Octopus — Book I, Chapter I, Part 3

For a few moments, Presley stood, watching.

Then, as he started to move on, a curious thing occurred.

At first, he thought he had heard some one call his name.

He paused, listening; there was no sound but the vague noise of the moving sheep.

Then, as this first impression passed, it seemed to him that he had been beckoned to.

Yet nothing stirred; except for the lonely figure beyond the herd there was no one in sight.

He started on again, and in half a dozen steps found himself looking over his shoulder.

Without knowing why, he looked toward the shepherd; then halted and looked a second time and a third.

Had the shepherd called to him?

Presley knew that he had heard no voice.

Brusquely, all his attention seemed riveted upon this distant figure.

He put one forearm over his eyes, to keep off the sun, gazing across the intervening herd.

Surely, the shepherd had called him.

But at the next instant he started, uttering an exclamation under his breath.

The far-away speck of black became animated.

Presley remarked a sweeping gesture.

Though the man had not beckoned to him before, there was no doubt that he was beckoning now.

Without any hesitation, and singularly interested in the incident, Presley turned sharply aside and hurried on toward the shepherd, skirting the herd, wondering all the time that he should answer the call with so little question, so little hesitation.

But the shepherd came forward to meet Presley, followed by one of his dogs.

As the two men approached each other, Presley, closely studying the other, began to wonder where he had seen him before.

It must have been a very long time ago, upon one of his previous visits to the ranch.

Certainly, however, there was something familiar in the shepherd's face and figure.

When they came closer to each other, and Presley could see him more distinctly, this sense of a previous acquaintance was increased and sharpened.

The shepherd was a man of about thirty-five.

He was very lean and spare.

His brown canvas overalls were thrust into laced boots.

A cartridge belt without any cartridges encircled his waist.

A grey flannel shirt, open at the throat, showed his breast, tanned and ruddy.

He wore no hat.

His hair was very black and rather long.

A pointed beard covered his chin, growing straight and fine from the hollow cheeks.

The absence of any covering for his head was, no doubt, habitual with him, for his face was as brown as an Indian's--a ruddy brown quite different from Presley's dark olive.

To Presley's morbidly keen observation, the general impression of the shepherd's face was intensely interesting.

It was uncommon to an astonishing degree.

Presley's vivid imagination chose to see in it the face of an ascetic, of a recluse, almost that of a young seer.

So must have appeared the half-inspired shepherds of the Hebraic legends, the younger prophets of Israel, dwellers in the wilderness, beholders of visions, having their existence in a continual dream, talkers with God, gifted with strange powers.

Suddenly, at some twenty paces distant from the approaching shepherd, Presley stopped short, his eyes riveted upon the other.

“Vanamee!

” he exclaimed.

The shepherd smiled and came forward, holding out his hands, saying, “I thought it was you.

When I saw you come over the hill, I called you.

” “But not with your voice,” returned Presley.

“I knew that some one wanted me.

I felt it.

I should have remembered that you could do that kind of thing.

” “I have never known it to fail.

It helps with the sheep.

” “With the sheep?

” “In a way.

I can't tell exactly how.

We don't understand these things yet.

There are times when, if I close my eyes and dig my fists into my temples, I can hold the entire herd for perhaps a minute.

Perhaps, though, it's imagination, who knows?

But it's good to see you again.

How long has it been since the last time?

Two, three, nearly five years.

” It was more than that.

It was six years since Presley and Vanamee had met, and then it had been for a short time only, during one of the shepherd's periodical brief returns to that part of the country.

During a week he and Presley had been much together, for the two were devoted friends.

Then, as abruptly, as mysteriously as he had come, Vanamee disappeared.

Presley awoke one morning to find him gone.

Thus, it had been with Vanamee for a period of sixteen years.

He lived his life in the unknown, one could not tell where--in the desert, in the mountains, throughout all the vast and vague South-west, solitary, strange.

Three, four, five years passed.

The shepherd would be almost forgotten.

Never the most trivial scrap of information as to his whereabouts reached Los Muertos.

He had melted off into the surface-shimmer of the desert, into the mirage; he sank below the horizons; he was swallowed up in the waste of sand and sage.

Then, without warning, he would reappear, coming in from the wilderness, emerging from the unknown.

No one knew him well.

In all that countryside he had but three friends, Presley, Magnus Derrick, and the priest at the Mission of San Juan de Guadalajara, Father Sarria.

He remained always a mystery, living a life half-real, half-legendary.

In all those years he did not seem to have grown older by a single day.

At this time, Presley knew him to be thirty-six years of age.

But since the first day the two had met, the shepherd's face and bearing had, to his eyes, remained the same.

At this moment, Presley was looking into the same face he had first seen many, many years ago.

It was a face stamped with an unspeakable sadness, a deathless grief, the permanent imprint of a tragedy long past, but yet a living issue.

Presley told himself that it was impossible to look long into Vanamee's eyes without knowing that here was a man whose whole being had been at one time shattered and riven to its lowest depths, whose life had suddenly stopped at a certain moment of its development.

The two friends sat down upon the ledge of the watering-trough, their eyes wandering incessantly toward the slow moving herd, grazing on the wheat stubble, moving southward as they grazed.

“Where have you come from this time?

” Presley had asked.

“Where have you kept yourself?

” The other swept the horizon to the south and east with a vague gesture.

“Off there, down to the south, very far off.

So many places that I can't remember.

I went the Long Trail this time; a long, long ways.

Arizona, The Mexicos, and, then, afterwards, Utah and Nevada, following the horizon, travelling at hazard.

Into Arizona first, going in by Monument Pass, and then on to the south, through the country of the Navajos, down by the Aga Thia Needle--a great blade of red rock jutting from out the desert, like a knife thrust.

Then on and on through The Mexicos, all through the Southwest, then back again in a great circle by Chihuahua and Aldama to Laredo, to Torreon, and Albuquerque.

From there across the Uncompahgre plateau into the Uintah country; then at last due west through Nevada to California and to the valley of the San Joaquin.

” His voice lapsed to a monotone, his eyes becoming fixed; he continued to speak as though half awake, his thoughts elsewhere, seeing again in the eye of his mind the reach of desert and red hill, the purple mountain, the level stretch of alkali, leper white, all the savage, gorgeous desolation of the Long Trail.

He ignored Presley for the moment, but, on the other hand, Presley himself gave him but half his attention.

The return of Vanamee had stimulated the poet's memory.

He recalled the incidents of Vanamee's life, reviewing again that terrible drama which had uprooted his soul, which had driven him forth a wanderer, a shunner of men, a sojourner in waste places.

He was, strangely enough, a college graduate and a man of wide reading and great intelligence, but he had chosen to lead his own life, which was that of a recluse.

Of a temperament similar in many ways to Presley's, there were capabilities in Vanamee that were not ordinarily to be found in the rank and file of men.

Living close to nature, a poet by instinct, where Presley was but a poet by training, there developed in him a great sensitiveness to beauty and an almost abnormal capacity for great happiness and great sorrow; he felt things intensely, deeply.

He never forgot.

It was when he was eighteen or nineteen, at the formative and most impressionable period of his life, that he had met Angele Varian.

Presley barely remembered her as a girl of sixteen, beautiful almost beyond expression, who lived with an aged aunt on the Seed ranch back of the Mission.

At this moment he was trying to recall how she looked, with her hair of gold hanging in two straight plaits on either side of her face, making three-cornered her round, white forehead; her wonderful eyes, violet blue, heavy lidded, with their astonishing upward slant toward the temples, the slant that gave a strange, oriental cast to her face, perplexing, enchanting.

He remembered the Egyptian fulness of the lips, the strange balancing movement of her head upon her slender neck, the same movement that one sees in a snake at poise.

Never had he seen a girl more radiantly beautiful, never a beauty so strange, so troublous, so out of all accepted standards.

It was small wonder that Vanamee had loved her, and less wonder, still, that his love had been so intense, so passionate, so part of himself.

Angele had loved him with a love no less than his own.

It was one of those legendary passions that sometimes occur, idyllic, untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of trees, natural as dew-fall, strong as the firm-seated mountains.

At the time of his meeting with Angele, Vanamee was living on the Los Muertos ranch.

It was there he had chosen to spend one of his college vacations.

But he preferred to pass it in out-of-door work, sometimes herding cattle, sometimes pitching hay, sometimes working with pick and dynamite-stick on the ditches in the fourth division of the ranch, riding the range, mending breaks in the wire fences, making himself generally useful.

College bred though he was, the life pleased him.

He was, as he desired, close to nature, living the full measure of life, a worker among workers, taking enjoyment in simple pleasures, healthy in mind and body.

He believed in an existence passed in this fashion in the country, working hard, eating full, drinking deep, sleeping dreamlessly.

But every night, after supper, he saddled his pony and rode over to the garden of the old Mission.

The 'dobe dividing wall on that side, which once had separated the Mission garden and the Seed ranch, had long since crumbled away, and the boundary between the two pieces of ground was marked only by a line of venerable pear trees.

Here, under these trees, he found Angele awaiting him, and there the two would sit through the hot, still evening, their arms about each other, watching the moon rise over the foothills, listening to the trickle of the water in the moss-encrusted fountain in the garden, and the steady croak of the great frogs that lived in the damp north corner of the enclosure.

Through all one summer the enchantment of that new-found, wonderful love, pure and untainted, filled the lives of each of them with its sweetness.

The summer passed, the harvest moon came and went.

The nights were very dark.

In the deep shade of the pear trees they could no longer see each other.

When they met at the rendezvous, Vanamee found her only with his groping hands.

They did not speak, mere words were useless between them.

Silently as his reaching hands touched her warm body, he took her in his arms, searching for her lips with his.

Then one night the tragedy had suddenly leaped from out the shadow with the abruptness of an explosion.

It was impossible afterwards to reconstruct the manner of its occurrence.

To Angele's mind--what there was left of it--the matter always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible confusion.

No doubt they two had been watched; the plan succeeded too well for any other supposition.

One moonless night, Angele, arriving under the black shadow of the pear trees a little earlier than usual, found the apparently familiar figure waiting for her.

All unsuspecting she gave herself to the embrace of a strange pair of arms, and Vanamee arriving but a score of moments later, stumbled over her prostrate body, inert and unconscious, in the shadow of the overspiring trees.

Who was the Other?

Angele was carried to her home on the Seed ranch, delirious, all but raving, and Vanamee, with knife and revolver ready, ranged the country-side like a wolf.

He was not alone.

The whole county rose, raging, horror-struck.

Posse after posse was formed, sent out, and returned, without so much as a clue.

Upon no one could even the shadow of suspicion be thrown.

The Other had withdrawn into an impenetrable mystery.

There he remained.

He never was found; he never was so much as heard of.

A legend arose about him, this prowler of the night, this strange, fearful figure, with an unseen face, swooping in there from out the darkness, come and gone in an instant, but leaving behind him a track of terror and death and rage and undying grief.

Within the year, in giving birth to the child, Angele had died.

The little babe was taken by Angele's parents, and Angele was buried in the Mission garden near to the aged, grey sun dial.

Vanamee stood by during the ceremony, but half conscious of what was going forward.

At the last moment he had stepped forward, looked long into the dead face framed in its plaits of gold hair, the hair that made three-cornered the round, white forehead; looked again at the closed eyes, with their perplexing upward slant toward the temples, oriental, bizarre; at the lips with their Egyptian fulness; at the sweet, slender neck; the long, slim hands; then abruptly turned about.

The last clods were filling the grave at a time when he was already far away, his horse's head turned toward the desert.