“Well, that settles it,” said Creede. “One of us stays here and cuts brush, and the other works around Hidden Water. This ain’t the first drought I’ve been through, not by no means, and I’ve learned this much: the Alamo can be dry as a bone and Carrizo, too, but they’s always water here and at the home ranch. Sooner or later every cow on the range will be goin’ to one place or the other to drink, and if we give ’em a little bait of brush each time it keeps ’em from gittin’ too weak. As long as a cow will rustle she’s all right, but the minute she’s too weak to travel she gits to be a water-bum –– hangs around the spring and drinks until she starves to death. But if you feed ’em a little every day they’ll drift back to the ridges at night and pick up a little more. I’m sorry for them lily-white hands of yourn, pardner, but which place would you like to work at?”
“Hidden Water,” replied Hardy, promptly, “and I bet I can cut as many trees as you can.”
“I’ll go you, for a fiver,” exclaimed Creede, emulously. “Next time Rafael comes in tell him to bring me up some more grub and baled hay, and I’m fixed. And say, when you write to the boss you can tell her I’ve traded my gun for an axe!”
As Hardy turned back towards home he swung in a great circle and rode down the dry bed of the Alamo, where water-worn bowlders and ricks of mountain drift lay strewn for miles to mark the vanished stream. What a power it had been in its might, floating sycamores and ironwoods as if they were reeds, lapping high against the granite walls, moving the very rocks in its bed until they ground together! But now the sand lay dry and powdery, the willows and water-moodies were dead to the roots, and even the ancient cottonwoods from which it derived its name were dying inch by inch. A hundred years they had stood there, defying storm and cloudburst, but at last the drought was sucking away their life. On the mesa the waxy greasewood was still verdant, the gorged sahuaros stood like great tanks, skin-tight with bitter juice, and all the desert trees were tipped with green; but the children of the river were dying for a drink.
A string of cattle coming in from The Rolls stopped and stared at the solitary horseman, head up against the sky; then as he rode on they fell in behind him, travelling the deep-worn trail that led to Hidden Water. At the cleft-gate of the pass, still following the hard-stamped trail, Hardy turned aside from his course and entered, curious to see his garden again before it succumbed to the drought. There before him stood the sycamores, as green and flourishing as ever; the eagle soared out from his cliff; the bees zooned in their caves; and beyond the massive dyke that barred the way the tops of the elders waved the last of their creamy blossoms. In the deep pool the fish still darted about, and the waterfall that fed it was not diminished. The tinkle of its music seemed even louder, and as Hardy looked below he saw that a little stream led way from the pool, flowing in the trench where the cattle came to drink. It was a miracle, springing from the bosom of the earth from whence the waters come. When all the world outside lay dead and bare, Hidden Water flowed more freely, and its garden lived on untouched.
Never had Hardy seen it more peaceful, and as he climbed the Indian steps and stood beneath the elder, where Chupa Rosa had built her tiny nest his heart leapt suddenly as he remembered Lucy. Here they had sat together in the first gladness of her coming, reading his forgotten verse and watching the eagle’s flight; only for that one time, and then the fight with the sheep had separated them. He reached up and plucked a spray of elder blossoms to send her for a keep-sake –– and then like a blow he remembered the forget-me-not! From that same garden he had fetched her a forget-me-not for repentance, and then forgotten her for Kitty. Who but Lucy could have left the little book of poems, or treasured a flower so long to give it back at parting? And yet in his madness he had forgotten her!
He searched wistfully among the rocks for another forget-me-not, but the hot breath of the drought had killed them. As he climbed slowly down the stone steps he mused upon some poem to take the place of the flowers that were dead, but the spirit of the drought was everywhere. The very rocks themselves, burnt black by centuries of sun, were painted with Indian prayers for rain. A thousand times he had seen the sign, hammered into the blasted rocks –– the helix, that mystic symbol of the ancients, a circle, ever widening, never ending, –– and wondered at the fate of the vanished people who had prayed to the Sun for rain.
The fragments of their sacrificial ollas lay strewn among the bowlders, but the worshippers were dead; and now a stranger prayed to his own God for rain. As he sat at his desk that night writing to Lucy about the drought, the memory of those Indian signs came upon him suddenly and, seizing a fresh sheet of paper, he began to write. At the second stanza he paused, planned out his rhymes and hurried on again, but just as his poem seemed finished, he halted at the last line. Wrestle as he would he could not finish it –– the rhymes were against him –– it would not come right. Ah, that is what sets the artist apart from all the under-world of dreamers –– his genius endures to the end; but the near-poet struggles like a bee limed in his own honey. What a confession of failure it was to send away –– a poem unfinished, or finished wrong! And yet –– the unfinished poem was like him. How often in the past had he left things unsaid, or said them wrong. Perhaps Lucy would understand the better and prize it for its faults. At last, just as it was, he sent it off, and so it came to her hand.
A PRAYER FOR RAIN
Upon this blasted rock, O Sun, behold
Our humble prayer for rain –– and here below
A tribute from the thirsty stream, that rolled
Bank-full in flood, but now is sunk so low
Our old men, tottering, yet may stride acrost
And babes run pattering where the wild waves tossed.
The grass is dead upon the stem, O Sun!
The lizards pant with heat –– they starve for flies ––
And they for grass –– and grass for rain! Yea, none
Of all that breathe may face these brazen skies
And live, O Sun, without the touch of rain.
Behold, thy children lift their hands –– in vain!
Drink up the water from this olla’s brim And take the precious corn here set beside –– Then summon thy dark clouds, and from the rim Of thy black shield strike him who hath defied Thy power! Appease thy wrath, Great Sun –– but give Ah, give the touch of rain to those that live!
As it had been a thousand years before, so it was that day at Hidden Water. The earth was dead, it gave forth nothing; the sky was clean and hard, without a cloud to soften its asperity. Another month and the cattle would die; two months and the water would fail; then in the last agonies of starvation and thirst the dissolution would come –– the Four Peaks would be a desert. Old Don Pablo was right, the world was drying up. Chihuahua and Sonora were parched; all Arizona lay stricken with the drought; in California the cattle were dying on the ranges, and in Texas and New Mexico the same. God, what a thing –– to see the great earth that had supported its children for ages slowly dying for water, its deserts first, and then its rivers, and then the pine-topped mountains that gave the rivers birth! Yet what was there for a man to do but take care of his own and wait? The rest was in the hands of God.
On the first morning that Hardy took his axe and went down to the river he found a single bunch of gaunted cattle standing in the shade of the big mesquites that grew against Lookout Point –– a runty cow with her two-year-old and yearling, and a wobbly calf with a cactus joint stuck across his nose. His mother’s face showed that she, too, had been among the chollas; there was cactus in her knees and long spines bristling from her jaws, but she could stand it, while it was a matter of life and death to the calf. Every time he came near his mother she backed away, and whenever he began to nudge for milk she kicked out wildly. So Hardy roped him and twitched the joint away with a stick; then he pulled out the thorns one by one and went about his work.
Selecting a fine-leaved palo verde that grew against the point, he cleared a way into its trunk and felled it down the hill. He cut a second and a third, and when he looked back he saw that