The coach road wound north through the Carson Range and a little east of Reno toward the Pah Rah Mountains and the western shore of Pyramid Lake. Desert mountains, devoid of any vegetation but the constant gray-black sage, crowded close. Old avalanches had tumbled rock down the mountain faces and lay like scabbed wounds below the ridges. Boulders the size of houses thrust out from the jagged summits. And always the terrain grew dryer, until at last it could scarcely support even the sage, and the bushes grew stunted, ten or fifteen feet apart.
Around three o’clock in the afternoon, a sharp rapping brought Imogene and Sarah out of their torpor. A ghostly face appeared upside down in the window, and Sarah squawked at the apparition before she recognized Mac behind the white alkali dust.
“Told you it was bad,” he snapped, without preamble. “Look lively now, we’re almost through the Pah Rahs. You’ll be able to see the lake in a few minutes, and it’s a beauty.”
Revived by the promise of water and green growing things upon which to rest their eyes, the women sat up straighter and took an interest in their surroundings. But the approach to Pyramid Lake was as desolate as the land they’d been traveling through for the past hours. Alkali flats, blinding white in the afternoon sun, stretched away on either side until they reached mountains spotted with sage. There were none of the soft announcements that usually herald water, neither green foliage nor the soft feel of humid air.
“It’s a little cooler,” Sarah ventured as the stage came to the top of a barren rocky rise.
“Pyramid Lake,” Noisy hollered down.
Below, spreading out across the desert floor, was a lake of the same hard blue as the sky. The shores were crusted with white and nothing grew. Even the sage and the coarse brown desert grass retreated from its shores. Gray, cone-shaped bubbles of stone frothed up fifty, seventy-five, a hundred feet in a skyline of fantastic castles at the north end of the lake. The eastern shore abutted against the foot of a mountain range, and in its shadow several more volcanic cones pushed up out of the lake.
“How bad can it be?” Sarah said.
The mudwagon jolted on, plowing up its plume of white dust. A hot dry wind buffeted the coach and drew the moisture from the lips and throats of the passengers. They rode in silence, occasionally passing each other the canteen Mac had provided. The water was tepid and tasted of metal.
They rounded the end of the lake at sunset. The mountains had turned rose, lavender, and gold. Shadows stretched long over the mountain faces, and the sage dotting the valley floor stretched out dark fingers five times its size. Mac rapped on the side of the coach and called on Sarah and Imogene to witness the mammoth bubbles and spires of rock. Pyramids of liquid stone, frozen in shape by the waters of an ancient sea, lay exposed on the lake shore. They clustered at the water’s edge like a ruined dream of Baghdad. Bats circled the spires and turrets, streaming from hidden caves in black ribbons.
Apathetic with the dust and the rolling of their stomachs, the women stared blankly through the moving frame of the coach window, then fell back against the seat to look at nothing.
Past the lake, the road curved northeast up a sand and gravel hill to a pass in the low hills that marked the end of the Pah Rah Range, northwest of Pyramid Lake. Noisy Dave pulled up at the summit, bellowing boistrous whoas. “Sand Pass,” he hollered. “There’s Round Hole below. If you gals want to step out, take a look, and stretch a bit, go ahead.” They climbed stiffly from the coach, not trusting their cramped legs to support them.
Winding down the shadowed side of the pass, a white wagon track snaked through a sea of sage; mountains, rounded and covered with the same coarse blanket of vegetation, rose to the northeast. To the south, rock-faced and sharp, the granite peaks of the Fox Range curved away in a jagged wall. Held between these pincers of rock and sand was the Smoke Creek Desert.
Near the middle of the broad valley floor, the sagebrush stopped abruptly in a wavy shoreline; beyond, there was nothing but the white glare of an immense alkali flat baked until the crust had cracked into a crazy network of lines. On the edge of the flat, in a blunt finger of sage that poked out onto the dead lake bottom, huddled Round Hole Stop. In an oasis of green the size of a postage stamp, its few trees looking like refugees in an alien land, three buildings, bleached the same drab gray as the sage, clung to the green skirts of a spring.
“Oh my Lord,” breathed Imogene.
“You gals change your mind?” Noisy asked.
“I knew it was desert,” Imogene replied crisply, but still she stared down on the desolate valley.
“Imogene,” Sarah whispered, “nobody can live down there.”
“Staying or not,” Noisy put in, “we’re going to be there tonight. There’s no place else within a half-day’s ride.” He started talking to the team as Imogene and Sarah climbed back into the mudwagon.
Stars were shining in the long desert twilight when they at last pulled up at the stage stop. A low, open-faced building formed one side of a square of hard-packed earth. Flanking it were a stable and a long two-story building with a veranda and two chimneys. The fourth side of the quadrangle, across the coach road, was the spring itself, a barn, and a squat icehouse.
The spring was aptly named, a round hole about forty-five feet across, with high, grass-covered sides. Under the darkening sky the spring lay black and placid, but the sound of moving water was everywhere. In the parched desert landscape it fell on the ear like music. A windmill pumped water to fill a trough in the small meadow to the south-forty acres of green crowded on all sides by the thirsty Smoke Creek. A narrow irrigation channel gurgled in front of the house and down through the paddock beside the barn, and another ditch ran full behind the stables and out across the square of dirt between the buildings. Planks had been laid over it where the paths to the shed and the stables crossed it.
Noisy held the horses in a hard grip, shouting soothing words at the top of his voice until Mac could get around to the lead team to hold their heads. The animals had smelled water several miles out and were frantic to drink.
A small man appeared from the murk of the stables and hurried across the yard to help with the unharnessing. Noisy Dave climbed down from the box and pounded his thighs with the flats of his hands. “Long haul, that,” he boomed, “but we brought you some passengers. I don’t know if you can rightly charge them, Van. It’s the folks took over your lease.” Noisy called through the coach window to Imogene and Sarah, “This is Beau Van Fleet.”
The man’s face had lit up when the lease was mentioned, and he ran halfway to the house. “Elmira!” he shouted in a high, boyish voice. “Come on out, it’s the folks took over the lease.” He laughed. “You hear me, pet?”
A hard-faced woman, all angles, stepped out on the porch, half-hidden in the gloom of the veranda. “Well, it’s none too soon for me,” she called back, and hurried down the steps to meet them. In her eagerness she pulled Sarah bodily from the mudwagon and bustled her and Imogene into the house.
Several freightwagon drivers were eating supper; they sat at a bar that ran half the length of the room. At the far end was a large stone fireplace with a varnished wooden mantle. A rattlesnake skin was stretched on the stone, the gray and brown diamonds shimmering in the lamplight. Several tables, mismatched and without cloths, were set between the bar and a row of windows overlooking the coach yard. Near the fireplace a motley assortment of comfortable chairs were scattered about. The ceiling was low and unpainted, of the same planking as the floor. The walls had been papered, but it was peeling in several places and faded wherever the direct light of the sun hit it.