Editor’s Note: The following story is
reprinted from The Troll Garden. Willa Cather (1873-1947). New York: McClure,
Phillips & Co., 1905. Modern version
from the public domain by www.shortstoryarchive.com
We had our swim before sundown, and
while we were cooking our supper the oblique rays of light made a dazzling
glare on the white sand about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind
the brown stretches of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of
air that had rested over the water and our clean sand bar grew fresher and
smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the flatter shore. The
river was brown and sluggish, like any other of the half-dozen streams that
water the Nebraska corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of bald clay
bluffs where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops threw
light shadows on the long grass. The western shore was low and level, with
cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and all along the water's edge were
little sandy coves and beaches where slim cottonwoods and willow saplings
flickered.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

***
The turbulence of the river in
springtime discouraged milling, and, beyond keeping the old red bridge in
repair, the busy farmers did not concern themselves with the stream; so the
Sandtown boys were left in undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail
through the miles of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and, after
the winter skating season was over and the ice had gone out, the spring
freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement of the year. The
channel was never the same for two successive seasons. Every spring the swollen
stream undermined a bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of cornfield to
the west and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere
else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand bars were thus exposed to
dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so firmly that
the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the little willow seedlings
emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up
into summer growth, and with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand
beneath them against the batterings of another April. Here and there a
cottonwood soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that,
even on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon road,
trembled along the face of the water.
It was on
such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green, that we built our
watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow wands, but on the level
terrace of fine sand which had been added that spring; a little new bit of
world, beautifully ridged with ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons
of turtles and fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured.
We had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although we often
swam to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.
This was our last watch fire of the
year, and there were reasons why I should remember it better than any of the
others. Next week the other boys were to file back to their old places in the
Sandtown High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first
country school in the Norwegian district. I was already homesick at the thought
of quitting the boys with whom I had always played; of leaving the river, and
going up into a windy plain that was all windmills and cornfields and big
pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no
new islands, and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the watercourses.
Other boys
came and went and used the river for fishing or skating, but we six were sworn
to the spirit of the stream, and we were friends mainly because of the river.
There were the two Hassler boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor.
They were the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned
hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best
mathematician in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in
the spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz
caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they lived so
much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the river itself.
There was
Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took half a dozen
boys' story-papers and was always being kept in for reading detective stories
behind his desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by his freckles and red hair to
be the buffoon in all our games, though he walked like a timid little old man
and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store
every afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his
recreations were laborious. He collected cigarette cards and tin tobacco-tags
indefatigably, and would sit for hours humped up over a snarling little
scroll-saw which he kept in his attic. His dearest possessions were some little
pill bottles that purported to contain grains of wheat from the Holy Land,
water from the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His
father had bought these dull things from a Baptist missionary who peddled them,
and Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their remote origin.
The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had
fine hazel eves that were almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and
such a pleasant voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he
had to read poetry aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be
sure, he was not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen and should
have finished the High School the year before, but he was always off somewhere
with his gun.
Arthur's
mother was dead, and his father, who was feverishly absorbed in promoting
schemes, wanted to send the boy away to school and get him off his hands; but
Arthur always begged off for another year and promised to study. I remember him
as a tall, brown boy with an intelligent face, always lounging among a lot of
us little fellows, laughing at us oftener than with us, but such a soft,
satisfied laugh that we felt rather flattered when we provoked it. In
after-years people said that Arthur had been given to evil ways as a lad, and
it is true that we often saw him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish
Fanny's boy, but if he learned anything ugly in their company he never betrayed
it to us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am bound to say that he
led us into no worse places than the cattail marshes and the stubble fields.
These, then, were the boys who camped with me that summer night upon the sand
bar.
After we
finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for driftwood. By the time we
had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent, weedy smell from the
shore increased with the coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and
made another futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried
it often before, but he could never be got past the big one.
"You
see those three big stars just below the handle, with the bright one in the
middle?" said Otto Hassler; "that's Orion's belt, and the bright one
is the clasp." I crawled behind Otto's shoulder and sighted up his arm to
the star that seemed perched upon the tip of his steady forefinger. The Hassler
boys did seine-fishing at night, and they knew a good many stars.
Percy gave up the Little Dipper and
lay back on the sand, his hands clasped under his head. "I can see the
North Star," he announced, contentedly, pointing toward it with his big
toe. "Anyone might get lost and need to know that."
We all
looked up at it.
"How do
you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point north any more?"
Tip asked.
Otto shook
his head. "My father says that there was another North Star once, and that
maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what would happen to us down here if
anything went wrong with it?"
Arthur
chuckled. "I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to it in your
time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good dead Indians."
We lay back
and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world. The gurgle of the water
had become heavier. We had often noticed a mutinous, complaining note in it at
night, quite different from its cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the
voice of a much deeper and more powerful stream. Our water had always these two
moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate
regret.
"Queer
how the stars are all in sort of diagrams," remarked Otto. "You could
do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always look as if they meant
something. Some folks say everybody's fortune is all written out in the stars,
don't they?"
"They
believe so in the old country," Fritz affirmed.
But Arthur
only laughed at him. "You're thinking of Napoleon, Fritzey. He had a star
that went out when he began to lose battles. I guess the stars don't keep any
close tally on Sandtown folks."
We were
speculating on how many times we could count a hundred before the evening star
went down behind the cornfields, when someone cried, "There comes the
moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!"
We all
jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us. It came up like a
galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing, red as an angry heathen god.
"When
the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice their prisoners on
the temple top," Percy announced.
"Go on,
Perce. You got that out of Golden Days. Do you believe that, Arthur?" I
appealed.
Arthur
answered, quite seriously: "Like as not. The moon was one of their gods.
When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where they used to sacrifice
their prisoners."
As we
dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the Mound-Builders were
older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the Mound-Builders we never
willingly got away from them, and we were still conjecturing when we heard a
loud splash in the water.
"Must
have been a big cat jumping," said Fritz. "They do sometimes. They
must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!"
There was a long, silvery streak on
the water, and where the current fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold
pieces.
"Suppose
there ever was any gold hid away in this old river?" Fritz asked. He lay
like a little brown Indian, close to the fire, his chin on his hand and his
bare feet in the air. His brother laughed at him, but Arthur took his
suggestion seriously.
"Some
of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere. Seven cities chuck
full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his men came up to hunt it. The
Spaniards were all over this country once."
Percy looked
interested. "Was that before the Mormons went through?"
We all
laughed at this.
"Long
enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they came along this
very river. They always followed the watercourses."
"I
wonder where this river really does begin?" Tip mused. That was an old and
a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain. On the map the little
black line stopped somewhere in western Kansas; but since rivers generally rose
in mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose that ours came from the
Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the Hassler boys
always maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our
noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up their old
argument. "If us boys had grit enough to try it, it wouldn't take no time
to get to Kansas City and St. Joe."
We began to
talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler boys wanted to see the
stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted to see a big store in Chicago.
Arthur was interlocutor and did not betray himself.
"Now
it's your turn, Tip."
Tip rolled
over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked shyly out of his
queer, tight little face. "My place is awful far away. My Uncle Bill told
me about it."
Tip's Uncle
Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had drifted into Sandtown
with a broken arm, and when it was well had drifted out again.
"Where
is it?"
"Aw,
it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads or anything. You
have to go on mules, and you run out of water before you get there and have to
drink canned tomatoes."
"Well,
go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?"
Tip sat up and excitedly began his
story.
"There's
a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for about nine hundred
feet. The country's flat all around it, and this here rock goes up all by
itself, like a monument. They call it the Enchanted Bluff down there, because
no white man has ever been on top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and
straight up, like a wall. The Indians say that hundreds of years ago, before
the Spaniards came, there was a village away up there in the air. The tribe
that lived there had some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, hung down
over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt and carried water
up in big jars swung on their backs. They kept a big supply of water and dried
meat up there, and never went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe
that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of the wars. You
see, they could pick off any war party that tried to get up their little steps.
The Indians say they were a handsome people, and they had some sort of queer
religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble
and left home. They weren't fighters, anyhow.
"One
time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a kind of
waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found their little
staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few steps were left hanging
away up in the air. While they were camped at the foot of the rock, wondering
what to do, a war party from the north came along and massacred 'em to a man,
with all the old folks and women looking on from the rock. Then the war party
went on south and left the village to get down the best way they could. Of
course they never got down. They starved to death up there, and when the war
party came back on their way north, they could hear the children crying from
the edge of the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn't see a sign of
a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since."
We exclaimed
at this dolorous legend and sat up.
"There
couldn't have been many people up there," Percy demurred. "How big is
the top, Tip?"
"Oh,
pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as tall as it is.
The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of worn away for several
hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so hard to climb."
I asked how
the Indians got up, in the first place.
"Nobody
knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along once and saw that
there was a town up there, and that was all."
Otto rubbed
his chin and looked thoughtful. "Of course there must be some way to get
up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway and pull a ladder up?"
Tip's little
eyes were shining with excitement. "I know a way. Me and Uncle Bill talked
it over. There's a kind of rocket that would take a rope over--lifesavers use
'em--and then you could hoist a rope ladder and peg it down at the bottom and
make it tight with guy ropes on the other side. I'm going to climb that there
bluff, and I've got it all planned out."
Fritz asked
what he expected to find when he got up there.
"Bones,
maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of their idols. There
might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want to see."
"Sure
nobody else has been up there, Tip?" Arthur asked.
"Dead
sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried to cut steps in
the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man can reach. The Bluff's all
red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a boulder the glaciers left. It's a
queer place, anyhow. Nothing but cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and
yet right under the Bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. That's why
the bison used to go down there."
Suddenly we
heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a dark, slim bird floating
southward far above us--a whooping crane, we knew by her cry and her long neck.
We ran to the edge of the island, hoping we might see her alight, but she
wavered southward along the rivercourse until we lost her. The Hassler boys
declared that by the look of the heavens it must be after midnight, so we threw
more wood on our fire, put on our jackets, and curled down in the warm sand.
Several of us pretended to doze, but I fancy we were really thinking about
Tip's Bluff and the extinct people. Over in the wood the ring doves were
calling mournfully to one another, and once we heard a dog bark, far away.
"Somebody getting into old Tommy's melon patch," Fritz murmured
sleepily, but nobody answered him. By and by Percy spoke out of the shadows.
"Say,
Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?"
"Maybe."
"Suppose
one of us beats you down there, Tip?"
"Whoever
gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest of us exactly what
he finds," remarked one of the Hassler boys, and to this we all readily
assented.
Somewhat
reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed about a race for the
Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other people were getting ahead of me
and that I was losing my chance. I sat up in my damp clothes and looked at the
other boys, who lay tumbled in uneasy attitudes about the dead fire. It was
still dark, but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of night. The
stars glistened like crystal globes, and trembled as if they shone through a
depth of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to pale and the sky
brightened. Day came suddenly, almost instantaneously. I turned for another
look at the blue night, and it was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call,
and all manner of little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows. A
breeze sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened corn. The
boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged into the river
just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.
When I came
home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to our island and talked over
the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff, renewing our resolution to find it.
Although
that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the Enchanted Bluff.
Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and will go nowhere that his red
touring car cannot carry him. Otto Hassler went on the railroad and lost his
foot braking; after which he and Fritz succeeded their father as the town
tailors.
Arthur sat
about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before he was twenty-five.
The last time I saw him, when I was home on one of my college vacations, he was
sitting in a steamer chair under a cottonwood tree in the little yard behind
one of the two Sandtown saloons. He was very untidy and his hand was not steady,
but when he rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as
ever. When I had talked with him for an hour and heard him laugh again, I
wondered how it was that when Nature had taken such pains with a man, from his
hands to the arch of his long foot, she had ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked
about Tip Smith's Bluff, and declared he was going down there just as soon as
the weather got cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth while, too.
I was
perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond the high plank
fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood. And, indeed, it was under
that very tree that he died one summer morning.
Tip Smith
still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a slatternly, unthrifty country
girl, has been much tied to a perambulator, and has grown stooped and grey from
irregular meals and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now
over, and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in Sandtown
I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he had balanced his cash
and shut up his store. We took the long way around and sat down on the
schoolhouse steps, and between us we quite revived the romance of the lone red
rock and the extinct people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there,
but he thinks now he will wait until his boy Bert is old enough to go with him.
Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing but the Enchanted
Bluff.
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