The Valiant Runaways Part 19

"Dios de mi alma!" exclaimed Roldan. "It is Los Angeles. We were right, after all. But why were we never told that it was so beautiful?"

On the southern horizon, half veiled in pale blue mist, showed a stately city, with domes and turrets and spires and many lofty cathedrals. It was a white city; there were no red tiles to break those pure and lovely lines, to blotch that radiant whiteness; even the red sun withheld its angry shafts.

Roldan gazed, his lips parting, his breath coming quickly. If his imagination had ever attempted to picture heaven, its wildest flight would have resembled but fallen short of that living beauty before him.

It was mystifying, exalting. It was worth the dangers and discomforts of the past month multiplied by twelve, just to have one moment's glimpse of such perfection. And it was Los Angeles! A city of the Californias, built by Indian hands! No wonder his family had been careful to leave its wonders out of the table talk; had he known, he would have been at its feet long since.

"It isn't the wine?" asked Adan, feebly.

"No. There must have been a fog before; Los Angeles is near the sea."

"Shall we start?"

"Yes, but slowly. The poor mustangs! But it will not be long now. We cannot be more than two leagues from there. See, it grows plainer every moment; the fog must have been very heavy."

They cantered on slowly, the mustangs responding automatically to the light p.r.i.c.k of the spur. The beautiful alluring city looked to be floating in cloud; it smiled and beckoned, inciting even the weary famished brutes to effort. But at the end of an hour Roldan reined in with a puzzled expression. "I do not understand," he said. "It seemed not two leagues away when we started, and we have come that far and more, and still it seems exactly the same distance beyond."

"The atmosphere is so clear," suggested Adan. "But I wish we were there. My mouth is parched, my tongue is dry--and the horses, Roldan.

Soon they will be as limp as sails in a calm."

"True, but we could easily walk the distance now. We could return for them at once with water and food." But he was beginning to feel vaguely uneasy once more. The odd sensation of death, of a buried world, had returned. Could it be that that fair city beyond was heaven? Surely, he thought with unconscious humour, it was very un-Californian.

They pa.s.sed the lonely b.u.t.tes, the parched beds of lakes, salt-coated.

Still they saw not a living thing; still the city seemed to recede with the horizon, its sharp beautiful outlines unchanged. For some time the horses had been trotting unevenly. Gradually they relaxed into a dogged amble, their heads down, their tongues out. Every now and again they half paused, with quivering knees.

Adan's was the first to collapse; it fell to its knees, then rolled over, Adan scrambling from under, unhurt.

Roldan also dismounted, and both boys, without a word, unsaddled the poor brutes, thrust the pistols into their belts and what was left of the provisions into their pockets. They cast off their ponchos, then once more turned their faces to the south. But they did not advance.

They stood with distended eyes and suspended breath. The city had disappeared.

Adan was the first to find speech. "A fog?" he asked. "A rain storm?"

"There is neither. The horizon is as blue and clear as it is on the north and east and west. It is a miracle. Let me think a moment."

He sat down and took his head between his hands. After a while he looked up. "For hours I have been trying to remember something," he said. "Do you remember what that mayor domo said to us?--Keep straight on, straight on, never turning to the left, for that way lies the terrible Mojave desert, I barely heard his last words at the time; that is the reason I have had such a time remembering. We are in the Mojave desert, my friend."

Adan, whose mouth was still wide open, sat down and rolled his eyes from east to west. "Caramba!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed finally.

"I could say a good deal more than Caramba. All that I have heard of this Mojave comes back to me. There is no water on it, no living thing but half choked cacti and stunted palms. Men who are lost on it go mad and die of thirst--"

"Ay, yi, yi!"

"Si, senor. However, it might be much worse. It is winter, not summer,--when the heat kills in a day; we have food and a little wine; we are young and very strong; we have not come so many leagues that we cannot walk back. And we have each other. Think, were we alone!"

"Yes, it might be worse," said Adan, "but all the same it might be six or eight leagues to the northwest better. And that city? What was it?

Where has it gone?"

"I do not know." Privately he believed that it had been a glimpse of heaven, and was disturbed lest it might have been a portent of death.

But his mind was too active, his nature too independent to sit down under superst.i.tion. If he died on the desert, it would not be through lack of effort to get out of it.

He stood up, setting his lips. "Come," he said. "We gain nothing by sitting here, and we are both fresh; we can walk many leagues before night."

"Do you know which way to go?" asked Adan.

Roldan swept the horizon with his eyes. The b.u.t.tes they had pa.s.sed had displaced the solitary landmark of the morning. There was not a hoof-beat on the hard split ground. Roldan shrugged his shoulders.

"We can at least follow the sun. Los Angeles must be due west. Come."

The sun was past the zenith and sloping to the west. The boys turned their backs upon it and trudged on, only pausing once for a half-hour to divide the meagre remains of their store. Evening came; the sun leaned his elbows on the horizon in front of them, leered at the contracted visages and blinking eyes resolutely facing him, then slid leisurely down; and night came suddenly. The boys flung themselves on the ground and slept.

They awoke consumed with hunger and thirst. Their mouths and nostrils were coated with the fine irritating dust of the desert, scarcely visible but always felt. But their smarting eyes were greeted by a refres.h.i.+ng sight: not a half-league before them, directly in their course, was a lake, a lake as blue as the metallic sky above, and lightly fringed with palms and orange-trees. Beyond was a forest of silver leaves--an olive orchard.

"A Mission!" exclaimed Roldan, and even Adan sprang to his feet and marched westward with some enthusiasm. But alas! although they trudged with dogged persistence for fully a league, striving to forget the gnawing at their vitals in the exquisite prospect filling the eye, the lake seemed to march ahead of them, in perfect time with their weary feet. Suddenly the two boys paused and faced each other.

"This accursed desert is bewitched," said Roldan. His face was white, but more with anger than fear; for the first time in his life he realised the helplessness of man when at the mercy of nature, and he did not like the sensation. He had a strong, and by this time, well developed instinct to govern, to bend others to his will, and he swore now that he would walk out of this desert unharmed if only for the pleasure of cheating a force mightier than himself. He turned and looked at the sun.

"We have been going in a wrong direction," he said. "That lake has been s.h.i.+fting gradually toward the southwest, and taken us nearly a league out of our course. The first thing we know we will be in Baja California, where there is nothing but deserts, and they are all on mountain tops. We must strike north again. I am sure that last night we were due west of Los Angeles."

"But the lake? the Mission?"

"I do not believe there is any lake. There are things you and I do not understand in this world--although we are learning--and I believe that this strange desert has the power to make scenes like the theatres they who have travelled tell us of. Be sure that lake will disappear like the city."

They turned north in order to get in line with the sun; and out of the tail of their eyes they saw the lake march with them. When they finally turned to the west again it faced them once more. They linked arms suddenly and trudged on, hungry, parched, beset by superst.i.tious fears, but not forgetting to turn every half hour and glance at the sun until he pa.s.sed the meridian and pointed for the west. And suddenly the lake seemed to slip behind a wall.

"There is really something there this time," said Roldan, closing one eye and curving his hand about the other. "It is ugly enough to be real. It is no use to say how far anything is in this place, but I should think we would reach it before long."

And long before they did reach it they knew what it was--a thicket of cacti some two miles long and of unknown depth. The plants were eight or ten feet high, and the broad thick leaves, spiked, as only the leaves of the cactus are, looked to be welded together. But that was from a distance. When the boys reached the thicket they saw that the plants in reality were some feet apart, although there appeared to be no end to them. The boys sat down suddenly, their strength deserting them. They threw their arms forward on their knees and dropped their heads. For a half hour or more they sat motionless, then Roldan looked up and fixed his gla.s.sy eyes on the forbidding wall, which at close proximity seemed to girt the horizon.

"If we tried to go round it," he said, "there is no knowing where we should find ourselves. We had better go straight ahead, if possible. If it is too thick we can turn back."

"At least we could not see this horrible desert for a while," said Adan. "I am willing."

"And, who knows? Los Angeles may be just on the other side."

Their utterance was thick. Their veins felt as if packed with lead, not so much from need of food as need of drink. But they stumbled to their feet and entered the cactus forest. They were obliged to pursue their way in single file; the spikes were long, and many of the larger leaves ab.u.t.ted so obstructively that they were obliged to go down on their hands and knees and crawl. Nor could they maintain a straight course, but zig-zagged among the great plants as nature permitted. More than once they heard the rip of silk, more than once blood sprang through their skin. Their progress was slow and fraught with peril, their only consolation that the end must come sooner or later.

Night came suddenly. They were near an open a few feet in circ.u.mference. They lay down side by side, knowing that a step at night might mean instant blindness.

The cactus never moves, not even in a storm. There was not a breath of wind to-night. The thick dull green plant-trees looked as solid as stone, a petrified forest. The sky had never seemed so high above, the stars so hard and bright.

Adan moistened his lips with his tongue. "Do you feel that you can last another day?" he asked.

"I expect to die of old age."

"Well, if you do, it won't be the fault of the Mojave desert. You have courage, and so have I; but this is worse than all--Do you feel that?"

"I have felt it many times before, to-day. It is said that parts of the Mojave shake all the time."

"We can swear to that. Supposing a great shake came, how could we get out of this?"