The trail left the river again, and as Joseph neared his lent the clouds rolled backward from the west to the east like a curtain of grey wool and the late sun sparkled on the washed land, glittered on the grass blades and shot sparks into the drops that lay in the hearts of wildflowers. Before his tent Joseph dismounted and unsaddled the horse and rubbed its wet back and shoulders with a cloth before he turned the tired beast loose to graze. He stood in the damp grass in front of his tent. The setting sun played on his brown temples and the evening wind ruffled his beard. The hunger in his eyes became rapaciousness as he looked down the long green valley. His possessiveness became a passion. “It’s mine,” he chanted. “Down deep it’s mine, right to the center of the world.” He stamped his feet into the soft earth. Then the exultance grew to be a sharp pain of desire that ran through his body in a hot river. He flung himself face downward on the grass and pressed his cheek against the wet stems. His fingers gripped the wet grass and tore it out, and gripped again. His thighs beat heavily on the earth.
The fury left him and he was cold and bewildered and frightened at himself. He sat up and wiped the mud from his lips and beard. “What was it?” he asked himself. “What came over me then? Can I have a need that great?” He tried to remember exactly what had happened. For a moment the land had been his wife. “I’ll need a wife,” he said. “It will be too lonely here without a wife?’ He was tired. His body ached as though he had lifted a great rock, and the moment of passion had frightened him.
Over a little fire before his tent he cooked his meager supper, and when the night came he sat on the ground and looked at the cold white stars, and he felt a throbbing in his land. The fire died down to coals and Joseph heard the coyotes crying in the hills, and he heard the little owls go shrieking by, and all about him he heard the field mice scattering in the grass. After a while the honey-colored moon arose behind the eastern ridge. Before it was clear of the hills, the golden face looked through bars of pine-trunks. Then for a moment a black sharp pine tree pierced the moon and was withdrawn as the moon arose.
3
LONG before the lumber wagons came in sight Joseph heard the sweet harsh clangor of their bells, the shrill little bells perched above the hames, that warned other teams to turn out of the narrow road. Joseph was washed clean; his hair and beard were combed and his eyes were eager with expectation, for he had seen no one in two weeks. At last the big teams came into view from among the trees. The horses walked with little humping steps to pull the heavy loads of planks over the rough new road.
The leading driver waved his hat to Joseph and the sun flashed on his hat buckle. Joseph walked down to meet the teams and climbed to the high seat beside the first driver, a middle-aged man whose cropped coarse hair was white, whose face was brown and seamed like a tobacco leaf. The driver shifted the lines to his left hand and extended his right.
“I thought you’d be here earlier,” Joseph said. “Did you have trouble on the way?”
“No trouble, Mr. Wayne, that you could call trouble. Juanito had a hot box and my own son Willie dropped his front wheel into a bog-hole. He was asleep, I guess. It isn’t much of a road these last two miles.”
“It will be,” Joseph said, “when enough teams like these go over it, it’ll be a good road.” He pointed a finger. “Over by that big oak we’ll drop this lumber.”
To the face of the driver there came an expression of half-foreboding. “Going to build under a tree? That’s not good. One of those limbs might crack off and take your roof with it, and smash you, too, some night while you’re asleep.”
“It’s a good strong tree,” Joseph assured him. “I wouldn’t like to build my house very far from a tree. Is your house away from a tree?”
“Well no, that’s why I’m telling you. The damn thing is right smack under one. I don’t know how I happened to build it there. Many a night I’ve laid awake and listened to the wind and thought about a limb as big around as a barrel coming through the roof.” He pulled up his team and wound the handful of lines around the brake. “Pull up even, here,” he shouted to the other drivers.
When the lumber lay on the ground and the horses, haltered heard-inward about the wagons, munched barley from their nose-bags, the drivers unrolled their blankets in the wagon-beds. Joseph had already built a fire and started the supper. He held his frying pan high above the flame and turned the bacon constantly. Romas, the old driver, walked up and sat beside the fire. “We’ll get an early start in the morning,” he said. ‘We’ll make good time with empty wagons.”
Joseph held his pan from the fire. “Why don’t you let the horses have a little grass?”
“When they are working? Oh, no. There’s no guts in grass. Got to have something stronger to pull over a road like yours. Put your pan down in the fire and let it lay a minute if you want to cook that bacon.”
Joseph scowled. “You people don’t know how to fry bacon. Slow heat and turning, that’s what makes it crisp without losing it all in grease.”
“It’s all food,” said Romas. “Everything’s food.”
Juanito and Willie walked up together. Juanito had a dark, Indian skin and blue eyes. Willie’s face was twisted and white with some unknown illness under its crusting of dirt, and Willie’s eyes were furtive and frightened, for no one believed in the pains which shook his body in the night and no one believed the dark dreams which tortured him when he slept. Joseph looked up and smiled at the two.
“You are seeing my eyes,” Juanito said boldly. “I am not Indian. I am Castilian. My eyes are blue. See my skin. It is dark, and that is the sun, but Castilians have blue eyes.”
“He tells everybody that,” Romas broke in. “He likes to find a stranger to tell that to. Everybody in Nuestra Señora knows his mother was a squaw, and only God knows who his father was.”
Juanito glared and touched his fingers to a long knife in his belt, but Romas only laughed and turned to Joseph. “Juanito tells himself, ‘Some time I’ll kill somebody with this knife.’ That’s the way he keeps feeling proud. But he knows he won’t, and that keeps him from being too proud. Sharpen a stick to eat your bacon with, Juanito,” he said contemptuously, “and next time you tell about being a Castilian, be sure nobody knows you.”
Joseph set down his frying pan and looked questioningly at Romas. “Why do you tell on him?” he asked. “What good do you do by it? He does no harm being a Castilian.”
“It’s a lie, Mr. Wayne. One lie is like another. If you believe that lie, he’ll tell another lie. In a week he’d be the cousin of the Queen of Spain. Juanito, here, is a teamster, a damn good one. I can’t let him be a prince.”
But Joseph shook his head and took up the frying pan again. Without looking up, he said, “I think he is a Castilian. His eyes are blue, and there’s something else besides. I don’t know how I know it, but I think he is.”
Juanito’s eyes grew hard and proud. “Thank you, señor,” he said. “it is true, what you say.” He drew himself up dramatically. “We understand each other, señor. We are caballeros.”
Joseph put the bacon on tin plates and poured the coffee. He was smiling gently. “My father thinks he is almost a god. And he is.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Romas protested. “I won’t be able to stand this caballero. He won’t work now. He’ll walk around admiring himself.”
Joseph blew wrinkles in his coffee. “When he gets too proud, I can use a Castilian here,” he said.
“But God damn it, he’s a good skinner.”
“I know it,” Joseph said quietly. “Gentlemen usually are. They don’t have to be made to work.”
Juanito got up hastily and walked off into the growing darkness, but Willie explained for him. “A horse has got its foot over a halter-rope.”
The western range was still edged with the silver of the after-glow, but the valley of Our Lady was filled to the mountain-rims with darkness. The cast stars in the steel-grey fabric of the sky seemed to struggle and wink against the night. The four men sat about the coals of the fire, their faces strong with shadows. Joseph caressed his beard and his eyes were brooding and remote. Romas clasped his knees with both his aims. His cigarette gleamed red and then disappeared behind its ash. Juanito held his head straight and his neck stiff, but his eyes, behind crossed lashes, did not leave Joseph. Willie’s pale face seemed to hang in the air unconnected to a body; the mouth contracted to a nervous grimace now and then. His nose was pinched and bony and his mouth came to a curved point like a parrot’s beak. When the firelight had died down so that only the faces of the men were visible, Willie put out his lean hand and Juanito took it and clasped the fingers strongly, for Juanito knew how frightened Willie was of the darkness. Joseph threw a twig into the fire and started a little blaze. “Romas,” he said, “the grass is good here, the soil is rich and free. It needs only lifting with a plow. Why was it left, Romas? Why didn’t anyone take it before this?”