Collected Short Fiction, page 159
“Iru, by the legend, loved the slave-girl, Aysa. And Vekyra was jealous. One night she made the king drunk, and won the slave from him in a game of chance.”
“I understand how she might have done that,” said Price, recalling his own adventure in the castle of Verl.
“When Iru was sober, he demanded that Vekyra trade him back the slave. She dared not deny him. But she set the greatest price she could think of. She told Iru she would exchange him the girl for a tiger tame enough to ride.
“So Iru rode into the mountains, and caught a live tiger cub, and tamed it. When it was grown, he gave it to Vekyra, and she had to surrender the slave—but still she hated Aysa.”
Price’s disquiet was returning. This was the same story Vekyra had told, of the pampered and adored slave—who was to murder her adorer. He resisted an impulse to stop the girl. After all, what happened twenty centuries ago could not come between them now.
“Iru did not like the cruel worship of the snake. He destroyed the snake’s temple, slew its priests in battle. But Malikar, when all thought him dead, came back, a man of gold, to avenge the desecration of the temple. In vain he made war on Iru, and at last he disguised himself and slipped into Anz, to slay Iru by stealth.
“He found a woman to do murder for him.”
Price’s heart sank. This was the same evil tale.
“I know not what he told Vekyra. He must have offered her the immortal golden life he afterward gave her, and the power with him over Anz. And Vekyra must have hated Iru, because of the slave.
“So Vekyra poisoned Iru’s wine——”
A paean of joy rose in Price’s heart. He drew Aysa abruptly to him, smothered her words with kisses.
“Why are you so glad,” she inquired innocently, “that Vekyra poisoned the wine?”
“Never mind, darling. Go on with the story.”
“Vekyra herself handed Iru the bowl. The slave-girl was near. She saw the look on Vekyra’s face, and cried out, and told Iru not to drink.
“Then Vekyra, to save herself, pretended to be very angry. She cursed the slave-girl. She said she herself would drink the wine, if Iru would give back the girl to her.
“But Iru refused. He was too brave to understand how another could do a cowardly thing. In the haste of his anger, he put the bowl to his own lips. Aysa tried to strike it from his hand; he held her back.
“Aysa then implored the king to let her drink it, rather than he. But he drained the bowl himself. Instantly he fell. His last breath was a promise that he would return to destroy Vekyra.
“The slave-girl threw herself down upon his body. Vekyra pinned the two together with a dagger she had ready in her clothing, to use if the poison failed. Leaving them so, she escaped from the palace to Malikar, who gave her reward for the thing.”
Price did not speak.
The story had removed his last unwilling doubt, the final barrier between them.
Now they were one. It seemed to Price as if a vast purpose had come to pass. A unity, an ultimate completeness, emerged from the confused, painful conflict of his life. He knew that every incident in his years of discontented roving had been but a step toward this moment with Aysa in the desert.
The sun descended, reddened. A purple sea, the vast shadow of Hajar Jehannum flowed over the rugged basalt plain behind them. Cooler air breathed against their blistered faces; the savage violence of the day surrendered to the mystic peace of twilight.
Aysa moved a little, sighing happily, and relaxed against him. His arm pillowed her fair head. The still desert wrapped them with a peace deeper than Price had ever known, with a quiet happiness that became changeless and enduring as the very desert.
THAT new peace was not broken when Aysa tensed abruptly in his arms, listening, and asked:
“What is that, humming like a great bee?”
Price heard the distant droning. He pointed out the gray mote wheeling up against the deepening azure of the southward sky. He knew that it was one of the fighting-planes that had been called by Jacob Garth’s radio.
It came northward, following the trail. Price and Aysa stood up as it came near; Price took off his shirt and waved it. The gray ship found them, roared low over them. Price saw Sam Sorrows, the old Kansan, bareheaded, leaning recklessly from the cockpit, gesturing with his arms. He waved in return, and the plane flew back toward the oasis.
“That is a flying-ship of my own people,” he told Aysa. “We may ride in it back to my land, if you wish. The man who waved is my friend. The rocks are so rough that he could not come down here. But he will come for us tomorrow.”
Wide-eyed with wonder, she asked many questions as the droning of the plane died in purple twilight. Price answered them, while the ancient stillness of the rode desert came back and the broad gold disk of the moon broke above a rugged horizon.
Aysa was eager, excited. But Price’s new, joyous peace lived on in a world of silver light and purple shadow, at one with silence and mystery that had endured a million years. She sat by him in the moonlight, and he was content.
[THE END]
“We Ain’t Beggars”
He took the crushed stale bun out of his overalls pocket. It was the last of the four he had bought in Ft. Worth for six pennies. He had meant to save it for tomorrow . . .
The dog lying against him whined and licked at his hand.
In the cold faint moonlight that fell through the half-open door of the box car he broke the dry bun carefully in half.
“Here, Tige, ol’ man. It ain’t much. But we’ll git to Uncle Jethro’s tomorrow, shore.”
The bony dog gnawed and gulped the piece of bread. Slowly, with lingering joy, the boy ate his own share, chewing each frugal bite until it became a sweetish liquid in his mouth.
The car lurched and jolted. The boy’s body was sore at hips and shoulders from lying on the bare splintery floor. Through the door rang the incessant rumble of the wheels, and a white arm of moonlight moved back and forth to rest on one or another of the untidy men sleeping with their heads on paper bundles. In worn overalls and thin blue shirt the boy’s slight body was cold; he was glad for Tige’s warm body against him.
A man groaned and rose. A match lit a weary, unshaven face, cast uncertain shadows over motionless bodies. Reek of cheap tobacco filled the car. The man shook out a dusty vest that had been rolled up under his head; he put it on, and walked across the sleepers to close the door.
The roar of the wheels was a little diminished; but yet it filled the car, mighty and unending.
In the new inky darkness the boy felt slightly warmer. He turned over, and drew Tige’s rough body closer to him.
He tried to go to sleep, and wished that he had another bun. He licked fragments of the last from the corners of his mouth and chewed at them and swallowed.
The hammering of the wheels grew slower and ceased. The train had stopped. In the new silence the boy could hear the snores of sleeping men. The car started again, with a jerk that slid his sore body over the rough planks, stopped as abruptly.
The door had been flung open; the man in the vest peered out furtively.
“Wake up, you guys,” he called. “The dirty hogheads have set us out, to hell and gone from no place!”
Men stirred and yawned and groaned. They struck matches that lit the car fugitively, rolled cigarettes, moved toward the door with their bundles.
The boy slipped out of the door, and took Tige in his arms to set him down. Cold dry air struck through his thin cotton garments. In the dead light of the narrow waning moon he saw that the car stood on a siding, in a string of empties.
“She’s coupling up over yonder,” said the man in the vest.
He walked away, wearily cursing. The boy followed him through the line of cars, calling to Tige.
He saw the train on another track, the engine headlight blazing on telegraph poles and a section shack. A man with a flashlight was coming back along the cars.
“A damn shack,” muttered the man in the vest. “Get out of sight.”
He and the boy stepped back between two cars.
“He’ll play hell keeping me off. I’m riding this damn rattler to the end of the division. And then I’m going to eat. Ain’t had a sit down since I left K.C.”
There was a pause, while they shivered in the cold moonlight that struck through between the cars. The man looked cautiously out. Then the boy asked:
“You got folks waitin’ for you?”
“Hell, no. I stem what I get.”
Curiously, the man looked at the thin, proud childish face, pallid and grimy in the moonlight.
“Don’t you bum, kid?”
The boy shook his head.
“Hell, it’s easy. Just stick with me and we’ll stem hell out of the next dump.”
“I ain’t no beggar.”
The dog put his velvety head up against the boy’s hand, and whined. The boy looked down at him quickly, and patted the soft fur.
“Tige and me are hungry,” he said. “But we ain’t goin’ to beg. We got folks.”
His slight shoulders stiffened as he looked at the man.
“Don’t be a fool, kid. We can mooch enough in an hour to last two days. Hell, it’s easy. No sense starving. You’ll get weak, and fall under the wheels.”
“We ain’t beggars. I’m goin’ to my Uncle Jethro.”
The man started to laugh. Then the whistle sounded two blasts and the train began to move.
“Them sons of bitches set out all the empties,” he grumbled. “We gotta ride on top.”
He swung on the end of a car as it passed.
The next was a tank car. The boy lifted Tige in his arms and set him on the running board. The dog seemed very heavy; he staggered a little beneath the weight.
“Easy, ol’ man. I’m a-comin’.”
He climbed on the steps at the end of the car and walked back along the narrow plank to Tige. By the ladder at the middle of the car he sat down, swinging off his feet. He grasped a rung of the ladder with one hand, and curved an arm around Tige’s body.
The boy felt a little queer and dizzy, but he set his jaw and held up his chin.
“We ain’t beggars, are we, ol’ man?” he whispered at last to the dog. “I reckon he was right about me gittin’ weak. An’ I’m shore sorry about you havin’ to go without. But I can’t beg. An’ we got Uncle Jethro.”
The train gathered speed. The wind grew stronger. Most of the buttons were gone off the shirt, and the wind whipped it away from the boy’s body. He was colder than he had been in the box car.
The car swayed and lurched. The sound of the wheels was the clangor of sledges on a thousand anvils. Ceaseless, powerful, terrible. A demoniac yell that never ended.
The black edge of the grade raced endlessly back at his feet, and interminable rows of weeds. Sometimes cinders rained on him. When one got in his eye, he forgot the cold until tears had washed it out. The arm with which he grasped the ladder was stiff and numb, but he dared not move to exercise the cold and the cramp from his body while the train plunged rocking through the night. He or Tige might fall, and the screaming, inexorable wheels were very near . . .
Dull eternities dragged away, and he clung shivering to the cold iron.
Lee Haskell came of a proud breed. His mother he knew only as a tight-mouthed face on a fading photograph. He and his father had always lived in lonely independence in the pine shack at the edge of the stony forty acres. Lee did not remember when he had been too small to go with his father to the cotton patch.
A proud and lonely breed. They asked no favors, and fate had given them none. All the year before Lee’s father had been too infirm to help in the field. Lee did his stubborn best. But cotton was five cents, and the boll weevil got into the crop. His father sold the best half the forty, and could not pay the taxes on the rest. He would not ask for a loan.
That spring he was feebler still. Lee put in the crop alone. When the cultivation was but well begun, Toby, the old mule, foundered himself when he broke into Jim Cole’s green corn, and died. Jim Cole, owner of a rich bottom farm, came next day, driving a team of grays to a riding cultivator. He found Lee’s father sitting on a rickety chair in the shade of the lone peach tree by the shack.
“I’m right sorry about your mule foundering,” he said. “Colonel,’—the stiff pride of the old man’s bearing must have won him the title, for he had seen no military service—’Colonel, I’m loaning Lee my outfit to plow out his cotton.”
The old man stiffened in his chair.
“Thankee, sir,” he said. “But I reckon we can make out.”
“Why, I won’t be needing them for a week, Colonel. We just got through this morning.”
“We ain’t askin’ nothin’, sir, from nobody.”
Jim Cole laughed. “I know you didn’t ask, Colonel. But I’d be glad to loan you the team.”
“Thankee, sir. But we don’t want it.”
When Cole had abandoned his efforts to lend the team and driven away, the old man called Lee out of the shack where he had been preparing their meal.
“Did you go beggin’ Jim Cole for help, boy?” his shrill voice cracked accusingly. “Ain’t you got no pride? Beggin’! An’ off a damn Yankee!”
“I didn’t ask him, Pa. I ain’t spoke a word to him since Toby died.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Lee my son. We ain’t no poor white trash. And I reckon we can get along without askin’ help from nobody. You jest finish choppin’ out the cotton, Lee. An’ then get what weeds you can with the hoe. An’ don’t be thinkin’ of beggin’!”
During the summer, as Lee toiled in the shrunken, weed-grown field, the old man took by degrees to his bed. One flaming noon, when the boy trudged in from the field, sweat-streaked and dusty, worn hoe on his shoulder, he found Mrs. Cole standing in the door of the shack. A large, energetic, jovial woman; Lee had always liked her. In a basket on her arm were a pail of milk and loaves of white bread and a pat of new butter.
“You’re a sick man, Colonel Haskell,” she was saying. “I tell you corn pone and salt meat ain’t best for you. Your stomach ain’t as strong as it used to be. It calls for lighter victuals.”
Lee’s father was sitting up on the rusty iron bed.
“Thankee, ma’am,” he said. “But I reckon Lee and I can take care of ourselves. We ain’t beggars.”
Three weeks later he was dead.
Lee remembered the gossiping company that sat up all night with the corpse, while hammers tapped away in the shed behind, fashioning the pine coffin. And then the man who came with the sheriff, to claim the rest of the farm for taxes.
Mrs. Cole came again, and wanted Lee to go home with her.
“I know you’re a good boy, Lee,” she said. “Jim and me want you to come and live with us. We’ll be good to you. You won’t have to work so hard; you’ll have time to go to school, and everything. Jim and me always wanted a boy of our own.”
Lee stood with tears in his eyes, and she came to him and pressed his trembling body against her soft bosom. Fiercely he broke away from her arms, chin up, fists clenched.
“I can look after myself,” he choked. “Tige and me, we ain’t beggars.”
“But honey, Jim and me want you. And you ain’t got a soul in the world to go to.”
“Yes, I got folks,” stammered Lee. “I got my Uncle Jethro.”
“Your uncle? Where does he live, child?”
“Pa always said he was in Denver. He went there the year I was born. He’s a paper hanger.”
“But hon, does he know you’re coming?”
“No, mam, we never heard from him after he started out. Pa was always lookin’ for a letter. But he tol’ me he knowed Uncle Jethro was goin’ to Denver.”
Her strong soft arms went around his body. He knew that she was crying, too, and felt a strange comfort.
“You must come stay with Jim and me, child, till we find him.”
Lee had heard tramp cotton pickers talk about riding the freights. That night he started.
Dawn came. A white gleam that slowly drowned the thin moon and the hard clear stars. The train hammered on and the gray light brought no warmth.
Lee was sleepy.
He could not relax. He dared not loosen his grasp upon the ladder or withdraw the guarding arm that held Tige against him . . . The pounding, ringing wheels were very near . . . He tried not to close his eyes, but the lids slipped down. Again and again he yawned.
Little gaps came in his consciousness, when he had been on the edge of sleep. They made it seem that he had been forever on the car, that the crashing ring of steel on steel would never end.
White sun struck him, feebly warm. The chill receded gradually from his limbs. But still they were cramped and stiff.
Yet he fought the desire to sleep, jerking himself back again and again from just beyond the brink, but alarmed into wakefulness only for moments by the threat of screaming steel.
The train lurched on.
The sun was high and Lee at last warm again when it slowed. He saw they were entering a hollow among bare hills. Desire to sleep had almost left; he was hungrier. He looked eagerly toward the town ahead.
Men were climbing from the train. He waited until it was rolling slowly, then threw himself off. He had meant to land on his feet, but he stumbled and fell in the weeds. It was strange how weak and tired he felt, when he was not so hungry as he had been yesterday. Giddy, and feeling almost that he was swimming instead of walking.
Tige yelped and leapt off the plank and came running back to him. He yawned and whined and licked the boy’s hand.
“Wisht I had somethin’ for you, ol’—ol’ man,” Lee choked. “But I can’t beg. I jes’ can’t!”
On a weed-grown open space near the track he approached three shabby men about a fire. One was cutting up cabbage and potatoes in a grimy tin bucket; and the scent of steaming coffee made the boy’s head swim.
“Please, sir,” Lee addressed the one who looked up at him. “Is this Denver? I’m lookin’ for my Uncle Jethro.” And he added hastily, “His name is Jethro Wade.”
The unshaven man scanned him, and grinned.
“Hell no, kid. This burg’s Trinidad. You can make Denver by night, though. Just hop the Rio Grande around the other end of the yards. She pulls out in about an hour.”
