Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 608
“I wish to heaven he’d try it,” responded Adam, and, loosing the woman’s hold upon his hands, he strode toward the shack.
“Virey, come out!” he called, loudly, though without any particular feeling. There was no reply, and he repeated the call, this time louder. Still Virey remained silent. Waiting a moment longer, Adam finally spoke again, with deliberate, cold voice. “Virey, I don’t want to mess up that room with all your wife’s belongings in there. So come outside.”
At that Adam heard a quick, panting breath. Then Virey appeared — came to the door of the shack. Adam could not have told what the man’s distorted face resembled. He carried a gun, and his heart was ferocious if his will was weak.
“Don’t you — lay one of your — bloody hands on me,” he panted.
Adam took two long strides and halted before Virey, not six feet distant.
“So you’ve got your little gun, eh?” he queried, without any particular force. Adam had been compelled to smother all that mighty passion within him, or he could not have answered for his actions. “What are you going to do with it?”
“If you make a — move at me — I’ll kill you,” came the husky, panting response.
“Virey, I’m going to beat you within an inch of your worthless life,” declared Adam, monotonously, as if he had learned this speech by rote. “But I’ve got to talk first. I’m full of a million things to call you.”
“Damn you, I’ll not listen,” replied Virey, beginning to shake with excitement. The idea of using the gun had become an intent and was acting powerfully upon him. “You leave my — camp — you get out — of this valley!”
“Virey, are you crazy?” queried Adam. The use of his voice had changed that deadlock of his feelings. He must not trust himself to bandy speech with Virey. The beating must be administered quickly or there would be something worse. Yet how desperately hard not to try to awaken conscience or sense in this man!
“No, I’m not crazy,” yelled Virey.
“If you’re not crazy, then that trick of throwing a tarantula on your wife was damnable — mean — hellish — monstrous...My God! man, can’t you see what a coward you are? To torture her — as if you were a heathen! That delicate woman — all quivering nerves! To pick on a weakness, like that of a child! Virey, if you’re not crazy you’re the worst brute I’ve ever met on the desert. You’ve sunk lower than men whom the desert has made beasts. You—”
“Beast I am — thanks to my delicate wife,” cried Virey, with exceeding bitter passion. “Delicate? Ha-ha! The last lover of Magdalene Virey can’t see she’s strong as steel — alive as red fire! How she clings to memory! How she has nine lives of a cat — and hangs on to them — just to remember!...And you — meddler! You desert rat of a preacher. Get out — or I’ll kill you!”
“Shoot and be damned!” flashed Adam, as with leap as swift as his voice he reached a sweeping arm.
Virey’s face turned ashen. He raised the gun. Adam knocked it up just as it exploded. The powder burned his forehead, but the bullet sped high. Another blow sent the gun flying to the sand. Then Adam, fastening a powerful grip on Virey, clutching shirt and collar and throat at once, dragged him before the stone bench where Mrs. Virey sat, wide-eyed and pale. Here Adam tripped the man and threw him heavily upon the sand. Before he could rise Adam straddled him, bearing him down. Then Adam’s big right hand swept and dug in the sand to uncover the dead tarantula.
“Ah! here’s your spider!” he shouted. And he rubbed the hairy, half-crushed tarantula in Virey’s face. The man screamed and wrestled. “Good! you open your mouth. Now we’ll see...Eat it — eat it, damn your cowardly soul!” Then Adam essayed to thrust the spider between Virey’s open lips. He succeeded only partly. Virey let out a strangling, spitting yell, then closed his teeth as a vice. Adam smeared what was left of the crushed tarantula all over Virey’s face.
“Now get up,” he ordered, and, rising himself, he kicked Virey. Adam, in the liberation of his emotions by action, was now safe from himself. He would not kill Virey. He could even hold in his enormous strength. He could even think of the joy of violence that was rioting inside him, of the ruthless fierceness with which he could have rent this man limb from limb.
Virey, hissing and panting in a frenzy, scrambled to his feet. Fight was in him now. He leaped at Adam, only to meet a blow that laid him on the sand. It had not stunned him. Up he sprang, bloody, livid, and was at Adam again. His frenzy lent him strength and in that moment he had no fear of man or devil. The desert rage was on him. He swung his fists, beat wildly at Adam, tore and clawed. Adam slapped him with great broad hands that clapped like boards, and then, when Virey lunged close, he closed his fist and smashed it into Virey’s face. The man of the cities went ploughing in the sand. Then on his hands and knees he crawled like a dog, and, finding a stone, he jumped up to fling it. Adam dodged the missile. Wildly Virey clutched for more, throwing one after another. Adam caught one and threw it back, to crack hard on his opponent’s shin. Virey yelled no more. His rage took complete possession of him. Grasping up a large rock, he held it as a mace and rushed upon Adam to brain him. That action and intent to kill was the only big response he had made to this wild environment. He beat at Adam. He lunged up to meet his foe’s lofty head. He had no fear. But he was mad. No dawning came to him that he was being toyed with. Strong and furious at the moment, he might have succeeded in killing a lesser man. But before Adam he was powerless to do murder. Then the time came when Adam knocked the rock out of his hand and began to beat him, blow on blow to face and body, with violence, but with checked strength, so that Virey staggered here and there, upheld by fists. At last, whipped out of rage and power to retaliate, Virey fell to the sands. Adam dragged him into the shack and left him prostrate and moaning, an abject beaten wretch who realised his condition.
Most difficult of all for Adam then was to face Mrs. Virey. Yet the instant he did he realised that his ignorance of women was infinite.
“Did the bullet — when he fired — did it hit you?” she queried, her large eyes, intense and glowing, wonderfully dark with emotion, flashing over him.
“No — it missed — me,” panted Adam, as with heavy breath he sank upon the stone bench.
“I picked up the gun. I was afraid he’d find it. You’d better keep it now,” she said, and slipped it into his pocket.
“What a — dis — gusting — sight for you — to have — to watch!” exclaimed Adam, trying to speak and breathe at once.
“It was frightful — terrible at first,” she returned. “But after the gun went flying — and you had stopped trying to make him eat the — the spider — ugh! how sickening I...After that it got to be — well, Wansfell, it was the first time in the years I’ve known my husband that I respected him. He meant to kill you. It amazed me. I admired him...And as for you — to see you tower over him — and parry his blows — and hit him when you liked — and knock him and drag him — oh, that roused a terrible something in me! I never felt so before in my whole life. I was some other woman. I watched the blood flow, I heard the thuds and heavy breaths, I actually smelled the heat of you, I was so close — and it all inflamed me, made me strung with savage excitement — I had almost said joy...God knows, Wansfell, we have hidden natures within our breasts.”
“If only it’s a lesson to him!” sighed Adam.
“Then it were well done,” she replied, “but I doubt — I doubt. Virey is hopeless. Let us forget...And now will you please help me search in the sand here for something I dropped. It fell from my lap when I fainted, I suppose. It’s a small ivory case with a miniature I think all the world of. Last and best of my treasures!”
Adam raked in the sand along the base of the bench, and presently found the lost treasure. How passionately, with what eloquent cry of rapture, did she clutch it!
“Look!” she exclaimed, with wonderful thrill in her voice, and held the little case open before Adam’s eyes.
He saw a miniature painting of a girl’s face, oval, pure as a flower, with beautiful curls of dark bronze, and magnificent eyes. In these last Adam recognised the mother of this girl. The look of them, the pride and fire, if not the colour, were the same as Magdalene Virey’s.
“A sweet and lovely face,” said Adam.
“Ruth!” she whispered. “My daughter — my only child — my baby that I abandoned to save her happiness!...Oh, mockery of life that I was given such a heart to love — that I was given such a perfect child!”
The midsummer midnight furnace winds began to blow.
They did not blow every night or many nights consecutively; otherwise all life in the valley would soon have become extinct. Adam found the hot winds heretofore, that he had imagined were those for which the valley was famed, were really comfortable compared with these terrible furnace blasts. In trying to understand their nature, Adam concluded they were caused by a displacement of higher currents of cool air. Sometime during the middle of the night there began a downward current of cool air from the mountain heights; and this caused a disturbance of the vast area of hot air in the burning valley below sea level. The tremendous pressure drove the hot air to find an outlet so it could rise to let the cool air down, and thus there came gusts and gales of furnace winds, rushing down the valley, roaring up the canyons.
The camp of the Vireys, almost in the centre of one of these outlets and scarcely a quarter of a mile from the main valley, lay open to the full fury of these winds.
The first of August was a hazy, blistering day in which the valley smoked. Veils of transparent black heat — shrouds of moving white transparent heat! The mountains’ tops were invisible, as if obscured in thin, leaden-hued fog; their bases showed dull, sinister red through the haze. Nothing moved except the strange veils and the terrible heaven-wide sun that seemed to have burst. It was a day when, if a man touched an unshaded stone with his naked hand, he would be burned as by a hot iron. A solemn, silent, sulphurous, smoky, deadly day, inimical to life!
But at last the sunset of red hell ended that day and merciful darkness intervened. The fore part of the night was hot, yet endurable, and a relief compared to the sunlit hours. Adam marked, however, or imagined, a singular, ominous, reddish hue of the dim stars, a vast still veil between him and the sky, a waiting hush. He walked out into the open, peering through the dimness, trying to comprehend. The colour of the stars and heavens, and of the dull black slopes, and of the night itself, seemed that of a world burned out. Immense, dim, mysterious, empty, desolate! Had this Death Valley finally unhinged his mind? But he convinced himself that it was normal. The unreality, the terror, the forbidding hush of all the elements, the imminence of catastrophe — these were all actually present. Anything could happen here. Exaggeration of sense was impossible. This Death Valley was only a niche of the universe and the universe only a part of the infinite. He felt his intelligence and emotion, and at the same time the conviction that only a step away was death. The old wonder arose — was death the end? Not possible! Yet the cruelty, the impassivity of nature, letting the iron consequences fall — this seemed to crush him. For the sake of a woman who suffered agony of body and mind, Adam was at war with nature and the spirit of creation. Why? The eternal query had no answer. It never would be answered.
As the hours wore away the air grew hotter, denser. Like a blanket it seemed to lie heavily on Adam. It was the hottest, stillest, most oppressive, strangest night of all his desert experience. Sleep was impossible. Rest was impossible. Inaction was impossible. Every breath seemed impossible of fulfilment. A pressure constricted Adam’s lungs. The slow, gentle walk that he drove himself to take, which it was impossible to keep from taking, brought out a hot flood of sweat on his body, and the drops burned as they trickled down his flesh.
“If the winds blow to-night!” he muttered, in irresistible dread.
Something told him they would blow. To-night they would blow harder and hotter than ever before. The day of leaden fire had promised that. Nature had her midnight change to make in the elements. Time would not stand still. The universe prevailed on its inscrutable course; the planets burned; the suns blazed upon their earths; and this ball of rock on which Adam clung, groaning with the other pygmies of his kind, whirled and hurtled through space, now dark and then light, now hot and then cold slave to a blazing master ninety million miles away. It was all so inconceivable, inscrutable, unbelievable.
There came a movement of air fanning his cheek, emphasising the warmth. He smelled anew the dry alkali dust, the smoky odour, almost like brimstone. The hour was near midnight and the death-like silence brooded no more. A low moan, as of a lost soul, moved somewhere on the still air. Weird, dismal, uncanny, it fitted the spectral shadows and shapes around him, and the night with its mystery. No human sound, though it resembled the mourn of humanity! A puff of hot wind struck Adam in the face, rushed by, rustling the dead and withered brush, passed on to lull and die away. It seemed to leave a slow movement in the still air, a soft, restless, uneasy shifting, as of an immense volume becoming unsettled, Adam knew. Behind that sudden birth of life the dead air pressed the furious blasts of hell — the midnight furnace wind of Death Valley.
Adam listened. How strange, low, sad the moan! His keen ears, attuned to all varieties of desert sound, seemed to fill and expand. The moan swelled to a low roar, lulling now, then rising. Like no sound he had ever heard before, it had strange affinity with the abyss of shadows. Suddenly the air around Adam began a steady movement northward. Its density increased, or else the movement, or pressure behind, made it appear so. And it grew swift, until it rustled the brush. Down in the valley the roar swelled like the movement of a mighty storm through a forest. When the gale reached the gateway below Adam it gave a hollow bellow.
The last of the warm, still air was pressed beyond Adam, apparently leaving a vacuum, for there did not appear to be air enough to breathe. The roar of wind sounded still quite distant, though now loud. Then the hot blast struck Adam — a burning, withering wind. It was as if he had suddenly faced an open furnace from which flames and sparks leaped out upon him. That he could breathe, that he lived a moment, seemed a marvel. Wind and roar filled the wide space between the slopes and rushed on, carrying sand and dust and even shadows with it. That blast softened in volume and had almost died away when another whooped up through the gateway, louder and stronger and hotter than its predecessor. It blew down Adam’s sun shelter of brush and carried the branches rustling away. Then stormed contending tides of winds until, what with burning blasts and whirling dust devils and air thick with powdered salt and alkali, life became indeed a torment for Adam, man of the desert as he was.
In the face of these furnace winds, tenacity of life had new meaning for Adam. The struggle to breathe was the struggle of a dying man to live. But Adam found that he could survive. It took labour, greater even than toiling through a sandstorm, or across a sun-scorched waste to a distant water hole. And it was involuntary labour. His great lungs were not a bellows for him to open when he chose. They were compelled to work. But the process, in addition to the burn and sting, the incessant thirst, the dust-laden air, the hot skull-bone like an iron lid that must fly off, and the strange, dim, red starlight, the sombre red varying shadow, the weird rush and roar and lull — all these created heroic fortitude if a man was to endure. Adam understood why no human being could long exist in Death Valley.
“She will not live through the night,” muttered Adam, “But if she does, I think I’ll take her away.”
While in the unearthly starlit gloom, so dimly red, Adam slowly plodded across to the Virey camp, that idea grew in his mind. It had augmented before this hour, only to faint at the strength of her spirit, but to-night was different. It marked a climax. If Magdalene Virey showed any weakening, any change of spirit, Adam knew he would have reached the end of his endurance.
She would be lying or sitting on the stone bench. It was not possible to breathe inside the shack. Terrible as were the furnace winds, they had to be breasted — they had to be fought for the very air of life. She had not the strength to walk up and down, to and fro, through those endless hours.
Adam’s keen eyes, peering through the red-tinged obscurity, made out the dark shape of Virey staggering along back and forth like an old man driven and bewildered, hounded by the death he feared. The sight gave Adam a moment of fierce satisfaction. Strong as was the influence of Magdalene Virey, it could not keep down hate for this selfish and fallen man. Selfish beyond all other frailty of human nature! The narrow mind obsessed with self — the I and me and mine — the miserable littleness that could not forgive, that could not understand! Adam had pity even in his hate.
He found the woman on the bench, lying prone, a white, limp, fragile shape, motionless as stone. Sitting down, he bent over to look into her face. Her unfathomable eyes, wide and dark and strained, stirred his heart as never before. They were eyes to which sleep was a stranger — haunted eyes, like the strange midnight at which they gazed out, supernaturally bright, mirroring the dim stars, beautiful as the waking dreams never to come true — eyes of melancholy, of unutterable passion, of deathless spirit. They were the eyes of woman and of love.
Adam took her wasted hand and held it while waiting for the wind to lull so that she could hear him speak. At length the hot blast moved on, like the receding of a fire.
“Magdalene, I can’t stand this any longer,” he said.
“You mean — these winds — of hell?” she panted, in a whisper.
“No. I mean your suffering. I might have stood your spiritual ordeal. Your remorse — your agony of loss of the daughter Ruth — your brave spirit defying Virey’s hate...But I can’t stand your physical torment. You’re wasting away. You’re withering — burning up. This hand is hot as fire — and dry as a leaf. You must drink more water...Magdalene, lift your head.”
