 | The Pot of Gold |  |
Austin, Mary. "The Pot of Gold."
Munsey's Magazine 25 (July 1901): 491-495.
WHAT FERROL FOUND AND WHAT HE LOST IN THE PLAIN OF BITTER WATERS
"THE thing is impossible."
"Yes—but there's the pot; you can see for yourself."
"Oh, that's likely enough. You can't strike down to bed rock anywhere in this country without getting colors. The impossibility is that you should find the place it came from, or, finding it, that it should be profitable to work."
"I wasn't thinking of working it."
"Well, what do you want with it?"
"Oh, to sell!"
The map maker laugher. "Ferrol," he said, "you haven't a rudiment of conscience; not a trace."
"Oh, come, it's not so bad as that. People always bite at these stories of buried treasure and lost mines. They like to be fooled that way. And as for finding it, there is no great difficulty about that, I take it. A pot like this won't outlast a generation, and these fellows get the material for their artifacts from the same places time out of mind. And gold has to be thick where an Indian can't scoop up a handful of clay to make him a cooking pot without getting it. Why, man, the thing fairly reeks with gold, good yellow gold."
The map maker did not speak. He bent above his instruments; his lips moved softly as he worked. The expedition was camped in the swale of the Dripping Spring, where its waters gathered in a rock basin under the wild almonds. The desert fell away towards Death Valley. A blanket stretched upon tent stakes stood between them and the sky. Behind a hill shoulder Chio kept the camp for his women folk, beginning to be incredibly busy, like ants, with seeds and roots, dried grasshoppers, and the flesh of chuckwallas.
Ferrol had found a cooking pot of an old, crude sort, shot through with grains of yellow gold, in Chio's cooking camp.
"I will not sell the pot," said Chio to all his chaffering.
"Come, now, what will you do one of these days when the pot is broken? With the money I will give, you can buy iron pots that will outlast you many such."
"It has lasted since my father's time. Will the pots of the white man last longer than that?"
"Confound the old rascal!" said Ferrol to himself. "But tell me, Chio, you who know so much, was the pot made by your own people, or came it from the south?"
"Of my own people, surely; what should I do with a pot of the Arizonas?"
"And made hereabouts? I should like to know. Perhaps, since you will not sell, I shall make me a pot for myself."
Tuyomai looked up from the fire she was stirring and laughed.
"Tuyomai, go into the house," said her father.
Ferrol knelt on the sand, sketching rapidly with his finger. "Look, Chio, here is the desert; here is Armagossa; here the Dripping Spring. These are the mountains. Is it here you make pots?"
"I think so; I no know," said Chio, relapsing from his own speech into broken English, after the manner of Indians who do not wish to understand.
Ferrol gave him a cigar and began again. "Is it here towards the getting up of the sun? Here?"
"Maybe so—I think so, long time my people not make um. I no know."
Ferrol, sweeping his map out with his hand, got up, laughing. As he stood, the day lapsed suddenly. The alpen-glow flowed in evenly across the dead levels of burnt earths, and the round browed, shouldering hills. "A rainbow land," he said, and laughed again a whimsical assent to his own conceit. "A rainbow land, and a pot of gold at the end of it!"
Going back by the way he came, Fer-
The expedition had finished its work, and was for returning by way of Pilot Knob, and thence across the Valley of Salt Wells to the stage road going south. Ferrol, it was given out by the map maker, would forge north and east to the unnamed purple barrows touching the desert rim, on the trail of some prehistoric ruins of which he had word from Chio.
"If you must go," said the map maker, "for goodness' sake, don't let the expedition know what wild goose's feather has set you off. If this should get to headquarters, it would spoil your chance of getting on the Peruvian expedition, and you know you've set your heart on that."
"Oh, that's all right! Besides, it is really true—about the ruins, I mean. Tuyomai says they did not make the pot, but found it near an ancient pottery. The old man lied, it seems. And Tuyomai says that there are ruins there of hewn stone with pictures on them. Besides, I can hardly help finding something in this country; why, man, it's in the air. Tuyomai says—"
"Does the girl go with you?" asked the map maker brutally.
Ferrol laughed. He had a quick insight and facility, and a merry temper, that made him invaluable in difficult expeditions. He had done some notable things, too, but the adventurous blood of the Celt stood him in evil stead. He liked the credit which his work brought him, but government expeditions have limitations, and more than anything else Ferrol desired a fortune, that he might go adventuring upon his own account. Clear through the soul of him he loved a happy chance better than the price of conscious toil; so now he would be off to the impossible borders of a barren land, on the edge of the dry season, seeking a rainbow end. But the map maker was wrong about the girl. Ferrol had no notion of burdening a difficult way with woman's gear.
The trail, straight away to the Borax Marsh, and north to the red hill that the Defiance twisted through, and east again by the California Girl, would bring him to the end of the mining country, and thence across to the nameless hills as best he might. The landmarks the girl had given him were sure: a white, wind sculptured chalk cliff, the tilted beds of vermilion earth, and the black, cleaving outcrop between two beds of clay—coal, perhaps. Well, that might be worth while also. Ferrol counted two months to his hazard, and made dry camp by starlight, having walked on into the gentle night wide eyed with the first fever of his enterprise. In the dark behind him a coyote howled, and he could hear the soft push, push, of the burrowing owls clearing out of the trail, and the crisping of sand under human foot. Ferrol drew his revolver and dropped it again, catching the stir of a woman's dress.
"Who?" he called across the gloom.
"Tuyomai—I have brought you the pot." She put it down from her head and stooped beside it, still and wearied.
"Oh, yes, the pot. So the old man changed his mind, did he?"
"My father does not know. He is an old man—and the pot would be mine."
"Quite so. Well, this is awkward; I have only a little silver with me. Will this do?"
The girl did not move. "Why should I take money?" she said. "I have brought my father's pot. And I cannot go back."
The sky filled and filled with unwinking stars, and the soft gloom grew into sound in the love notes of the burrowing owls. Ferrol remembered, in the night, to be grateful that the expedition had traveled well away from Dripping Spring the day before. Waking, it fell in with his desert mood to see Tuyomai moving softly, and not without grace, between him and the kindling fire. Well, she knew, if any knew, where were the beds of golden sand, and the time was past when the tribe would arise hot on his path for the theft of a girl and a cooking pot.
When they came to the Borax Marsh, the girl had wit enough to turn out of the trail and wait for him on the other side; and again when they came to the
The thing began to take the color of a lotus eating dream; a man and a woman free of all things in a big new land, a woman of shining, gold colored limbs and black, deep lighted eyes, who loved him dearly; a strong young life that trod the hills with him, resourceful, tireless, and unafraid. Ferrol thought how good the days of the first pair must have been. He thought once of the women he had known, and forgot them utterly.
Tuyomai had the wisdom of her people in foodful roots and berries and the flesh of wild things. The days broke softly luminous upon rayed blossomings, and the dewless nights were deep and sweet with sleep.
All this time they had not found the golden sands. Old potteries they found, and strewn shards, clay beds of surpassing qualities, mineral earths, chrome and vermilion, and huge outcroppings of wasteful ore, but never the thing they sought.
At the end of eight weeks Ferrol found, at the Defiance, a letter from the map maker, calling him several kinds of a fool, for the Peruvian expedition had been made up suddenly without him. Ferrol sent in a report on the deposits of mineral earths, and went back to the hills and Tuyomai.
In golden noons, under the almond bushes, he taught her to write upon the sands, and began to explore the lore of her people, and to learn how many things a man may drop out of his life without making himself unhappy. So they fared along the rim of the aching sand wastes, exploring the washes of forgotten streams, until they came again to the Dripping Spring, where Tuyomai built him a wattled hut; and while Ferrol dozed, she sat under the creosote brushes, pondering, and writing upon the sand. Ferrol came upon one of these scrawls one day—his own name written large, and aside and falteringly "Mrs. Ferrol." He wiped it out hastily with his foot, Tuyomai accepting the omen silently as becomes a woman of her race.
When the heat began to beat down the hollow of the valley, insistent and palpable, they got them up to the high ridges and the scant shadows of the fox-tail pines, and, when the heat was past, back to the spring. Here Ferrol built a hut such as miners use in the rainless hills, for by this time he knew all that was in the mind of Tuyomai when she wrote upon the sand.
He meant, when he had made all safe for her, to go back to his own; but when the fire was lit and the stars burned in the velvet void, and Tuyomai huddled against his feet, silent as he was silent, glowing when he glowed, he found that the taste of life was good. And always the cooking pot pricked him towards the golden quest. The desert wantoned with his intimate desires, kindled, and promised, and withheld. In the next luminous hollow, the farther hidden hills—everywhere the secret pressed and warmed him. And the message of the imperturbable hills is that one must take no account of mere days.
The mail came up from Minton, and supplies in the ore wagon of the Defiance. Prospectors hailed him in his wanderings; gipsy bands of Indians shifted from Panniment to Pilot Knob, and back by way of the Dripping Spring, and Tuyomai made friends with their women against her time of need. By the time the almonds flowered again, one came and dwelt by them in a little leafy hut, and Tuyomai, gone back in time of stress to the habit of her kind, bore him a son lying under the wattles by the rill of the spring.
Ferrol showed his pot to the miners he met. The things he knew about it and the things he hoped were blown about in the common talk, even as far as Angustora, and came back to him as a thing long established and believed, of a forgotten treasure in a hidden hill. It would have been better for Ferrol in those days if the little horned snake of the desert had bitten him, for there is more wealth in that unstinted land than a man can look upon and keep perfectly sane. So in the end Ferrol went mad, stark, desert mad; in all else orderly of speech and judgment, but mad. And Tuyomai made him very comfortable.
Meanwhile the child grew and arrived at the age of speech. At first the bright blackness of its eyes and hair, so much
By the time the boy could pull himself up babbling by his father's knee, Ferrol understood that this was a son of his own begetting, and required to be named. "Light on the Mountain," Tuyomai called him, "Sweetwater," "Little Coyote," and the like foolish women's phrases, but as yet he had no name by which a man might be known.
"And what will you be called, sonny?" said Ferrol, giving the child a finger to hold by.
"Very good," laughed Tuyomai. "As thou art the great sun of all my days, so he shall be Sunny, my little sun." Tuyomai's English lapsed in those days, since Ferrol had a fancy for speaking her own speech.
So Sonny he was called, and when he could run at his father's heels for the better part of a day, Ferrol found no fault with his life, though his fortune was not yet made, and he had not yet begun his great work upon mineral deposits, with the promise of which he sopped the promptings of an old ambition.
Upon a day when the light broke rayed and luminous from every blossoming herb, and the creosote, spreading down into the swale of the spring, fretted the soft air with new leafage, Ferrol set forth across the hills, and the child got up unbidden from his play to follow. Tuyomai, plaiting a basket under the wattles, saw them go.
About noon the mail carrier from Minton called to her from the road that he had seen the child straying alone on the Argus trail, going further away from home. Tuyomai knew instantly what had happened. Ferrol had not seen the child following, or, seeing, had bidden him home, and Sonny had turned out of the trail to explore on his own account.
Tuyomai filled a canteen and the pitch smeared wicker water bottle that her people use, took food, and bethought herself how she might let Ferrol know, if he returned and found them gone. "Sonny Ferrol passed this way," she wrote upon the door, for so Ferrol had taught her to mark their trail when they two journeyed out towards Armagossa in an unforgotten spring. Then, her English failing, she filled up the space with crude sketches, and cast about from the beaten path to pick up the boy's trail with the native craft and patience that wins against all speed.
Ferrol, coming home about the time the twilight purple began to fill between the hollow of the desert and the hollow sky, found the writing on the door, and understood. He looked at the embers dead upon the hearth and the day dying along the hills; he ran to the spring for water, and ate as he ran, knowing what was before him. Seeing the water bottle gone, he cast about for another vessel that might hold water, and there, on the chimneypiece, stood the cooking pot, in the net Tuyomai had made to carry it by. He caught it up as he ran, and thrust it gurgling into the spring.
Ferrol found and followed the double trail until the night closed. He spent the dark hours fruitlessly, going down to the cabin of a man he knew for help, and finding none. At dawn he picked up the trail where Tuyomai had marked it, Indian fashion, as she went. Ferrol had the explorer's instinct for topography, could make straight away to a given landmark, and keep direction clear, but he had not the Indian's trained faculties for tracking, and in stony ground he was baffled. It takes a strong man to deal with a barren land and the madness that lies in the heart of it. If he knows no landmarks, and cannot pick up his back tracks, he is not like to see his starting point again, and none but a skilled tracker, following fast, shall find him. Consider now if it be a child that is lost, with the mother following, and the father hard upon the trail of both.
Ferrol followed the woman's trail, understanding by its windings that she followed some trace of the child that he lacked wit to see. But there were traces later which he could understand, body prints where it had stumbled, blood upon the cutting edges of the black rocks, and crushed twigs where the child had thrust his face in the midst of the thorns to be free of the burning sun.
So he came at last, quite spent, and with little water, to a place where all
The desert has taken many men in its time, and the thirst consumes like fire. Ferrol was already far spent when he came to the plain. In the night a wind arose and covered all the trails with drifted sand.
The cabin stood by the Dripping Spring until the sun warped it asunder, and a miner from Panniment way carried off the timbers to patch his own dwelling; and there, when the door swings outward and the light is strong, one might read a penciled scrawl, "Sonny Ferrol passed this way." In one of the wandering Indian tribes that drift about the desert rim are a dull, withered woman, neither young nor old, and a half white boy who answers to the name of Sonny.
Somewhere out in the plain of Bitter Waters are the bones of a man, and away on the sand flat, where he cast it from him when he ran in madness, and the hills mocked him as he ran—somewhere in that rainbow land lies the pot of gold.
| The Pot of Gold | |