The Vision of Elijah Berl

She was up and dressed almost before the echo of Uncle Sid's voice had died away.

Uncle Sid eyed her approvingly as she stepped into the hall.

"Pretty trim lookin' craft," he remarked. "Don't take you long to get under way, either."

"Where are you going, Uncle Sid?"

"Anywhere, so I get out o' the smell o' varnish! Sand's better'n that." Uncle Sid wrinkled his nose in deep disgust. "You can blow sand off; but this stuff! It just soaks into you till you can taste it."

Helen laughed.

"It is penetrating."

"Penetratin'!" Uncle Sid snorted. "I should say it was. If starvin' cannibals just got one whiff of us they'd never think o' cookin' us unless they'd got used to lunchin' off pitch pine."

They passed through the office, startling a dozing clerk and porter to forced attention; but these, discovering that their services were not needed, settled themselves to their former positions.

The outside air was heavy with the indescribable odor of newness and of hustling activity in drowsy repose.

Uncle Sid had a bag in his hand which bumped softly against the outer door as he opened it.

"Oranges," he explained. "Hope to Gracious they ain't infected. I gave 'em a good chance. I kept 'em in my room last night."

Outside the door, he gained his first knowledge of a California fog. The sticky, clammy chill penetrated their garments like water. Uncle Sid buttoned his sailor jacket as he descended the broad steps.

"This settles it!"

"Settles what?" Helen inquired, her teeth chattering.

"This 'ere fog has given me an idea. I'm goin' down to the river, the Christopher Sawyer, or some such heathen name. I just bet it's one of those uncanny sort o' streams that fit this country like a wet sail to a spar."

"You'll have to explain, Uncle Sid; I'm stupid this morning."

Uncle Sid looked sceptical, but resumed his point.

"Just look at this fog! I bet that the Christopher Sawyer gets out o' bed nights and distributes itself through the air general, an' waits for the sun to herd it back. I'm goin' down to see."

Helen followed the old gentleman, absently humoring him in his fancy. She was in a listening mood rather than a talkative one, and Uncle Sid distracted her thoughts from her own perplexities.

"Gosh a'mighty!" Uncle Sid was out in the street, peering through the mist. "Seems like wadin' through skim milk."

"Which way?" Helen paused beside him.

"I snum to Gracious if I know! I didn't adjust my compasses last night, an' I guess I'll have to sail by dead reckonin'. Every country that ever I was in before, an' I've been in most of 'em, the water ran down hill. Now here, what there is of it, don't seem to pay any attention to grades. When it comes to a hill, it just changes to gas, coagulates on the other side, an' goes on."

Uncle Sid was under way; Helen, absorbed in thought, followed absently in his wake. The palms which the industrious boomers had planted along the streets, loomed hazily through the fog ahead, gradually sharpened in outline, and again grew hazy with distance, as they passed them by. From each palm, a tuft of yellow-green spears stood up defiantly above a cluster of gray spikes pointing downward to their warty trunks; a picture of hope eternal in spite of inevitable death, as cheerfully suggestive of mortality, as the upward pointing hands, and the downward-drooping willows on the tombstones of New England's puritan dead.

Helen was wondering what possible pleasure there could be in this walk, but it was new and strange to Uncle Sid and he ploughed steadily ahead. In spite of the dragging sand that made her feet feel like lead, the exercise did not stir her blood to a glow of warmth. The physical chill of the fog, the tawny sand that seemed to tinge the creeping mist, the mental chill of her mood affected her so that it suddenly seemed to her as if she could not take another step.

"Aren't you hunting needless trouble, Uncle Sid?" she suddenly cried, stopping short and looking at Uncle Sid. "Let's go back. We can be no end more miserable in our awful hotel with only half the trouble."

"I ain't seen no signs of the Christopher Sawyer yet, exceptin' this." Uncle Sid clove a semicircle through the mist with his outstretched arm.

"Oh, well, if it's a scientific voyage, Uncle Sid, let's go right on."

"Must be that. It's something an' it ain't no pleasure excursion, that's sure!"

They plodded on. It seemed to Helen as if it were miles, she was certain it was hours. At last it grew lighter, and the yellow tawn of the sand appeared to have risen higher and higher, till the whole of the shrouding mist was a yellow haze.

"I can't go another step, Uncle Sid." Helen stopped short and sat down on a hummock of sand.

"What's the matter little girl? You seem sort o' done up this mornin'," Uncle Sid dropped beside her with a sounding slump. "There! here I be! If I didn't ring, it ain't because I ain't hollow."

He unfolded a paper bag and drawing forth some formidable sandwiches passed one to Helen and began eating one himself. The sandwiches disposed of, he again investigated the bag. This time he brought out two large oranges.

"They do one thing shipshape in this country." He was eyeing Helen keenly while tearing the rind from his orange. "They do up water in mighty neat shape, but they do charge for it though. That's what they do!" he rattled on. "These yellow water-balls cost me five cents apiece, they did!" He parted the segments carefully, anxious lest a drop of the juice should be wasted. Again his eyes rested thoughtfully on Helen's somber face.

"What's the trouble, Helen?"

Helen's answer was accompanied by a blended look of assent to Uncle Sid's assumption and a humorous denial of it.

"One is often absent minded over troubles that can't be explained even to one's best friends."

"Well," Uncle Sid was not wholly satisfied, "perhaps by the time I'm your best friend, you'll be ready to tell me."

"I think that may be very soon," said Helen soberly, as she finished her orange.

"Have another?" Uncle Sid held out the bag cordially.

Helen was morally certain that Uncle Sid's New England thrift was dwelling on the five cents apiece; but she took the proffered orange. Uncle Sid rose clumsily to his feet.

"Now for the Christopher Sawyer."

The mist was rapidly clearing. Without visible means of locomotion, wisps of fog rose from the ground in the distance, trailed along like a sea-bird rising from the water, then melted in the air. They were standing on the edge of a mesa. Below them, tall cottonwoods rose in a straggling, sinuous line, their trunks matted with clinging vines, their branches loaded almost to the breaking point with clusters of parasitic plants. A line of shrubs, filling in between the trees, were bowed in a mat of tangled verdure that was dotted and sprinkled with rainbow colors. White-rimmed ditches appeared from behind projecting promontories of yellow sand, crawled under wire fences whose crooked, ghostly sticks, like the legs of some gigantic centipede, straggled around patches of wheat and barley. Outside these patches of green, adobe huts were surrounded by other scraggly sticks, driven into the ground and held upright by wires which were stretched out to them from occasional cottonwoods.

Back of them, Ysleta was lost to sight behind a rising grade of yellow sand, dotted by clumps of chaparral and cactus. Across the barranca, over the tops of the highest cottonwoods, the rolling mesa stretched as barren and forbidding as that on which they were standing.

"I bet that's the Christopher Sawyer!" Uncle Sid was pointing to the tangled mass of vegetation. "These are the first things I've seen that look as if they'd had enough to drink."

Helen was looking in another direction.

"How queer those cattle are acting."

She was watching a bunch of cattle about three hundred yards away. They were clustered thickly, their heads pointed towards herself and Uncle Sid. In front of the herd, a huge bull was pawing the sand. There was a muffled bellowing and from beneath the nostrils of his low-hanging head, spurts of dust rose in the air.

"Those critters do look hostile, an' there ain't no fence to get over an' not a gosh-hanged tree to climb." Uncle Sid spoke uneasily.

Across the barranca, they caught sight of another cloud of dust, from which swung wildly gesticulating arms. At the same time, from one of the adobes, they saw a vaquero emerge. His arms too, were wildly waving. In response to his cries which they heard only faintly, two bunches of yapping gray fur swept across the white-rimmed ditches and rolled up the bank.