from which help 
 might conceivably have come, Shorty could not 
 have left him to go and fetch it; and along 
 about the hour which the Indians call, all in 
 142 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 one word, the bluish-light-of-dawn, Tom had 
 died. 
 
 All the way back to camp, after he had met 
 the Pocket-Hunter, Shorty kept arguing with 
 himself as to whether, if he had done the one 
 thing or had not done the other, it would have 
 been better for poor Tom, and the Pocket-Hunter 
 assuring him for his comfort that it would not, 
 keeping back, by some native stroke of sym 
 pathy, what he had lately heard at Tres Pinos 
 that Creelman had a cabin in the Jawbone, 
 and was living in it what time Mac was camp 
 ing on his trail. It was no farther from the 
 foot of Tinpah than they had come toward 
 Denman s, but in the opposite direction, and 
 from their not turning there it seemed likely 
 they had not heard of it kinder if Shorty 
 might never come to know, seeing he had not 
 known it in time to be of use to Tom. And 
 this was a point the Pocket-Hunter was pres 
 ently to make sure of, that neither Shorty nor 
 Long Tom was acquainted with the location of 
 the cabin, nor with Mac nor Creelman by sight. 
 
 As it was, he made the most of comforting 
 Shorty for having stayed by his partner to 
 the last. 
 
 "I never left him till he croaked," Shorty 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 told him. "It was along toward morning he went 
 quiet, and just as I was goin for to cover him 
 with the blanket, he croaked and I come away. 
 
 There was that touch of dread in him which 
 ever the figure of death excites in simple minds, 
 which, perhaps as much as the wish to bring 
 help to the burial, had turned him from the 
 body of the friend who was, and now kept 
 his eyes fixed persistently upon the ground as 
 they came back to it across the flat, which here, 
 made smooth in shining, leprous patches of 
 alkali, presented no screen to the disordered 
 camp higher than the sickly pickle-weed about 
 its borders. The Pocket-Hunter, therefore, as 
 they came on toward the place where from two 
 crossed sticks of Shorty s fire a thin point of 
 flame wavered upward, had time for wondering 
 greatly at what he saw, which was so little 
 what he had been led to expect there that he 
 had not found yet any warrant for mentioning 
 it, when Shorty, gathering himself toward what 
 he had to face, lifting up his eyes, let out a 
 kind of howl and ran. 
 
 The Pocket-Hunter said he did not know 
 how soon Shorty grasped the fact, which he 
 himself perceived with his eyes some time be 
 fore his intelligence took hold of it, that the 
 144 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 body lying doubled on the sand some yards 
 from the empty bed was not the same that 
 Shorty had left stiffening under the blanket. 
 He thought they must have both taken account 
 of it at the same time, and been stricken dumb 
 by the sheer horror of it, for he could not re 
 member a word spoken by either of them, be 
 tween Shorty s sharp yell of astonishment and 
 the time when they took it by the shoulders 
 and turned it to the sun. 
 
 The limbs were still lax enough with recent 
 life to settle slowly as they stirred the body; 
 there were no wounds upon it, but blood had 
 gushed freely from the nose and mouth. It 
 was a smallish man of no particular color or 
 complexion, with that slight distortion of the 
 joints common in a country of leaded ores. 
 By these marks, as they discovered themselves 
 in the sharp light, the Pocket-Hunter was able 
 to identify him as a man Shorty had never 
 seen, last heard of at Tres Pinos, where he had 
 fallen by rage into some such seizure as had 
 apparently overtaken him upon the trail. 
 That he should be here at all, and in such a 
 case as this, was sufficiently horrifying, but it 
 was nothing to the appalling wonder as to 
 what had become of Tom. 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 There was the impress of his body upon the 
 bed, and the blanket, shed in loose folds across 
 the foot, now lifted a little and buoyed by the 
 wind, and in all the wide day nothing to hide 
 a man, except where, miles behind, the sheer 
 bulk of Tinpah was split by shadowy gulfs of 
 canons. Shorty was, for the time, fairly totter 
 ing in his mind. He would pry foolishly about 
 the camp, getting back by quick turns and 
 pounces to the stretched body on the sand, as 
 though in the interim it might have recovered 
 from its extraordinary illusion and become the 
 body of his friend again. By degrees the 
 Pocket-Hunter constrained him to piece out 
 the probable circumstance. 
 
 They had to begin, of course, with Tom s 
 not being dead, and to go on from that to the 
 previous fact of Mac working his poor body 
 over the long stretches between Tres Pirios and 
 the Jawbone, where he must have learned that 
 Creelman was hiding. Well, he had a poor 
 body, and it must have given out under him 
 just as he arrived in camp, very shortly after 
 Shorty had left it, and, over-ridden by his er 
 rand, had persuaded Long Tom, then recovering 
 from his trance or swoon, to rise and go on 
 with it. 
 
 146 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 1 To kill Creelman ! Tom ? 
 
 Shorty s imagination flagged visibly in the 
 eye of Tom s huge amiability, but the Pocket- 
 Hunter came around triumphantly. 
 
 "Well, he went!" 
 
 "But he couldn t have," Shorty put forward, 
 hopefully, as if any bar to his partner s leaving 
 the camp might somehow result in proving him 
 still there. "He hadn t stood on his feet for 
 twenty- four hours, and suffered something aw 
 ful. Besides, he didn t know there was a 
 cabin; if he had, I d have gone there yester 
 day." 
 
 "Mac would have told him, of course." 
 
 Shorty drooped dejectedly before a supposi 
 tion that, however large the hope it entailed of 
 finding his partner still in the flesh, afforded 
 no relief to the incontrovertible persistence of 
 evidence in his own mind. "But he croaked, 
 I tell you they re dead when they croak, ain t 
 they?" 
 
 Whatever was said to that was said by the 
 zt-z-z-t of desert flies punctuating the heavy 
 heat. At the sound of it little beads of sweat 
 broke out on Shorty s face. 
 
 "Look a-here," he brought out, finally, "if 
 this other fellow, Mac here, was as bad off as 
 ii 147 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 you say, why didn t Tom go to him; kind of 
 ease him off like ? What for did he go off and 
 leave him crumpled up like that?" 
 
 "He wouldn t have died until after Tom left, 
 Mac wouldn t," the Pocket-Hunter reminded 
 him. "What makes you so sure?" 
 
 "Tom never walked none after we struck 
 camp." Shorty was secure of his ground here. 
 "And there s no tracks of him except where 
 he came in alongside of me and goin out 
 there!" The print of Tom s large feet had 
 turned toward the Jawbone. "Besides," he 
 returned to it with anxiety, "what would he 
 go to Creelman s for?" 
 
 This was a point, and the Pocket-Hunter 
 took as much time as was necessary to shroud 
 the dead man in Tom s blanket to consider it. 
 He found this at last: 
 
 "Tom," he said, "was a peaceable man?" 
 
 "None peaceabler," admitted Tom s partner. 
 
 "Well, then, when he found this little "(the 
 adjective checked out of respect to the object 
 of it being as he was) "Mac here so set on 
 killing, he thought it no more than right to 
 get on ahead and give Creelman a hint of what 
 was coming to him." 
 
 This being so much what might have been 
 148 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 expected of Tom, it appeared insensibly to give 
 greater plausibility to the whole occasion. It 
 left them for the moment free to set out on 
 Tom s trail with almost a movement of natural 
 ness. It lasted, however, only long enough to 
 see them into the steady, flowing stride of 
 desert travel; the recurrence of that motion, 
 perhaps, set up again in Shorty s mind the 
 consciousness of loss in which it had some two 
 hours earlier begun, and the consideration of 
 mere practical details, such as the distance from 
 the camp to Creelman s, swept back to the full 
 the conviction of unreality. 
 
 Looking ahead at the long trudge between 
 them and the mouth of the canon, where in that 
 clear light, on that level mesa, no man could 
 have moved unespied by them, where, in fact, 
 no man at that moment was moving, he broke 
 out in a kind of exasperated wail: 
 
 "But he couldn t have, I tell you; he couldn t 
 have walked it. ... He was dead, I tell you. . . . 
 He croaked and I covered him up. . . ." 
 
 It became momentarily clearer to the Pocket- 
 Hunter that unless they came soon, behind 
 some screening weed, in some unguessed hollow, 
 upon Long Tom s huddled body, collapsed in the 
 recurrent weakness of his disorder, so to restore 
 149 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 the event to reasonableness, he must find him 
 self swamped again in the horror of the in 
 explicable, out of which they had been specious 
 ly pulled by the Pocket-Hunter s argument. 
 
 It was not until they came to the loose shale 
 and sand at the mouth of the canon that 
 Shorty reverted again to the form of his amaze 
 ment. 
 
 "Did you notice," said he, "anything queer 
 about Tom s tracks?" 
 
 "Queer, how?" 
 
 "Well different?" 
 
 "Like he thought he had a game leg?" sug 
 gested the Pocket-Hunter. 
 
 "Well, he hadn t ... but the other man . . . 
 back yonder . . . he had a game leg." 
 
 "Shorty! Shorty!" the Pocket-Hunter fairly 
 begged. "You ain t . . . you mustn t ... let 
 your mind run on them things!" 
 
 "Well, he had," persisted Wells. His voice 
 clicked with dryness, trailed off whispering. It 
 seemed to the Pocket-Hunter, suddenly, that 
 the twenty steps or so between the man so 
 certainly dead in his tracks on one side the 
 fire back there, and the supposedly dead arising 
 in his on the other, had swelled to immeasurable 
 space. It was then there came into his mind 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 the remainder of that singular obsession of the 
 trail in the notice of which our conversation 
 had begun. He saw on the instant Mac inch 
 ing out from Tres Pinos on his unmatched poor 
 legs, his hate riding far before him, blown 
 forward by some devil s blast, tugging at him 
 like a kite at its ballast, lifting him past in 
 credible stretches of hot sand and cutting stone, 
 until it dropped him there. He wrenched his 
 mind away from that by an effort, and fixed it 
 on the pale pine-colored square of Creelman s 
 cabin, where it began to show in the shadowy 
 gulf of the canon. 
 
 The door was open and the curtains of the 
 two small windows on either side half drawn 
 against a glare which would have been gone from 
 that side of the canon more than an hour ago. 
 Here, as they halted to take notice of it, some 
 expiring gasps of bluish smoke from Creelman s 
 breakfast fire went up from the tin chimney 
 against the basalt wall. As they came near 
 they observed a large flaccid hand hanging out 
 over the sill. What they made out further 
 was Creelman s body, extended face downward, 
 barring the door. A small lizard tic-tacked 
 on the unpainted boards across the hand that 
 did not start at it, and disappeared into the 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 shadow of the room, where, as if this intrusion 
 gave them leave to look, they perceived among 
 the broken plates and disordered furniture a 
 broken pack-stick, Creelman s knife, open and 
 blooded the figure of Long Tom, half propped 
 against the footboard of the bunk, dropping 
 weakly from a wound. It was Tom, though 
 over his face as it leered up at them was spread 
 a strange new expressiveness, such a superficial 
 and furtive change as frivolous passers-by will 
 add sometimes to the face of a poster with 
 pencil touches, provoking to half - startled 
 laughter; plain enough to have shocked them 
 back, even as against the witness of clothes and 
 hair and features, from the instant s recogni 
 tion, to produce in them an amazement, mo 
 mentary, yet long enough for the dying man 
 to take note of them unfriendlily, and to have 
 addressed himself to the Pocket-Hunter. 
 
 "Came to see the fight, did you? It s 
 damned well over . . . but I did for him . . . the 
 
 , , !" His body sank visibly with 
 
 the stream of curses. 
 
 But the faith of Shorty was proof even against 
 this. He had cleared the body of Creelmanat 
 a stride, and was on his knees beside his part 
 ner, crying very simply. 
 152 
 
THE POCKET-HUNTER S STORY 
 
 "Oh, Tom, Tom," he begged, "you never 
 done it? Say you never done it, pardner, say 
 you never!" 
 
 "Aw, who the hell are you?" The lewd eyes 
 rolled up at him, he gave two or three long 
 gasps which ended in a short choking gurgle, 
 the body started slightly, and dropped. 
 
 "Come away, Shorty, he s croaked," said the 
 Pocket-Hunter not unkindly; but Shorty knelt 
 on there, crying quietly as he watched the dead 
 man s features settle and stiffen to the likeness 
 of his friend. 
 
XI 
 
 THE READJUSTMENT 
 
 EMMA JEFFRIES had been dead and 
 buried three days. The sister who had 
 come to the funeral had taken Emma s child 
 away with her, and the house was swept and 
 aired; then, when it seemed there was least 
 occasion for it, Emma came back. The neigh 
 bor woman who had nursed her was the first 
 to know it. It was about seven of the evening 
 in a mellow gloom: the neighbor woman was 
 sitting on her own stoop with her arms wrapped 
 in her apron, and all at once she found herself 
 going along the street under an urgent sense 
 that Emma needed her. She was half-way 
 dowp. the block before she recollected that this 
 was impossible, for Mrs. Jeffries was dead and 
 buried; but as soon as she came opposite the 
 house she was aware of what had happened. 
 It was all open to the summer air; except that 
 
THE READJUSTMENT 
 
 it was a little neater, not otherwise than the 
 rest of the street. It was quite dark; but the 
 presence of Emma Jeffries streamed from it and 
 betrayed it more than a candle. It streamed 
 out steadily across the garden, and even as it 
 reached her, mixed with the smell of the damp 
 mignonette, the neighbor woman owned to her 
 self that she had always known Emma would 
 come back. 
 
 "A sight stranger if she wouldn t," thought 
 the woman who had nursed her. "She wasn t 
 ever one to throw off things easily." 
 
 Emma Jeffries had taken death as she had 
 taken everything in life, hard. She had met 
 it with the same bright, surface competency 
 that she had presented to the squalor of the 
 encompassing desertness, to the insuperable 
 commonness of Sim Jeffries, to the affliction of 
 her crippled child; and the intensity of her 
 wordless struggle against it had caught the at 
 tention of the townspeople and held it in a 
 shocked curious awe. She was so long a-dying, 
 lying there in that little low house, hearing the 
 abhorred footsteps going about her rooms and 
 the vulgar procedure of the community encroach 
 upon her like the advances of the sand wastes 
 on an unwatered field. For Emma had always 
 155 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 wanted things different, wanted them with a 
 fury of intentness that implied offensiveness in 
 things as they were. And the townspeople had 
 taken offence, the more so because she was not 
 to be surprised in any inaptitude for their own 
 kind of success. Do what you could, you could 
 never catch Emma Jeffries in a wrapper after 
 three o clock in the afternoon. And she would 
 never talk about the child in a country where 
 so little ever happened that even trouble was 
 a godsend if it gave you something to talk about. 
 It was reported that she did not even talk to Sim. 
 But there the common resentment got back 
 at her. If she had thought to effect anything 
 with Sim Jeffries against the benumbing spirit 
 of the place, the evasive hopefulness, the large 
 sense of leisure that ungirt the loins, if she still 
 hoped somehow to get away with him to some 
 place for which by her dress, by her manner, 
 she seemed forever and unassailably fit, it was 
 foregone that nothing would come of it. They 
 knew Sim Jeffries better than that. Yet so 
 vivid had been the force of her wordless dis 
 satisfaction that when the fever took her and 
 she went down like a pasteboard figure in the 
 damp, the wonder was that nothing toppled 
 with her. And, as if she too had felt her- 
 
 156 
 
THE READJUSTMENT 
 
 self indispensable, Emma Jeffries had come 
 back. 
 
 The neighbor woman crossed the street, and 
 as she passed the far corner of the garden, 
 Jeffries spoke to her. He had been standing, 
 she did not know how long a time, behind the 
 syringa-bush, and moved even with her along 
 the fence until they came to the gate. She 
 could see in the dusk that before speaking he 
 wet his lips with his tongue. 
 
 "She s in there," he said, at last. 
 
 "Emma?" 
 
 He nodded. "I been sleeping at the store 
 since but I thought I d be more comforta 
 ble as soon as I opened the door there she 
 was." 
 
 "Did you see her?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "How do you know, then?" 
 
 "Don t you know?" 
 
 The neighbor felt there was nothing to say 
 to that. 
 
 "Come in," he whispered, huskily. They 
 slipped by the rose-tree and the wistaria, and sat 
 down on the porch at the side. A door swung 
 inward behind them. They felt the Presence 
 in the dusk beating like a pulse. 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 What do you think she wants ? " said Jeffries. 
 "Do you reckon it s the boy?" 
 
 "Like enough." 
 
 "He s better off with his aunt. There was 
 no one here to take care of him like his mother 
 wanted." He raised his voice unconsciously 
 with a note of justification, addressing the room 
 behind. 
 
 "I am sending fifty dollars a month," he 
 said; "he can go with the best of them." 
 
 He went on at length to explain all the ad 
 vantage that was to come to the boy from 
 living at Pasadena, and the neighbor woman 
 bore him out in it. 
 
 "He was glad to go," urged Jeffries to the 
 room. "He said it was what his mother would 
 have wanted." 
 
 They were silent then a long time, while the 
 Presence seemed to swell upon them and en 
 croached upon the garden. 
 
 Finally, "I gave Ziegler the order for the 
 monument yesterday, Jeffries threw out, appeas- 
 ingly. "It s to cost three hundred and fifty." 
 
 The Presence stirred. The neighbor thought 
 she could fairly see the controlled tolerance 
 with which Emma Jeffries endured the evidence 
 of Sim s ineptitudes. 
 
THE READJUSTMENT 
 
 They sat on helplessly without talking after 
 that until the woman s husband came to the 
 fence and called her. 
 
 "Don t go," begged Sim. 
 
 "Hush," she said. "Do you want all the 
 town to know? You had naught but good 
 from Emma living, and no call to expect harm 
 from her now. It s natural she should come 
 back if if she was lonesome like in the 
 place where she s gone to." 
 
 "Emma wouldn t come back to this place," 
 Jeffries protested, "without she wanted some 
 thing." 
 
 "Well, then, you ve got to find out," said the 
 neighbor woman. 
 
 All the next day she saw, whenever she passed 
 the house, that Emma was still there. It was 
 shut and barred, but the Presence lurked behind 
 the folded blinds and fumbled at the doors. 
 When it was night and the moths began in the 
 columbine under the windows, it went out and 
 walked in the garden. 
 
 Jeffries was waiting at the gate when the 
 neighbor woman came. He sweated with help 
 lessness in the warm dusk, and the Presence 
 brooded upon them like an apprehension that 
 grows by being entertained. 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 She wants something," he appealed, "but 
 I can t make out what. Emma knows she is 
 welcome to everything I ve got. Everybody 
 knows I ve been a good provider." 
 
 The neighbor woman remembered suddenly 
 the only time she had ever drawn close to Emma 
 Jeffries touching the boy. They had sat up 
 with it together all one night in some childish 
 ailment, and she had ventured a question. 
 "What does his father think?" And Emma 
 had turned her a white, hard face of surpassing 
 dreariness. 
 
 "I don t know," she admitted, "he never 
 says." 
 
 "There s more than providing," suggested 
 the neighbor woman. 
 
 "Yes. There s feeling . . . but she had 
 enough to do to put up with me. I had no call 
 to be troubling her with such." He left off to 
 mop his forehead, and began again. 
 
 "Feelings!" he said, "there s times a man 
 gets so wore out with feelings he doesn t have 
 them any more." 
 
 He talked, and presently it grew clear to the 
 
 woman that he was voiding all the stuff of his 
 
 life, as if he had sickened on it and was now done. 
 
 It was a little soul knowing itself and not good 
 
 1 60 
 
THE READJUSTMENT 
 
 to see. What was singular was that the Presence 
 left off walking in the garden, came and caught 
 like a gossamer on the ivy-tree, swayed by the 
 breath of his broken sentences. He talked, 
 and the neighbor woman saw him for once as he 
 saw himself and Emma, snared and floundering 
 in an inexplicable unhappiness. He had been 
 disappointed, too. She had never relished the 
 man he was, and it made him ashamed. That 
 was why he had never gone away, lest he should 
 make her ashamed among her own kind. He 
 was her husband, he could not help that though 
 he was sorry for it. But he could keep the 
 offence where least was made of it. And there 
 was a child she had wanted a child ; but even 
 then he had blundered begotten a cripple 
 upon her. He blamed himself utterly, searched 
 out the roots of his youth for the answer to that, 
 until the neighbor woman flinched to hear him. 
 But the Presence stayed. 
 
 He had never talked to his wife about the 
 child. How should he ? There was the fact 
 the advertisement of his incompetence. And 
 she had never talked to him. That was the one 
 blessed and unassailable memory; that she had 
 spread silence like a balm over his hurt. In 
 return for it he had never gone away. He had 
 161 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 resisted her that he might save her from showing 
 among her own kind how poor a man he was. 
 With every word of this ran the fact of his love 
 for her as he had loved her, with all the stripes 
 of clean and uncleanness. He bared himself 
 as a child without knowing; and the Presence 
 stayed. The talk trailed off at last to the 
 commonplaces of consolation between the 
 retchings of his spirit. The Presence lessened 
 and streamed toward them on the wind of the 
 garden. When it touched them like the warm 
 air of noon that lies sometimes in hollow places 
 after nightfall, the neighbor woman rose and 
 went away. 
 
 The next night she did not wait for him. 
 When a rod outside the town it was a very 
 little one the burrowing owls whoo-whooed, 
 she hung up her apron and went to talk with 
 Emma Jeffries. The Presence was there, drawn 
 in, lying close. She found the key between the 
 wistaria and the first pillar of the porch, but as 
 soon as she opened the door she felt the chill 
 that might be expected by one intruding on 
 Emma Jeffries in her own house. 
 
 " The Lord is my shepherd/ " said the neigh 
 bor woman ; it was the first religious phrase that 
 occurred to her; then she said the whole of the 
 162 
 
THE READJUSTMENT 
 
 psalm and after that a hymn. She had come in 
 through the door and stood with her back to it 
 and her hand upon the knob. Everything was 
 just as Mrs. Jeffries had left it, with the waiting 
 air of a room kept for company. 
 
 "Em," she said, boldly, when the chill had 
 abated a little before the sacred words. "Em 
 Jeffries, I ve got something to say to you. 
 And you ve got to hear," she added with firm 
 ness, as the white curtains stirred duskily at 
 the window. "You wouldn t be talked to 
 about your troubles when . . . you were here 
 before; and we humored you. But now there 
 is Sim to be thought of. I guess you heard 
 what you came for last night, and got good of it. 
 Maybe it would have been better if Sim had said 
 things all along instead of hoarding them in his 
 heart, but any way he has said them now. And 
 what I want to say is, if you was staying on 
 with the hope of hearing it again, you d be mak 
 ing a mistake. You was an uncommon woman, 
 Emma Jeffries, and there didn t none of us 
 understand you very well, nor do you justice 
 maybe ; but Sim is only a common man, and I 
 understand him because I m that way myself. 
 And if you think he ll be opening his heart to 
 you every night, or be any different from what 
 
 ia 163 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 he s always been on acount of what s happened, 
 that s a mistake too . . . and in a little while, if 
 you stay, it will be as bad as it always was . . . 
 Men are like that. . . . You d better go now 
 while there s understanding between you." She 
 stood staring into the darkling room that seemed 
 suddenly full of turbulence and denial. It 
 seemed to beat upon her and take her breath, 
 but she held on. 
 
 "You ve got to go ... Em . . . and I m going 
 to stay until you do." She said this with 
 finality, and then began again. 
 
 " The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a 
 broken heart, " and repeated the passage to 
 the end. Then as the Presence sank before it. 
 "You better go, Emma," persuasively, and again 
 after an interval: 
 
 " He shall deliver thee in six troubles, yea, in 
 seven shall no evil touch thce. 
 
 . . . The Presence gathered itself and was still. 
 She could make out that it stood over against 
 the opposite corner by the gilt easel with the 
 crayon portrait of the child. 
 
 . . . " For thou shalt forget thy misery. Thou 
 shalt remember it as waters that are past, 
 concluded the neighbor woman, as she heard 
 Jeffries on the gravel outside. What the 
 
 164 
 
THE READJUSTMENT 
 
 Presence had wrought upon him in the night was 
 visible in his altered mien. He looked more 
 than anything else to be in need of sleep. He 
 had eaten his sorrow, and that was the end of it 
 as it is with men. 
 
 "I came to see if there was anything I could 
 do for you," said the woman, neighborly, with 
 her hand upon the door. 
 
 "I don t know as there is," said he; "I m 
 much obliged, but I don t know as there is." 
 
 "You see," whispered the woman over her 
 shoulder, "not even to me." She felt the tug 
 of her heart as the Presence swept past her. 
 
 The neighbor went out after that and walked 
 in the ragged street, past the school-house, 
 across the creek below the town, out by the 
 fields, over the headgate, and back by the town 
 again. It was full nine of the clock when she 
 passed the Jeffries house. It looked, except for 
 being a little neater, not other than the rest of 
 the street. The door was open and the lamp 
 was lit; she saw Jeffries, black against it. He 
 sat reading in a book, like a man at ease in his 
 own house. 
 
L 
 
 XII 
 
 BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 
 
 4 
 
 C)UIS CHABOT was sitting under the fig- 
 tree in her father s garden at Tres Pirios 
 when he told Marguerita Dupre" that he could 
 not love her. This sort of thing happened so 
 often to Louis that he did it very well and 
 rather enjoyed it, for he was one of those be 
 fore whom women bloomed instinctively and 
 preened themselves ; and that Marguerita loved 
 him very much was known not only to Louis 
 but to all Tres Pinos. 
 
 It was bright mid-afternoon, and there was 
 no sound in Dupre s garden louder than the 
 dropping of ripe figs and the drip of the hydrant 
 under the Castilian roses. A mile out of town 
 Chabot s flock dozed on their feet, with their 
 heads under one another s bellies, and his 
 herders dozed on the ground, with their heads 
 under the plaited tops of the sage. Old Dupre" 
 1 66 
 
BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 
 
 sat out in front of his own front yard with a 
 handkerchief over his face, and slept very 
 soundly. Chabot finished his claret to the last 
 drop (it was excellent claret, this ot Dupr6 s), 
 turned the tumbler upside down, sat back in 
 his chair, and explained to Marguerita point by 
 point why he did not love her. 
 
 Marguerita leaned her fat arms on the table, 
 wrapped in her blue reboza ; it was light blue, 
 and she was too dark for it; but it was such 
 a pretty color. She leaned forward, looking 
 steadily and quietly at Louis, because she was 
 afraid if she so much as let her lids droop the 
 tears would come, and if she smiled her lips 
 would quiver. Marguerita felt that she had 
 not invited this, neither had she known how to 
 avoid it. She would have given anything to 
 have told Louis to his face that he need not 
 concern himself so much on her account, as 
 she was not the least interested in him; she 
 had called on all her pride to that end, but 
 nothing came. 
 
 She was a good girl, Louis told her, such as, 
 if she had pleased him, he would gladly have 
 married. She was a very good girl, and she 
 understood about sheep. Tres - bien ! Old 
 Dupre had taught her that; but she lacked a 
 167 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 trifle a nuance but everything where love is 
 concerned, Vart d etre dtsire, explained the lit 
 tle Frenchman ; for though he was only a sheep- 
 herder of Lost Borders, if he had been a boule- 
 vardier he could not have been more of a 
 Frenchman nor less of a cad. He leaned back 
 in his chair with the air of having delivered 
 himself very well. 
 
 Salty Bill loves me," ventured Marguerita. 
 
 "Eh, Bill!" Louis looked hurt, for though 
 he frequently disposed of his ladies in this 
 negligent fashion, he did not care to have them 
 snapped up so quickly. Marguerita felt con 
 victed of lese-majeste by the look, and hastened 
 to reassure him that she cared nothing what 
 ever for Salty Bill. It was a false move, and 
 she knew it as soon as it was done; but she 
 could not bear to have Louis look at her like 
 that, and Marguerita had never in her life 
 learned the good of pretending. Chabot poured 
 him another glass of claret, and returned to his 
 point. 
 
 There was Suzon Moynier, he explained. 
 Such an eye as Suzon had! there was a spark 
 for you ! And an ankle ! more lovers than few 
 had been won by an ankle. Marguerita, under 
 cover of the table, drew her feet together be- 
 168 
 
BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 
 
 neath her skirts. Her ankles were thick, and 
 there was no disguising it. 
 
 "So it is Suzon you love?" 
 
 "Eh," said the herder, "that is as may be. 
 I have loved many women." Then perhaps 
 because the particular woman did not matter 
 so much as that there should be womanhood, 
 and perhaps because he could no more help it 
 than she could help being wondrously flooded 
 by it, he threw her a look from the tail of his 
 eye and such a smile as drew all the blood 
 from her heart, bent above her, brushing her 
 hair with his lips in such a lingering tender 
 ness of farewell, that though he had just told 
 her she was not to be loved, the poor girl was 
 not sure but he was beginning to love her. 
 Women suffered things like that from Louis 
 Chabot, each being perfectly sure she was the 
 only one, and perhaps, like Marguerita, finding 
 it worth while to be made to suffer if it could 
 be done so exquisitely. - 
 
 Marguerita was only half French herself, old 
 Dupre having married her mother, Senorita 
 Carrasco, who was only half a senorita, since, 
 in fact, most people in Tres Pinos were a little 
 this or that, with no chance for name-calling. 
 Dupre had been a herder of sheep, risen to an 
 169 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 owner whom the Desert had bitten. The 
 natural consequence was that when he was old, 
 instead of returning to France, he had mar 
 ried Marguerita s mother, and settled down 
 in Tres Pinos to live on the interest of his 
 money. 
 
 It was a fact that his daughter had at heart 
 all the fire and tenderness that promised in 
 Suzon s glance; but of what use to Louis 
 Chabot that she had a soul warm and alight 
 if no glow of it suffused her cheek and no spark 
 of it drew him in her eye. She was swart hy 
 and heavy of face; she had no figure, which 
 means she had a great deal too much of it, 
 and there was a light shadow, like a finger- 
 smudge, on her upper lip. Not that the girl 
 did not have her good points. She could cook, 
 that was the French strain in her father; she 
 could dance, that was Castilian from her 
 mother; and such as she was Salty Bill wanted 
 her. Bill drove an eighteen-mule team for the 
 borax works and was seven times a better man 
 than Chabot, but she would have no more of 
 him than Louis would have cf her. She con 
 tinued to say her prayers regularly, and told 
 Tia Juana, who reproached her with losing a 
 good marriage, that she believed yet the saints 
 170 
 
BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 
 
 would give her the desire of her heart, whereat 
 Tia Juana pitied her. 
 
 Chabot brought his sheep up from the spring 
 shearing at Bakersfield each year, and made 
 three loops about Tres Pinos, so that it brought 
 him to the town about once in three months 
 to replenish his supplies, and the only reason 
 there was not a new object of his attentions 
 each time was that there were not girls enough, 
 for Chabot s taste required them young, pretty, 
 and possessed of the difficult art of being de 
 sired. Therefore, he had time to keep hope 
 alive in Marguerita with the glint of his flatter 
 ing eyes and the trick of his flattering lips, 
 which was such very common coin with him 
 that he did not quite know himself how free 
 he was with it. And after old Dupre died and 
 his daughter inherited his house and the in 
 terest on his money, she was enough of a figure 
 in Tres Pinos to make a little attention worth 
 while, even though she had a smudge of black 
 on her upper lip and no art but that of being 
 faithful. She lived in the house under the fig- 
 tree with old Tia Juana for a companion, and 
 was much respected. She was said to have 
 more clothes than anybody, though they never 
 became her. 
 
 171 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 Marguerita kept a candle burning before the 
 saints and another in her heart for the hand 
 some little herder who went on making love 
 to ladies and being loved by them for three 
 years. Then the saints took a hand in his 
 affairs, though, of course, it did not look that 
 way to Louis. 
 
 He was sleeping out on Black Mountain in 
 the spring of the year with his flock. The 
 herder whose business it was to have done that 
 was at Tres Pinos on a two days leave, con 
 fessing himself, and getting a nice, jolly little 
 claret drunk. Somewhere up in the blown 
 lava-holes of Black Mountain there was a bear 
 with two cubs, who had said to them, bear 
 fashion: "Come down to the flock with me to 
 night, and I will show you how killing is done. 
 There will be dogs there and men; but do not 
 be afraid, I will see to it that they do not hurt 
 you." 
 
 Along about the time Orion s sword sloped 
 down the west, Chabot heard their gruntled 
 noises and the scurry of the flock. Chabot 
 was not a coward; perhaps because he knew 
 that in general bears are; he got up and kid 
 about him with his staff. This he never would 
 have done if he had known about the cubs; 
 172 
 
BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 
 
 he trod on the foot of one in the dark, and the 
 bear mother heard it. She came lumbering 
 up in the soft blackness and took Chabot in 
 her arms. 
 
 Toward four of the next afternoon, the 
 herder coming back, still very merry and very 
 comfortable in his mind, found a maimed, 
 bleeding thing by the water-hole that moaned 
 and babbled. One of its arms was gone to the 
 elbow, its face was laid open, and long, red 
 gashes lay along its sides and down one thigh. 
 After a while, when he had washed away the 
 blood and dust, he discovered that this thing 
 was Chabot. The herder laid it as tenderly as 
 he could on the camp burro and took it in to 
 Tres Pinos. If there was any question of the 
 propriety of the care of Chabot falling to Mar- 
 guerita Dupre, it counted for nothing against 
 the fact that nobody was found willing to do 
 it in her stead, and Marguerita was very dis 
 creet. Tia Juana was put in charge of the 
 sick-room, and Marguerita gave her whole soul 
 to the cooking. 
 
 And if any question had arisen later when 
 Chabot began to hobble about with a crutch 
 under his good arm, and his sleeve pinned up 
 where the other had been, he put an end to it 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 by marrying her. He was thought to have 
 done very well in this, since he could get no 
 more good of himself; and since Marguerita 
 wanted him it was a handsome way of paying 
 her, but there had something gone before that. 
 Tia Juana had been careful there should be 
 no scrap of a mirror about when Chabot began 
 to slip his bandages, and perhaps he had not 
 had the courage to ask for it; certainly there 
 had been no change in Marguerita s face for 
 any change she saw in him. And the day that 
 he knew the thing he was, he asked her to 
 marry him. He had slipped out into the street 
 for the first time, wearying a little of the solicita 
 tions of the two women, and, to say truth, wholly 
 misinterpreting Marguerita s reasons for screen 
 ing him so much from the public gaze, for she, 
 poor girl, when he had asked her, could only tell 
 him that he was quite as handsome as ever in 
 her eyes. He felt the pleasant tingle of the 
 air and the sun and the smell of grapes and 
 dropping leafage from the little arbors of Tres 
 Pinos, and at the turn of the street in old 
 Moynier s garden the flirt of skirts and the grace 
 ful reach of young round arms. Louis straight 
 ened himself on his crutches ; he felt the stir and 
 excitement of the game ... he was divided be- 
 
BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 
 
 tween his old swagger and the pathetic droop 
 of weakness ... he swung slowly past the 
 garden, and suddenly Suzon looked up ... 
 looked dully at first . . . with dawning recogni 
 tion. Then she threw her apron over her face 
 and shrieked, and fled into the house. There 
 was something more than coquetry in the way 
 she ran. 
 
 Louis turned into the lane and sat down 
 under the black sage, he was not so strong as 
 he had thought, and tried to be quite clear in 
 his mind what this should mean. In a little 
 while he was quite clear. Some children play 
 ing in the dust of the roadway at his approach 
 had scuttled away like quail, and now he heard 
 behind him the rustle of the sage, the intima 
 tion of hunched shoulders and fingers held over 
 giggles of irrepressible excitement as they dared 
 one another to come and peek at a fearsome 
 thing. 
 
 It was that afternoon, when she came in with 
 his soup and claret, that he asked Marguer- 
 ita. The poor girl put down the bowl, and 
 came and knelt by him very humble and 
 gentle. 
 
 "Are you quite sure, Louis?" she asked, with 
 her cheek upon his hand. 
 75 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 "I am sure of nothing," said he, "except that 
 I cannot live without you." 
 
 It was very curious that no sooner had he 
 said that than he began to discover it would 
 be very hard to live with her; for to lose an 
 ear and an eye and to have one s mouth 
 drawn twisty by a scar does not make a kiss 
 relish better if it falls not in with the natural 
 desire. 
 
 Marguerita did not grow any prettier after 
 she was married, but showed a tendency to 
 take on fat, and she did not dress quite so well 
 because she could not afford it, though there 
 are times, as, for instance, when he has gone 
 out in company and seen the young married 
 women hustled out of sight of his scars, that 
 her plain face looks almost good to him. Mar 
 guerita insists on their going out a great deal, 
 to cock-fights and to bbiles, where he sits in 
 the corner with his good side carefully disposed 
 toward the guests, and his wife has given up 
 dancing, though she is very fond of it, to sit 
 beside him and keep him company ; though, to 
 tell the truth, Chabot could bear very well to 
 do without that if only he could find himself 
 surrounded by the lightness, the laughter, the 
 half-revealing draperies, the delicious disputed 
 176 
 
BITTERNESS OF WOMEN 
 
 moves of the game he loves as he will not any 
 more, for he knows now that such as these are 
 not given save when there is something to be 
 got by them, and though he is only thirty-four, 
 poor Louis is no longer possessed of Vart etre 
 desire. 
 
 For the rest of his life he will have to make 
 the best of knowing that his wife carries his 
 name with credit, and does not cost him any 
 thing. They are not without their comfortable 
 hours. Marguerita takes excellent care of him, 
 and she understands about sheep; if she sees 
 the dust of a flock arising can tuck up her 
 skirts and away to the edge of the town, getting 
 back as much news of where they go, whence 
 they come, and the conditions of the weather 
 as Chabot could have brought himself, and not 
 even her husband knows the extent of her 
 devices for keeping him surrounded with the 
 sense and stir of life. For it was not long after 
 his marriage that Chabot made the discovery 
 that all the quick desire of him toward lovely 
 women warms in his wife s spirit toward the 
 maimed and twisted thing that he is, and 
 thwarted of the subtle play of lip and limb and 
 eye, spends itself in offices of homely comfort. 
 
 And this is the bitterness of women 
 177 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 which has come to him: that it matters 
 not so much that they should have pas 
 sion as the power to provoke it, and lack 
 ing the spark of a glance, the turn of an ankle, 
 the treasures of tenderness in them wither un 
 fulfilled. Shut behind his wife s fat, common 
 place exterior lies the pulse of music, the delight 
 of motion, the swimming sense, the quick, 
 white burning fenced within his scars. Times 
 like this he remembers what has passed between 
 him and many women, and finds his com 
 placency sicken and die in him. Knowing 
 what he does of the state of her heart, and not 
 being quite a cad, he does not make her an 
 altogether bad husband, and if sometimes, look 
 ing at her with abhorring eyes the shaking 
 bosom, the arms enormous, the shade of her 
 upper lip no longer to be mistaken for a smudge 
 resenting her lack of power to move him, he 
 gives her a bad quarter of an hour, even there 
 she has the best of him. For however un 
 happy he makes her, with one kiss of his crooked 
 mouth he can set it all right again. But for 
 Louis, the lift, the exultation, the exquisite, 
 unmatched wonder of the world will not hap 
 pen any more ; never any more. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 IT began to be called the House when it was 
 the only frame building in the camp, and 
 wore its offence upon its front long and low, 
 little rooms, each with its own door opening 
 upon the shallow veranda. Such a house in 
 a mining country is the dial finger of prosperity. 
 All the ores thereabout were argent, and as the 
 lords of far market-places made silver to go 
 up a few points, you were aware of it in the 
 silken rustle and the heel-click of satin slippers 
 in the House. When the Jews got their heads 
 together and whispered in the Bourse, the gay 
 skirts would flit and the lights go out in the 
 little rooms behind the two cottonwood-trees 
 that should have screened their entrances, but 
 clacking their leaves as if forever fluttered and 
 aghast at what went on in them, betrayed it 
 all the more. 
 
 13 179 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 Inmates came and went; sometimes they 
 had names and personalities, but mostly they 
 were simply the women of the House. It was 
 always spoken of in that way, as if but to pass 
 the door-sill were to be seized of its full in 
 heritance of turbulence and shame ; and as the 
 town poised and hung upon the turn of the 
 appointed fortune of mining-camps, the House 
 passed from being an outburst, an excess, to a 
 backwater pool of enticement, wherein men 
 swam or sunk themselves, and at last, as the 
 quality of its attractions fell off with the grade 
 of ores, it became merely the overt sign of an 
 admitted and ineradicable baseness. 
 
 Always it served to keep alive in the camp 
 the consciousness of style and the allurement 
 of finery; for when the House was at its best, 
 the conditions in desert camps, the price 
 freight was, scrub-water to be bought by the 
 gallon, the prohibitive cost of service, ground 
 terribly the faces of good women. But they 
 could always tell what kind of sleeves were 
 being worn in San Francisco by watching the 
 House. They all watched it; women whose 
 lean breasts sagged from the lips of many 
 children, virtuous slattern in calico, petted 
 wives secure in a traditional honor; and their 
 
 1 80 
 
THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 comment kept a stir about it like the pattering 
 trail of the wind in the cottonwoods. In time, 
 as the springs of mining interest drew away 
 from that district to flash and rise again in 
 some unguessed other side of the world, even 
 that fell off before the dead weight of stable 
 interests and a respectability too stale to be 
 curious ; the ground about it was parcelled off ; 
 all the accustomed activities of small towns 
 went on around it screened from its contamina 
 tion by no more than a high board fence, from 
 which in time the palings rotted away. Good 
 women exercised themselves no more against 
 it than to prevent their children from playing 
 under the shade of the two cottonwoods that 
 broadened before it, like the shadow of pro 
 fessional impropriety, behind which the House 
 had shrunk, and, in its condition of unregarded 
 sordidness, pointed the last turn of the dial. 
 
 About this time it came into the sole pos 
 session of Hard Mag, who was handsome 
 enough to have done much better by herself, 
 and concerning whom nothing worth recording 
 might have transpired had it not been for Mrs. 
 Henby. 
 
 The Henbys had taken the place which faced 
 the adjacent street and abutted on the back 
 181 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 yard of the House. Henby was blast foreman 
 at the Eclipse, and came home every other 
 Sunday; and his wife, who was very fond of 
 him, found a consolation for the lack of his 
 company in the ordered life of the town. To 
 wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, bake on 
 Wednesday, and keep the front room always 
 looking as if nobody lived in it, gave Mrs. 
 Henby a virtuous sense of well-being that she 
 had not known in twenty years of scrambled 
 existence at the mines. The trouble with Mrs. 
 Henby was that she had no children. If there 
 had been small footsteps going about the 
 rooms and small finger-clutchings at her dress 
 she would have been perfectly happy, and con 
 sequently had no time to trouble about the 
 doing of the House. There had been hopes 
 but at forty, though her cheeks were smooth 
 and bright, her hair still black, and her figure 
 looking as if it had been melted and poured 
 into her neat print wrapper, Mrs. Henby did 
 not hope any more. She made a silk crazy- 
 quilt for the bed-lounge in the parlor, and be 
 gan to take an interest in Hard Mag and the 
 draggled birds of passage that preened them 
 selves occasionally in the dismantled rooms of 
 the House, though being the most virtuous of 
 182 
 
THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 women she would never have admitted the 
 faintest distraction in the affairs of "such like." 
 It began by Mrs. Henby discovering, through 
 the cracks of the fence, that Mag, in the inter 
 vals of sinning, was largely occupied with the 
 tasks of widowed and neglected women. Mrs. 
 Henby cut kindlings for herself sometimes if 
 Henby was detained at the mine beyond his 
 week-end visits, but to see Mag of the hard, 
 red lips, the bright, unglinting hair, and the 
 burnt-out blackness of her eyes under the pale, 
 long lids, so employed made it of an amazing 
 opprobriousness. For, as Mrs. Henby under 
 stood it, the root of sin lay in self-indulgence, 
 and might be fostered by such small matters as 
 sitting too much in rocking-chairs and wearing 
 too becoming hats; she saw it now as the sign 
 of an essential incompetency in the offices of 
 creditable living. Mag, she perceived, did not 
 even know how to pin up her skirts properly 
 when she swept the back stoop. To see her 
 thus fumbling at the mechanism of existence 
 was to put her forever beyond the reach of re 
 sentment into the region of pitiable humanness. 
 In time it grew upon Mrs. Henby that the poor 
 creatures, who took the air of late afternoons 
 in the yard behind the House, might have pos- 
 183 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 sibilities even of being interested in the crazy- 
 quilt and the garden, and being prevented by 
 some mysterious law of their profession from 
 doing so. She went so far upon this supposi 
 tion as to offer Mag a bunch of radishes out of 
 her minute vegetable plot, which Mag, to her 
 relief, refused. Mrs. Henby could no more re 
 frain from neighborliness than she could help 
 being large at the waist, but she really would 
 not like to be seen handing things through the -> 
 fence to the inmates of the House. She came 
 to that in time, though. 
 
 Some wretched consort of Mag s fell sick at 
 the House of the lead poisoning common in the 
 mines when the doctor was away at Maverick, 
 and nobody in the neighborhood so skilled in 
 the remedies proper to the occasion as Mrs. 
 Henby. This led to several conferences, and 
 the passage between the palings of sundry 
 preparations of hot milk and soups and cus 
 tards. Mrs. Henby would hand them out after 
 nightfall, and find the dishes on her side of the 
 fence in the morning. She was so ashamed of 
 it that she never told even her husband, and 
 the man having gone away to his own place 
 and died there, Mag had nobody to tell it to 
 in any case. But Mrs. Henby always enter- 
 184 
 
THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 tained a subconscious sureness that something 
 unpleasant was likely to come of her condon- 
 ings of inquity, and one morning, when she 
 came out of the kitchen door to find Mag fur 
 tively waiting at the fence, she roughed for 
 ward all the quills of her respectability at once. 
 Mag leaned her breast upon the point of a 
 broken paling, as though the sharpness of it 
 stayed her. She had no right to the desultory 
 courtesies of back- fence neighborliness, and did 
 not attempt them. 
 
 "I ve had a letter," she said, abruptly, show 
 ing it clinched against her side; the knuckles 
 of her hand were strained and white. 
 
 "A letter?" 
 
 "From Kansas. My daughter s coming." 
 She lowered her voice and looked back cautious 
 ly at the shut House, as if the thing could over 
 hear. 
 
 So she had a daughter this painted piece; 
 and God-fearing women might long and long! 
 Twenty years resentment began to burn in 
 Mrs. Henby s cushiony bosom. 
 
 "What are you doin with a daughter?" she 
 said. 
 
 "Oh," cried Mag, impatiently, "I had her 
 years ago ten eleven years! She has been 
 
 185 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 living with my aunt in Kansas: and now my 
 aunt is dead, and they are sending her." 
 
 "Who is sending her?" 
 
 "I don t know the neighbors. I ve nobody 
 belonging to me back there. They have to do 
 something with her, so they are sending her to 
 me. Here!" She struck upon the paling 
 wickedly with her hand. 
 
 "Where s her father?" Mrs. Henby s inter 
 est rose superior to her resentment. 
 
 "How should I know? I tell you it was a 
 long time ago. I came away when she was a 
 little, little baby. My aunt was religious and 
 couldn t have anything to do with me, but she 
 took care of her! I sent money." 
 
 Mrs. Henby recalled herself to the aloofness 
 of entire respectability. If your aunt wouldn t 
 have you, I don t see how she could feel to 
 abide your money?" 
 
 "I told her I was married," said Mag, "and 
 respectable." She leaned upon the paling and 
 laughed a hard, sharp laugh. 
 
 Mrs. Henby gathered up her apron full of 
 kindlings. 
 
 "Well, you ve made your bed," she said. 
 "I guess you will lie in it." 
 
 But she sat down trembling as soon as she 
 1 86 
 
WELL. YOUVE MADE YOUR BED. I GUESS YOU WILL 
 LIE IN IT" 
 
THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 had shut the door. A daughter to that wom 
 an and she Mrs. Henby went about shak 
 ing her head and talking to herself with in 
 dignation. All day the House remained shut 
 and slumbering, its patched and unwashed 
 windows staring blankly on the yard; but if 
 ever Mrs. Henby came out of her kitchen door, 
 as if she were the cuckoo on the striking of the 
 hour, Mag appeared from the House. It was 
 evident she had ordered a clear field for her 
 self, for no one came out in draggled finery to 
 take the air that day. It was dusk before Mrs. 
 Henby s humanness got the better of her. She 
 went out to the woodpile and whispered to the 
 stirring of Mag s dress: 
 
 "When s she coming?" 
 
 * Wednesday. She will be started before I 
 can get a letter to her." 
 
 "Well, I reckon you ll have to take her," 
 said Mrs. Henby, unconsolingly. A flash of 
 Mag s insuperable hardness broke from her. 
 
 11 She ll spoil trade," she said. 
 
 Mrs. Henby looked up the dusky bulk of the 
 House beyond her, lines of light at the win 
 dows like the red lids of distempered eyes. 
 All at once, and, as she said afterward, with 
 out for the moment any consciousness relativity, 
 
 187 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 she recalled the quagmires of unwarned water- 
 holes where cattle sink and flounder, and the 
 choking call of warning that sounds to the last 
 above the stifling slime. When Mag said that 
 about the child and her way of making a liv 
 ing, Mrs. Henby jumped. She thought she 
 heard the smothering suck of the mire. Some 
 body in the House laughed and cried out 
 coarsely, and then she heard Mag s voice going 
 on hurriedly behind the palings: 
 
 "Mrs. Henby! Mrs. Henby! you ve got to 
 help me I must find some place for her to 
 board She has been well brought up, I tell 
 you. My aunt is religious She would be 
 a comfort to some good person." 
 
 "Meaning me, I suppose," sniffed Mrs. 
 Henby. Mag had not meant anybody in par 
 ticular, but she swept it up urgently. 
 
 "Oh, if you would she d be a comfort to 
 you! She s real sweet-looking they sent me 
 her picture once." She felt for phrases to 
 touch the other woman, but they rang in 
 sincerely. "You d be the saving of her if 
 you would." 
 
 "Well, I won t!" snapped Mrs. Henby; and 
 as soon as she was inside she locked the door 
 against even the suggestion. "Me to take 
 1 88 
 
THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 anything off that painted piece!" she quivered, 
 angrily. 
 
 It was five days until Wednesday, and Mag 
 struck to her trail insistently. 
 
 "You been thinking of what I said last 
 night?" she questioned in the morning interval 
 at the woodpile. 
 
 Mrs. Henby denied it, but she had. She 
 had thought of what Henby would say to it, 
 and wondered if Mag s daughter had hard 
 eyes, and bright, unglinting, canary-colored 
 hair. She thought of what explanation she 
 might make to the neighbors in case she de 
 cided suddenly to adopt the daughter of of 
 an old friend in Kansas; then she thought of 
 the faces of the women who w r ent in and out 
 of the House, and resolved not to think any 
 more. 
 
 She kept away from the woodpile as much 
 as possible during Saturday and Sunday, but 
 Monday evening she heard Mag calling her from 
 the back of the yard. This was the worst yet, 
 for there was no telling who might overhear. 
 
 "Mrs. Henby," demanded the painted piece, 
 "are you going to see that innocent child 
 brought to this place and never lift a hand 
 to it?" 
 
 189 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 "I don t know as I got any call to interfere," 
 said Mrs. Henby. 
 
 "And you with a good home, and calling 
 yourself Christian, and all," went on the hard 
 one. "Besides, I d pay you." 
 
 "I don t feel to need any of your money," 
 thrust in Mrs. Henby, resentfully. "I guess I 
 could take care of one child without but I 
 ain t going to." She broke off, and moved 
 rapidly toward the house. 
 
 "Mrs. Henby, listen to me!" cried Mag, shak 
 ing at the palings as though they had been the 
 bars of a cage and she trapped in it. "For 
 God s sake, Mrs. Henby, you must! Mrs. 
 Henby, if you won t listen to me here, I shall 
 come to your house." 
 
 Mrs. Henby heard the crack of the rotten 
 palings as she shut the door. 
 
 "Mrs. Henby! Mrs. Henby!" threatened the 
 voice, "I m coming in!" 
 
 Then the crash of splintering wood, and 
 Mag s hand on the knob. The vehemence of 
 her mood, her tragic movements, the bright 
 vividness of her lips and hair seemed to force 
 Mrs. Henby into the attitude of the offender. 
 She sat limply in a chair twisting her hands in 
 her fat lap while the other assailed her. Be- 
 190 
 
THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 hind her on the wall Mag s shadow shook and 
 threatened like the shape of an uncouth 
 destiny. 
 
 "I know what you are thinking, Mrs. Henby. 
 You think there s bad blood, and she will turn 
 out like me maybe, but I tell you it s no such 
 thing. Look here if it s any satisfaction to 
 you to know I was good when I had her, and 
 her father was good only we were young and 
 didn t know any better we hadn t any feelings 
 except what we d have had if we had been 
 married only we didn t happen to It s the 
 truth, Mrs. Henby, if I die for it. Bad blood!" 
 she said, hardness augmenting upon her. "How 
 many a man comes to the House and goes 
 away to raise a family, and not a word said about 
 bad blood! You don t reckon " 
 
 But Mrs. Henby had her apron over her face, 
 and was crying into it. Mag floundered back 
 to the other woman s point of view. 
 
 " If it is a question what she ll come to, you 
 know well enough if I have to take her with 
 me. Me!" she said. She threw round herself 
 an indescribable air of lascivious deviltry, as 
 though she had been blown upon by the blast 
 of an unseen furnace, and the shadow upon 
 the wall shook and confirmed it. "That s what 
 191 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 she will come to unless you save her from it. 
 It s up to you, Mrs. Henby." 
 
 "I I don t know what Henby will say," 
 whimpered Mrs. Henby, afresh. 
 
 "Say?" urged Mag, with the scorn of her 
 kind for the well-regulated husband. "He ll 
 say anything he thinks you want him to say. 
 He ll be as fond as anything of her and you 
 can bring her up to be a comfort to him." 
 The poverty of Mag s experience furnished her 
 with no phrases to express what a child might 
 become. 
 
 "A nice time I d have," burst out the other 
 woman, in a last throb of resentment, "bring 
 ing her up to be a comfort to anybody, with 
 her own mother living a sinful life right under 
 her eyes." 
 
 "Oh," said Mag, with enlightenment, "so 
 that s what is troubling you! Well if you 
 say the word I ll clear out. The girls will 
 kick but they have to do what I say. Look 
 here, then! If you ll take the kid I ll go." 
 
 "And never come back nor let her know?" 
 
 "Cross my heart to die," said Mag. 
 
 "Well, then "Mrs. Henby let her apron fall 
 tremulously "I ll take her." 
 
 "For keeps?" 
 
 IQ2 
 
THE HOUSE OF OFFENCE 
 
 "For keeps," vowed Mrs. Henby, solemnly. 
 
 They were silent, regarding each other for 
 a time, neither knowing how to terminate the 
 interview without offence. 
 
 "What s her name?" asked Mrs. Henby, 
 timidly, at last. 
 
 "Marietta." 
 
 Mag searched her scant remembrances and 
 brought up this: "She s got dark hair." 
 
 Mrs. Henby was visibly comforted. 
 
 Mrs. Henby found, after all, that she was not 
 put to any great strain of inventiveness to 
 account for the little girl she had decided to 
 adopt, the event being overshadowed, in the 
 estimation of the townspeople, by the more 
 memorable one which occurred on the very 
 night of Marietta s arrival. This was no less 
 than the departure of Hard Mag and the 
 women of the House. They went out of it as 
 they came, with scant warning, helped by 
 coarse laughter of the creatures they had 
 preyed upon, and with so much of careless 
 haste that about two hours after their flitting 
 caught, it was supposed, from their neglected 
 fires the whole shell of the House burst into 
 flame. It made a red flare in the windows in 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 the middle of the night, but, as none of the 
 townspeople had any interest in it and no 
 property was endangered, it was allowed to 
 burn quite out, which it did as quickly as the 
 passions it had thrived upon, to an inconsider 
 able heap of cinders. The next year the Henbys 
 took over the place where it had stood for a 
 garden, and Henby made a swing under the 
 cottonwood-trees for his adopted daughter. 
 
XIV 
 THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 THE first time of my hearing of her was at 
 Temblor. We had come all one day be 
 tween blunt, whitish bluffs rising from mirage 
 water, with a thick, pale wake of dust billowing 
 from the wheels, all the dead wall of the foot 
 hills sliding and shimmering with heat, to learn 
 that the Walking Woman had passed us some 
 where in the dizzying dimness, going down to 
 the Tulares on her own feet. We heard of her 
 again in the Carrisal, and again at Adobe Sta 
 tion, where she had passed a week before the 
 shearing, and at last I had a glimpse of her 
 at the Eighteen-Mile House as I went hurriedly 
 northward on the Mojave stage ; and afterward 
 sheepherders at whose camps she slept, and 
 cowboys at rodeos, told me as much of her way 
 of life as they could understand. Like enough 
 they told her as much of mine. That was very 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 little. She was the Walking Woman, and no 
 one knew her name, but because she was a sort 
 of whom men speak respectfully, they called 
 her to her face Mrs. Walker, and she answered 
 to it if she was so inclined. She came and 
 went about our western world on no discover 
 able errand, and whether she had some place 
 of refuge where she lay by in the interim, or 
 whether between her seldom, unaccountable 
 appearances in our quarter she went on steadily 
 walking, wa never learned. She came and 
 went, oftenest in a kind of muse of travel which 
 the untrammelled space begets, or at rare inter 
 vals flooding wondrously with talk, never of 
 herself, but of things she had known and seen. 
 She must have seen some rare happenings, too 
 by report. She was at Maverick the time of 
 the Big Snow, and at Tres Pinos when they 
 brought home the body of Morena ; and if any 
 body could have told whether De Borba killed 
 Mariana for spite or defence, it would have been 
 she, only she could not be found when most 
 wanted. She was at Tunawai at the time of 
 the cloud-burst, and if she had cared for it 
 could have known most desirable things of the 
 ways of trail-making, burrow-habiting small 
 things. 
 
 196 
 
THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 All of which should have made her worth 
 meeting, though it was not, in fact, for such 
 things I was wishful to meet her; and as it 
 turned out, it was not of these things we talked 
 when at last we came together. For one thing, 
 she was a wo an, not old, who had gone about 
 alone in a country where the number of women 
 is as one in fifteen. She had eaten and slept 
 at the herder s camps, and laid by for days at 
 one-man stations whose masters had no other 
 touch of human kind than the passing of chance 
 prospectors, or the halting of the tri-weekly 
 stage. She had been set on her way by team 
 sters who lifted her out of white, hot desertness 
 and put her down at the crossing of unnamed 
 ways, days distant from anywhere. And 
 through all this she passed unarmed and un- 
 offended. I had the best testimony to this, 
 the witness of the men themselves. I think 
 they talked of it because they were so much 
 surprised at it. It was not, on the whole, what 
 they expected of themselves. 
 
 Well I understand that nature which wastes 
 its borders with too eager burning, beyond 
 which rim of desolation it flares forever quick 
 and white, and have had some inkling of the 
 isolating calm of a desire too high to stoop to 
 197 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 satisfaction. But you could not think of these 
 things pertaining to the Walking Woman ; and 
 if there were ever any truth in the exemption 
 from offence residing in a frame of behavior 
 called ladylike, it should have been inoperative 
 here. What this really means is that you get 
 no affront so long as your behavior in the esti 
 mate of the particular audience invites none. 
 In the estimate of the immediate audience 
 conduct which affords protection in Mayfair 
 gets you no consideration in Maverick. And 
 by no canon could it be considered ladylike to 
 go about on your own feet, with a blanket and 
 a black bag and almost no money in your 
 purse, in and about the haunts of rude and 
 solitary men. 
 
 There were other things that pointed the wish 
 for a personal encounter with the Walking 
 Woman. One of them was the contradiction of 
 reports of her as to whether she was comely, for 
 example. Report said yes, and again, plain to 
 the point of deformity. She had a twist to her 
 face, some said; a hitch to one shoulder; they 
 averred she limped as she walked. But by the 
 distance she covered she should have been 
 straight and young. As to sanity, equal in 
 certitude. On the mere evidence of her way of 
 198 
 
THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 life she was cracked; not quite broken, but un 
 serviceable. Yet in her talk there was both 
 wisdom and information, and the word she 
 brought about trails and water-holes was as 
 reliable as an Indian s. 
 
 By her own account she had begun by walk 
 ing off an illness. There had been an invalid 
 to be taken care of for years, leaving her at 
 last broken in body, and with no recourse but 
 her own feet to carry her out of that predica 
 ment. It seemed there had been, besides the 
 death of her invalid, some other worrying 
 affairs, upon which, and the nature of her ill 
 ness, she was never quite clear, so that it might 
 very well have been an unsoundness of mind 
 which drove her to the open, sobered and healed 
 at last by the large soundness of nature. It 
 must have been about that time that she lost 
 her name. I am convinced that she never told 
 it because she did not know it herself. She 
 was the Walking Woman, and the country peo 
 ple called her Mrs. Walker. At the time I 
 knew her, though she wore short hair and a 
 man s boots, and had a fine down over all her 
 face from exposure to the weather, she was per 
 fectly sweet and sane. 
 
 I had met her occasionally at ranch-houses 
 199 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 and road-stations, and had got as much ac 
 quaintance as the place allowed; but for the 
 things I wished to know there wanted a time 
 of leisure and isolation. And when the occasion 
 came we talked altogether of other things. 
 
 It was at Warm Spring in the Little Ante 
 lope I came upon her in the heart of a clear 
 forenoon. ( The spring lies off a mile from the 
 main trail, and has the only trees about it 
 known in that country. First you come upon 
 a pool of waste full of weeds of a poisonous dark 
 green, every reed ringed about the water-level 
 with a muddy white incrustation. Then the 
 three oaks appear staggering on the slope, and 
 the spring sobs and blubbers below them in 
 ashy-colored mud. All the hills of that country 
 have the down plunge toward the desert and 
 back abruptly toward the Sierra. The grass is 
 thick and brittle and bleached straw-color tow 
 ard the end of the season. \ As I rode up the 
 swale of the spring I saw the Walking Woman 
 sitting where the grass was deepest, with her 
 black bag and blanket, which she carried on a 
 stick, beside her. It was one of those days 
 when the genius of talk flows as smoothly as 
 the rivers of mirage through the blue hot desert 
 morning. 
 
 200 
 
THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 You are not to suppose that in my report of a 
 Borderer I give you the words only, but the 
 full meaning of the speech. Very often the 
 words are merely the punctuation of thought; 
 rather, the crests of the long waves of inter- 
 communicative silences. Yet the speech of the 
 Walking Woman was fuller than most. 
 
 The best of our talk that day began in some 
 dropped word of hers from which I inferred 
 that she had had a child. I was surprised at 
 that, and then wondered why I should have 
 been surprised, for it is the most natural of all 
 experiences to have children. I said something 
 of that purport, and also that it was one of 
 the perquisites of living I should be least willing 
 to do without. And that led to the Walking 
 Woman saying that there were three things 
 which if you had known you could cut out all 
 the rest, and they were good any way you got 
 them, but best if, as in her case, they were 
 related to and grew each one out of the others. 
 It was while she talked that I decided that she 
 really did have a twist to her face, a sort of 
 natural warp or skew into which it fell when 
 it was worn merely as a countenance, but which 
 disappeared the moment it became the vehicle 
 of thought or feeling. 
 
 201 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 The first of the experiences the Walking 
 Woman had found most worth while had come 
 to her in a sand-storm on the south slope of 
 Tehachapi in a dateless spring. I judged it 
 should have been about the time she began to 
 find herself, after the period of worry and loss 
 in which her wandering began. She had come, 
 in a day pricked full of intimations of a storm, 
 to the camp of Filon Geraud, whose companion 
 shepherd had gone a three days pas ear to 
 Mojave for supplies. Geraud was of great hardi 
 hood, red-blooded, of a full laughing eye, and 
 an indubitable spark for women. It was the 
 season of the year when there is a soft bloom 
 on the days, but the nights are cowering cold 
 and the lambs tender, not yet flockwise. At 
 such times a sand-storm works incalculable 
 disaster. The lift of the wind is so great that 
 the whole surface of the ground appears to 
 travel upon it slantwise, thinning out miles 
 high in air. In the intolerable smother the 
 lambs are lost from the ewes ; neither dogs nor 
 man make headway against it. 
 
 The morning flared through a horizon of yel 
 low smudge, and by mid-forenoon the flock 
 broke. 
 
 "There were but the two of us to deal with 
 
 202 
 
THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 the trouble," said the Walking Woman. " Until 
 that time I had not known how strong I was, 
 nor how good it is to run when running is worth 
 while. The flock travelled down the wind, the 
 sand bit our faces; we called, and after a time 
 heard the words broken and beaten small by 
 the wind. But after a little we had not to call. 
 All the time of our running in the yellow dusk 
 of day and the black dark of night, I knew 
 where Filon was. A flock-length away, I knew 
 him. Feel? What should I feel? I knew. 
 I ran with the flock and turned it this way and 
 that as Filon would have. 
 
 "Such was the force of the wind that when 
 we came together we held by one another and 
 talked a little between pantings. We snatched 
 and ate what we could as we ran. All that day 
 and night until the next afternoon the camp 
 kit was not out of the cayaques. But we held 
 the flock. We herded them under a butte 
 when the wind fell off a little, and the lambs 
 sucked; when the storm rose they broke, but 
 we kept upon their track and brought them 
 together again. At night the wind quieted, 
 and we slept by turns; at least Filon slept. I 
 lay on the ground when my turn was and 
 beat with the storm. I was no more tired than 
 203 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 the earth was. The sand filled in the creases 
 of the blanket, and where I turned, dripped 
 back upon the ground. But we saved the 
 sheep. Some ewes there were that would not 
 give down their milk because of the worry of 
 the storm, and the lambs died. But we kept 
 the flock together. And I was not tired/ 
 
 The Walking Woman stretched out her arms 
 and clasped herself, rocking in them as if she 
 would have hugged the recollection to her 
 breast. 
 
 "For you see," said she, "I worked with a 
 man, without excusing, without any burden 
 on me of looking or seeming. Not fiddling or 
 fumbling as women work, and hoping it will 
 all turn out for the best. It was not for Filon 
 to ask, Can you, or Will you. He said, Do, and 
 I did. And my work was good. We held the 
 flock. And that," said the Walking Woman, 
 the twist coming in her face again, "is one of 
 the things that make you able to do without 
 the others." 
 
 "Yes," I said; and then, "What others?" 
 
 "Oh," she said, as if it pricked her, "the 
 looking and the seeming." 
 
 And I had not thought until that time that 
 one who had the courage to be the Walking 
 204 
 
THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 Woman would have cared! We sat and looked 
 at the pattern of the thick crushed grass on the 
 slope, wavering in the fierce noon like the water 
 ings in the coat of a tranquil beast; the ache 
 of a world-old bitterness sobbed and whispered 
 in the spring. At last 
 
 "It is by the looking and the seeming," said 
 I, "that the opportunity finds you out." 
 
 "Filon found out," said the Walking Woman. 
 She smiled ; and went on from that to tell me 
 how, when the wind went down about four 
 o clock and left the afternoon clear and tender, 
 the flock began to feed, and they had out the 
 kit from the cayaques, and cooked a meal. 
 When it was over, and Filon had his pipe be 
 tween his teeth, he came over from his side of 
 the fire, of his own notion, and stretched him 
 self on the ground beside her. Of his own 
 notion. There was that in the way she said 
 it that made it seem as if nothing of the sort 
 had happened before to the Walking Woman, 
 and for a moment I thought she was about to 
 tell me one of the things I wished to know; 
 but she went on to say what Filon had said to 
 her of her work with the flock. Obvious, kind 
 ly things, such as any man in sheer decency 
 would have said, so that there must have some- 
 205 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 thing more gone with the words to make them 
 so treasured of the Walking Woman. 
 
 "We were very comfortable," said she, "and 
 not so tired as we expected to be. Filon leaned 
 up on his elbow. I had not noticed until then 
 how broad he was in the shoulders, and how 
 strong in the arms. And we had saved the 
 flock together. We felt that. There was some 
 thing that said together, in the slope of his 
 shoulders toward me. It was around his 
 mouth and on the cheek high up under the 
 shine of his eyes. And under the shine the 
 look the look that said, We are of one sort 
 and one mind his eyes that were the color 
 of the flat water in the toulares do you know 
 the look?" 
 
 "I know it." 
 
 "The wind was stopped and all the earth 
 smelled of dust, and Filon understood very 
 well that what I had done with him I could 
 not have done so well with another. And the 
 look the look in the eyes " 
 
 "Ah-ah !" 
 
 I have always said, I will say again, I do 
 
 not know why at this point the Walking Woman 
 
 touched me. If it were merely a response to 
 
 my unconscious throb of sympathy, or the un- 
 
 206 
 
THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 premeditated way of her heart to declare that 
 this, after all, was the best of all indispensable 
 experiences; or if in some flash of forward 
 vision, encompassing the unimpassioned years, 
 the stir, the movement of tenderness were for 
 me but no ; as often as I have thought of it, I 
 have thought of a different reason, but no con 
 clusive one, why the Walking Woman should 
 have put out her hand and laid it on my arm. 
 
 "To work together, to love together," said 
 the Walking Woman, withdrawing her hand 
 again; "there you have two of the things; 
 the other you know." 
 
 "The mouth at the breast," said I. 
 
 "The lips and the hands," said the Walking 
 Woman. "The little, pushing hands and the 
 small cry." There ensued a pause of fullest 
 understanding, while the land before us swam 
 in the noon, and a dove in the oaks behind the 
 spring began to call. A little red fox came 
 out of the hills and lapped delicately at the 
 pool. 
 
 "I stayed with Filon until the fall," said she. 
 "All that summer in the Sierras, until it was 
 time to turn south on the trail. It was a good 
 time, and longer than he could be expected to 
 have loved one like me. And besides, I wag 
 207 
 
LOST BORDERS 
 
 no longer able to keep the trail. My baby was 
 born in October." 
 
 Whatever more there was to say to this, the 
 Walking Woman s hand said it, straying with 
 remembering gesture to her breast. There are 
 so many ways of loving and working, but only 
 one way of the first-born. She added after an 
 interval, that she did not know if she would 
 have given up her walking to keep at home and 
 tend him, or whether the thought of her son s 
 small feet running beside her in the trails 
 would have driven her to the open again. The 
 baby had not stayed long enough for that. 
 "And whenever the wind blows in the night," 
 said the Walking Woman, "I wake and wonder 
 if he is well covered." 
 
 She took up her black bag and her blanket; 
 there was the ranch-house of Dos Palos to be 
 made before night, and she went as outliers 
 do, without a hope expressed of another meet 
 ing and no word of good-bye. She was the 
 Walking Woman. That w r as it. She had 
 walked off all sense of society-made values, and, 
 knowing the best when the best came to her, 
 was able to take it. Work as I believed; love 
 as the Walking Woman had proved it; a 
 child as you subscribe to it. But look you: 
 208 
 
X 
 
 THE WALKING WOMAN 
 
 it was the naked thing the Walking Woman 
 grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for in 
 stance, by prejudices in favor of certain occupa 
 tions"; and love, man love, taken as it came, 
 not picked over and rejected if it carried no 
 obligation of permanency; and a child; any 
 way you get it, a child is good to have, say 
 nature and the Walking Woman; to have it 
 and not to wait upon a proper concurrence of 
 so many decorations that the event may not 
 come at all. 
 
 At least one of us is wrong. To work and to 
 love and to bear children. That sounds easy 
 enough. But the way we live establishes so 
 many things of much more importance. 
 
 Far down the dim, hot valley I could see the 
 Walking Woman with her blanket and black bag 
 over her shoulder. She had a queer, sidelong 
 gait, as if in fact she had a twist all through her. 
 
 Recollecting suddenly that people called her 
 lame, I ran down to the open place below the 
 spring where she had passed. There in the 
 bare, hot sand the track of her two feet bore 
 evenly and white. 
 
 THE END 
 

 
 , 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 \ . < , 
 
 ^M ( \ 1*4 
 
 ir 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 : 
 
 4sft^ 
 
 . -ik ,jM>*< 
 
 
 
 
 - l -^ iSj 
 
 ^/ v 
 

 
 
 M 
 
 
 / 
 
 
 <.(. ^ 
 
 4>v 
 
 >KYVJ 
 
 HU 
 
R 
 
 L( 
 
 RETURN TO the circulation desk of any 
 University of California Library 
 
 or to the 
 
 NORTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 Bldg. 400, Richmond Field Station 
 University of California 
 Richmond, CA 94804-4698 
 
 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 2-month loans may be renewed by calling 
 (510)642-6753 
 
 1-year loans may be recharged by bringing 
 books to NRLF 
 
 Renewals and recharges may be made 4 
 days prior to due date. 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 
 
 MAR 2 7 1997 
 
 <r 
 
 59 
 
 ~=3- 
 
 cr 
 
 \a 
 
 FORA 
 
 12.000(11/95) 
 
72755 
 
 GENERAL LIBRARY - U.C. BERKELEY 
 
 BDQ0122M7D 
 
 -2, 4. ,4 2-S 
 
 A 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY