The Second Zane Grey MEGAPACK® by Zane Grey

Author:Zane Grey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: western
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXII

When the following March came, Adam had been a week plodding southward over the yucca plateaus of the Mohave. The desert had changed its face. Left behind were the rare calico-veined ranges of mountains, the royal-purple porphyries, the wonderful white granites, the green-blue coppers, the yellow sulphurs, and the ruddy red irons. This desert had colour, but not so vivid, not so striking. And it had become more hospitable to the survival of plant life. The sandy floor was no longer monotonously grey.

Adam loved the grotesque yucca trees. They were really trees that afforded shade and firewood, and they brought back no bitter-sweet memories like the palo verdes. The yuccas were fresh and green, renewed in the spring from the dusty grey sunburnt trees they had been in the autumn. Many of them bore great cone-shaped buds about to open, and on others had blossomed large white flowers with streaks of pink. A yucca forest presented a strange sight. These desert trees were deformed, weird, bristling, shaggy trunked, with grotesque shapes like spectres in torture.

Adam travelled leisurely, although a nameless and invisible hand seemed to beckon him from the beyond. His wandering steps were again guided, and something awaited him far down toward the Rio Colorado. He was completing a vast circle of the desert, and he could not resist that call, that wandering quest down toward the place which had given the colour and direction to his life. But the way must be long, and as there were the thorns and rocks for his feet, so must there be bruises to his spirit.

At night on the moon-blanched desert, under the weird, spectral-armed yuccas, Adam had revelation of the clearness of teaching that was to become his. The years had been preparing him. When would come his supreme trial? What would it be? And there came a whisper out of the lonely darkness, on the cool night wind, that some day he would go back to find the grave of his brother and to meet the punishment that was his due. Then all that was physical, all that was fierce, enduring, natural, thrust the thought from him. But though the savage desert life in him burned strong and resistless, yet he began to hear a new, a different, a higher voice of conscience. He imagined he stifled it with fiercely repudiating gestures, but all the wonderful strength of his brawny hands, magnified a thousand times, could not thrust a thought from him.

Toward sunset one day Adam was down on the level desert floor, plodding along a sandy trail around the western wall of San Jacinto. The first bisnagi cacti he saw seemed to greet him as old friends. They were small, only a foot or so high, and sparsely scattered over the long rocky slope that led to the base of the mountain wall. The tops of these cacti were as pink as wild roses. Adam was sweeping his gaze along to see how far they grew out on the desert when he discovered that his burro Jinny had espied moving objects.

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