Overland Red | Page 2

easier sweeps through a
widening valley, but forever climbing.
Again and again, fetlock deep across it runs the stream, gently
persistent and forever murmuring its happy soliloquies.
Here and there the road passes quickly through a blot of shade,--a
group of wide-spreading live-oaks,--and reappears, gray-white and hot
in the sun.

And then, its high ambition fulfilled, the road recovers from its last
climbing sweep round the base of a shouldering hill and runs straight
and smooth to its ultimate green rest in the shade of the sycamores.
Beyond these two huge-limbed warders of the mountain ranch gate,
there is a flower-bordered way, but it is the road no longer.
The mountain ranch takes its name from the cañon below. It is the
Moonstone Ranch, the home of Louise, whose ancestors, the
Lacharmes, grew roses in old France.
Among the many riders to and from the ranch, there is one, a great,
two-fisted, high-complexioned man, whose genial presence is ever
welcome. He answers to many names. To the youngsters he is "Uncle
Jack,"--usually with an exclamation. To some of the older folk he is
"Mr. Summers," or "Jack." Again, the foreman of the Moonstone
Ranch seldom calls him anything more dignified than "Red." Louise
does sometimes call him--quite affectionately--"Overland."
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OVERLAND RED
CHAPTER I
THE PROSPECTOR
For five years he had journeyed back and forth between the little desert
station on the Mojave and the range to the north. The townspeople paid
scant attention to him. He was simply another "desert rat" obsessed
with the idea that gold was to be found in those northern hills. He
bought supplies and paid grudgingly. No one knew his name.
The prospector was much younger than he appeared to be. The desert
sun had dried his sinews and warped his shoulders. The desert wind
had scrawled thin lines of age upon his face. The desert solitude had
stooped him with its awesome burden of brooding silence.

Slowly his mind had been squeezed dry of all human interest save the
recurrent memory of a child's face--that, and the poignant memory of
the child's mother. For ten years he had been trying to forget. The last
five years on the desert had dimmed the woman's visioned face as the
child came more often between him and the memory of the mother, in
his dreams.
Then there were voices, the voices of strange spirits that winged
through the dusk of the outlands and hovered round his fire at night.
One voice, soft, insistent, ravished his imagination with visions of
illimitable power and peace and rest. "Gold! Lost gold!" it would
whisper as he sat by the meager flame. Then he would tremble and
draw nearer the warmth. "Where?" he would ask, tempting the darkness
as a child, fearfully certain of a reply.
Then another voice, cadenced like the soft rush of waves up the sand,
would murmur, "Somewhere away! Somewhere away! Somewhere
away!" And in the indefiniteness of that answer he found an
inexplicable joy. The vagueness of "Somewhere away" was as vast
with pregnant possibilities as his desert. His was the eternity of hope,
boundless and splendid in its extravagant promises. Drunk with the
wine of dreams, he knew himself to be a monarch, a monarch
uncrowned and unattended, yet always with his feet upon the wide
threshold of his kingdom.
Then would come the biting chill of night, the manifold rays of stars
and silence, silence reft of winds, yet alive with the tense immobility of
the crouching beast, waiting ... waiting....
The desert, impassively withering him to the shell of a man, or
wracking him terribly in heat or in storm and cold, still cajoled him day
and night with promises, whispered, vague and intoxicating as the
perfume of a woman's hair.
Finally the desert flung wide the secret portals of her treasure-house
and gave royally like a courtesan of kings.

The man, his dream all but fulfilled, found the taste of awakening bitter
on his lips. He counted his years of toil and cursed as he viewed his
shrunken hands, claw-like, scarred, crippled.
He felt the weight of his years and dreaded their accumulated burdens.
He realized that the dream was all--its fulfillment nothing. He knew
himself to be a thing to be pointed at; yet he longed for the sound of
human voices, for the touch of human hands, for the living sweetness
of his child's face. The sirens of the invisible night no longer whispered
to him. He was utterly alone. He had entered his kingdom. Viewed
from afar it had seemed a vast pleasure-dome of infinite enchantment.
He found Success, as it ever shall be, a veritable desert, grudging man
foothold, yet luring him from one aspiration to another, only to
consume his years in dust.
A narrow cañon held his secret.