Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

“Damned Mormon!” I cried. “Damned Mormon! Damned Mormon! Damned Mormon!”

When my father, and the men who had accompanied him, returned, all crowded anxiously about him. He shook his head.

“They will not sell?” some woman demanded.

Again he shook his head.

A man spoke up. “They say they have flour and provisions for three years, Captain,” he said. “They have always sold it before. And now they won’t sell. And it is not our quarrel. Their quarrel is with the government, and they’re taking it out on us[52]. It is not right, Captain. It is not right, I say. We have our women and children, and California is months away, winter is coming, and there is nothing but desert in between. We can’t face the desert.”

He broke off for a moment to address the whole crowd.

“Why, you all don’t know what desert is. This is not desert. I tell you, it’s paradise, and heavenly pasture. Captain, we must get flour first. If they don’t want to sell it, then we must just take it.”

Many of the men and women began crying out in approval, but my father held up his hand.

“I agree with everything you say, Hamilton[53],” he began. “We could wipe out Nephi very fast and take all the provisions we can carry. But we wouldn’t carry them very far. You know it. I know it. We all know it.”

His words were reasonable.

“We can’t afford to fight now,” father continued. “We’ve all got our women and children. We’ve got to be peaceable at any price.”

“But what will we do with the desert?” cried a woman who nursed a babe at her breast.

“There are several settlements before we come to the desert,” father answered. “We’ll have to go on, that’s all. Two days’ journey beyond is good pasture, and water. They call it Mountain Meadows. Nobody lives there, and that’s the place we’ll rest our cattle and feed them up. Maybe we can shoot some meat. And if the worst comes, we’ll keep going as long as we can, then abandon the wagons, pack what we can on our animals, and make the last stages on foot. We can eat our cattle as we go along. It would be better to arrive in California without a rag than to leave our bones here.”

I was slow in falling asleep that night. My rage against the Mormon had left my brain. I heard mother ask father if he thought that the Mormons would let us depart peacefully from their land. He answered her that he was sure the Mormons would let us go if none of our own company started trouble. But I saw his face at that moment, and in it was none of the confidence that was in his voice.

And I awoke to the old pain of the jacket in solitary. About me were the customary four: Warden Atherton, Captain Jamie, Doctor Jackson, and Al Hutchins. I cracked my face with a smile. I drank the water they held to me, refusing to eat bread and speak. I closed my eyes. But so long as my visitors stood about me and talked I could not escape.

“Just as yesterday,” Doctor Jackson said. “No change.”

“Then he can stand it?” Warden Atherton queried.

“Sure. The next twenty-four hours as easy as the last. He’s a wooz[54], I tell you, a perfect wooz.”

I awoke, lying upon a rough rocky floor, and found myself on my back. I opened my eyes. My shelter was a small cave, no more than three feet in height and a dozen in length. It was very hot in the cave. I wore no clothing save a filthy rag about the middle. I was very thin. I was very dirty. My long hair was all about my shoulders.

After a time I crawled to the entrance, and lay down in the burning sunshine on a narrow ledge of rock. It was a very hot day. Not a breath of air moved over the river valley on which I sometimes gazed. Hundreds of feet beneath me the river ran sluggishly. The farther shore was flat and sandy and stretched away to the horizon. Above the water were scattered clumps of palm-trees.

There were lofty, crumbling cliffs on my side. Farther along the curve, carved out of the living rock, there were four colossal figures. The figures sat, with hands resting on knees, and gazed out upon the river.

The hours passed while I roasted in the sun. All this I knew—colossal figures and river and sand and sun and sky—would pass away. Ah, I knew it so profoundly that I was ready for such sublime event. That was why I was here in rags and filth and wretchedness. I was meek and lowly, and I despised the frail needs and passions of the flesh. And I thought of the far cities of the plain I had known, of the last day so near at hand. Well, they would see soon enough, but too late for them. And I should see. But I was ready. I will arise, reborn and glorious, and take my rightful place in the City of God.

At times, between dreams and visions in which I was verily and before my time in the City of God. The penitent apostates should never again be received into the churches. Continually I returned to contemplation of the nature of the unity of God. I liked the contentions of my beloved teacher, Arius[55]. Truly, if human reason could determine anything at all, there must have been a time, when the Son did not exist. There must have been a time when the Son commenced to exist. A father must be older than his son. To hold otherwise were a blasphemy.

And I remembered back to my young days when I had sat at the feet of Arius, who had been a presbyter of the city of Alexandria. Yes, I had been to the Council of Nicea[56]. And I remembered when the Emperor Constantine had banished Arius for his uprightness. And Arius died in the street. I said, and so said all we Arians, that the violent sickness was due to a poison.

And here I muttered aloud, drunk with conviction:

“Let the Jews and Pagans mock. Let them triumph, for their time is short. Their time is short, and for them there is no time after time.”

I talked to myself aloud a great deal on that rocky shelf overlooking the river. I was feverish, and I drank water from a stinking goatskin. There was food, lying in the dirt on my cave-floor—a few roots and a chunk of mouldy bread; and I was hungry, although I did not eat.

When the sun set, I took a last look at the world. And I crawled into my hole and ebbed down into the darkness of sleep.

Consciousness came back to me in solitary, with the quartet of torturers about me.

“Blasphemous and heretical Warden of San Quentin,” I gibed, after I had drunk deep of the water they held to my lips. “Let the jailers and the trusties triumph. Their time is short, and for them there is no time after time.”

“He’s out of his head,” Warden Atherton affirmed.

“He’s mocking at you,” was Doctor Jackson’s judgment.

“But he refuses food,” Captain Jamie protested.

“Huh, he could fast forty days and not hurt himself,” the doctor answered.

“And I have,” I said, “and forty nights as well. Do me the favour to tighten the jacket and then get out of here.”

The head trusty tried to insert his forefinger inside the lacing.

“It’s impossible,” he assured them.

“Have you any complaint to make, Standing?” the Warden asked.

“Yes,” was my reply. “On two counts.”

“What are they?”

“First,” I said, “the jacket is abominably loose. Hutchins is an ass.”

“What is the other count?” Warden Atherton asked.

“That you are conceived of the devil, Warden.”

Captain Jamie and Doctor Jackson tittered.

Left alone, I strove to go into the dark and gain back to the wagon circle at Nephi. I was interested to know the outcome of that drifting of our forty great wagons across a desolate and hostile land, and I was not at all interested in what came of the mangy hermit. And I gained back.

But here I must pause in the narrative, my reader, in order to explain a few things and make the whole matter easier to your comprehension. This is necessary, because my time is short.

Life cannot be explained in intellectual terms. When we are so ignorant of life, can we know death? Matter is the only illusion. It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly different from mere chemic matter. I know. I am life. I have lived ten thousand generations. I have lived millions of years. I have possessed many bodies. I am life.

Look here. This finger of mine—this finger is not I. Cut it off. I live. The spirit that is I is whole.

Very well. Cut off all my fingers. I am I. The spirit is entire. Cut off both hands. Cut off both arms. Cut off both legs. I, the unconquerable and indestructible I, survive. Clip my hair. Shave from me with sharp razors my lips, my nose, my ears. I will still exist, unmutilated, undiminished.

Oh, the heart still beats. Very well. Cut out the heart. I have not perished. Only the body has perished, and the body is not I.

Have I not shown you, my reader, that in previous times, I have been Count Guillaume de Sainte-Maure, and the boy Jesse, whose father was captain of forty wagons in the great westward emigration? And, also, am I not now, as I write these lines, Darrell Sanding, under sentence of death in Folsom Prison and one time professor of agronomy in the College of Agriculture of the University of California?

Matter is the great illusion. That is, matter manifests itself in form, and form is apparitional. Where, now, is the body of Guillaume de Sainte-Maure that was thrust through on the grass so long ago by de Villehardouin? Where, now, are the forty great wagons in the circle at Nephi, and all the men and women and children and cattle? All such things no longer are, for they were forms, manifestations of matter. They have passed and are not.

The spirit is the reality that endures. I am spirit, and I endure. The form of me that is my body will fall apart when it has been sufficiently hanged by the neck. In the world of spirit the memory of it will remain. Matter has no memory, because its forms are evanescent.

In all my journeys through the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never been able to guide any journey to a particular destination. Thus many new experiences of old lives were mine before I returned to the boy Jesse at Nephi.

Chapter XIII

Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir. The cattle were driven out to water and pasture. While the men unchained the wheels and drew the wagons, the women cooked forty breakfasts over forty fires. The children clustered about the fires.

Again it was long hours of heat and dust, sage-brush and sand. No dwellings of men, neither cattle nor fences, nor any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that day.

We made about fifteen miles a day. At Fillmore[57] the inhabitants were hostile, as all had been. They laughed at us when we tried to buy food.

The old man I have mentioned, the one with long, sunburnt hair who helped my father, rode close to our wagon and indicated the jaded horses.

“I guess they’re watching us, Laban[58],” was my father’s sole comment.

It was at Fillmore that I saw a man that I was to see again. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with all the evidence of good health and immense strength—strength not alone of body but of will. Unlike most men I saw, he was smooth-shaven. His mouth was unusually wide, with thin lips. His nose was large, square, and thick. So was his face square, wide between the cheekbones, and topped with a broad, intelligent forehead. And the eyes were the bluest blue I had ever seen.

It was at the flour-mill at Fillmore that I first saw this man. Father, with several of our company, had gone there to try to buy flour, and I, disobeying my mother in my curiosity to see more of our enemies, had tagged along unperceived. This man was one of four or five who stood in a group with the miller during the interview.

“Have you seen that smooth-faced rascal?” Laban said to father.

Father nodded.

“Well, that’s Lee,” Laban continued. “I’ve seen him before. He’s a regular bastard. He’s got nineteen wives and fifty children, they all say. And he’s crazy on religion. But why is he pursuing us in this God-forsaken country?”

The little settlements were from twenty to fifty miles apart. And at every settlement our peaceful attempts to buy food were vain. They denied us harshly, and wanted to know who of us had sold them food when we drove them from Missouri. It was useless to tell them that we were from Arkansas. They insisted on our being Missourians.

Cedar City[59] was the last settlement. Laban, who had ridden on ahead, came back and reported to father. His first news was significant.

“I saw Lee as I rode in, Captain. And there are many men and horses in Cedar City.”

But we had no trouble at the settlement. They refused to sell us food, but they left us to ourselves. The women and children stayed in the houses, and though some of the men appeared in sight they did not enter our camp and taunt us.

This was the last Mormon outpost. Beyond lay the vast desert, with, on the other side of it, the dream land, the myth land, of California.

My father regarded me quizzically.

“You don’t like the Mormons, eh, son?”

I shook my head.

“When I grow up,” I said, after a minute, “I’m going to kill them all.”

“You, Jesse!” came my mother’s voice from inside the wagon. “Shut your mouth.” And to my father: “You ought to be ashamed letting the boy talk on like that.”

We made camp early that day, and everybody worked till nightfall. While some of the men mended harness others repaired the frames and ironwork of the wagons. Laban was sitting cross-legged in the shade of a wagon and sewing a new pair of moccasins. He was the only man in our train who wore moccasins, and I have an impression that he had not belonged to our company when it left Arkansas. Also, he had neither wife, nor family, nor wagon of his own. All he possessed was his horse, his rifle, his clothes, and a couple of blankets.

My awakening was like a nightmare. It came as a sudden blast of sound. I could hear near and distant explosions of rifles, shouts and curses of men, women screaming, and children bawling. When I began to rise, my mother pressed me down with her hand. Father ran into the wagon.

“Out of it!” he shouted. “Quick! To the ground!”

He wasted no time.

“Here, Jesse!” father shouted to me, and I joined him in digging a hole.

“Go ahead and make it deeper, Jesse,” father ordered,

He stood up and rushed away in the gray light, shouting commands as he ran.

“Lie down!” I could hear him. “Get behind the wagon wheels and burrow in the sand! Family men, get the women and children out of the wagons! Hold your fire![60] No more shooting! Hold your fire and be ready! Single men, join Laban at the right, Cochrane[61] at the left, and me in the centre! Don’t stand up! Crawl!”

For a quarter of an hour the heavy and irregular firing continued. The Indians—for Indians Laban declared them to be—had attacked us and were lying down and firing at us. I heard father cried out:

“Now! All together!”

From left, right, and centre our rifles shot. Some Indians fell down. Their fire immediately ceased. The Indians ran away.

Under father’s directions the company began to work like beavers. All the children helped. There was no whimpering or excitement. There was work to be done.

At noon Laban returned from a scout. He had seen new Indians arriving from the south. It was at this time that we saw a dozen white men on the crest of a low hill.

“I see,” Laban said to father. “They made the Indians fight us.”

“They’re white like us,” I heard somebody complain to mother. “Why don’t they help us?”

“They are not white,” I said. “They’re Mormons.”

That night, after dark, three of our young men went out of camp. I saw them go.

“They are going for Cedar City to get help,” father told mother.

Mother shook her head.

“There’s plenty of Mormons near the camp,” she said. “But they won’t help us.”

“But there are good Mormons and bad Mormons—” father began.

“We haven’t found any good ones,” she said.

In the morning I heard of the return of the young men. The news was sad. One man was shot down. The others escaped. So the whites were behind the Indians.

There were occasional shots into camp, but the morning passed quietly. So we were comfortable enough.

It was hot that afternoon. The sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, and there was no wind. In the mid-afternoon of that day we saw Lee again. He was on foot, crossing diagonally over the meadow to the north-west.