Pay Dirt and Other Whispering Sands Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

Foreword

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) is one of the most popular writers of all time. His books have been translated into thirty-seven foreign languages. The first of his many mystery novels (The Case of the Velvet Claws, 1933) has sold four million copies. His paperback sales exceed every other author who has ever lived, and a current estimate of his total sales in all languages and editions would be well over 300 million copies.

Born in Massachusetts, Erle was ten when his family moved to Oregon, and the young boy grew into a hard-working and self-reliant amalgamation of East and West. Though he built a successful law practice, he was an outdoorsman by temperament and became a writer partly so that he could satisfy his taste for a semi-nomadic life-style. Indeed, his profound love for the southwestern deserts is reflected by the fact that he used them as the setting for more than seventy of his earliest works.

Twenty-one of these stories were known as the “Whispering Tales” series. Published in Argosy magazine from 1930 to 1934, they take place in what was then the contemporary West. Most involve gold, crime, and romance. All are told in the first person and seventeen feature Bob Zane, a middle-aged prospector who seems to function as a sort of alter ego for Mr. Gardner.

Nine of the stories were collected in the volume called Whispering Sands, published by Morrow in 1981, and nine more appear here for the first time since their initial publication fifty years ago.[1]

The first, “Singing Sand,” finds Zane guiding a man he distrusts into Yaqui Indian territory to try to rescue a young woman held hostage. Preoccupied with the Yaquis, Zane is less reflective than usual and is, considering the treachery which takes place, lucky to escape alive.

In “The Land of Painted Rocks,” the dreams of a seemingly reincarnated Navajo Indian lead Zane and two friends to the Painted Desert, where they are ambushed and pursued by four gangsters intent on murder. But street smarts are no match for hard-won desert wisdom.

Later, in “The Big Circle,” Zane is pressed into driving to jail a suspect he believes innocent of murder. To turn the tables on the guilty, Zane plays the fool, risking his reputation.

“Pay Dirt” finds Zane functioning primarily as an observer to Old Pete’s attempts to make a man out of a spoiled kid. Initial skepticism ultimately gives way to surprise.

Gangsters chase Zane through “The Land of Poison Springs,” where a drink of tempting alkali water means painful death. Yet the desert is hot and some springs are pure.

In “Stamp of the Desert,” Zane must solve the mystery of why an accused thief refuses to defend himself. Fortunately, a good woman helps them both.

Perhaps encouraged by this success, Zane becomes the “Law of the Ghost Town” while on a brief sojourn from prospecting. But he resigns after finding justice more appealing.

Still mysteries continue to intrigue him. In “The Law of Drifting Sand,” he stumbles across one involving Death Valley, gold found in strange places, and murder.

Finally, “The Whip Hand” is a memorable story with a plot seemingly foreshadowing Gardner’s later Lam and Cool series. In it claim jumpers, a swindle, and a kidnapping all lead to a richly rewarding climax.

While Zane seldom describes himself physically, he makes frequent observations about life, civilization, and the desert. Indeed, they reveal quite a lot about his (and possibly his creator’s) personality, beliefs, and temperament when pieced together as we have done with the thirty-four snippets below.[2]

The city dweller differs from the desert man. (“Singing Sand,” 19)[3]

A professor of psychology camped with me for a while. He was out on the desert getting rid of a spot on his left lung. He told me that the subconscious mind was always receptive; that man’s environment stamped itself indelibly upon his character, because of the innumerable little things that were soaked up by the subconscious mind, without the consciousness being aware of it.

I didn’t get it in just the terms that he expressed it, but I got the idea all right, and I knew that it was the truth. (“Sand Blast,” 52–53)

Every place a man lives leaves its stamp upon that man. (“Singing Sand,” 19)

Back in the cities a man getting along in the sixties or seventies or maybe eighties without even his next meal in sight and no chance of any sort of job, would get panicky, or maybe go to charity. Out on the desert it’s a matter of course. No one thinks anything about it.

For one thing old age ain’t much of a handicap out on the desert. They get old and dried up, but they always have their health and their strength. They can always get around and fight the desert. And the desert makes ’em fight just enough to make ’em remember they’re men. It keeps ’em fit. (“Stone Frogs,” 646–647)

We desert men kid ourselves we’re looking for gold. It makes the game interesting. What we’re really doing is visiting with the desert. It’s in our blood: open skies — silence — space — freedom. (“Sign of the Sun,” 111)

Why work in the treadmill of civilization? Civilization taxes you almost a hundred percent for the privilege of participating in it.

You have butchers to make your kills, machinery to carry you from place to place, do your work. And yet one really lives in caves. They’re made out of concrete instead of cut into the side of a precipice, but they’re caves just the same, steam-heated caves. Your liver gets sluggish, and you lose the capacity to enjoy life. (“Gold Blindness,” 135)

Out in the desert we get closer to fundamental truths than you do in the cities. (“Priestess of the Sun,” 289)

The desert knows the true philosophy of life. Man lives and suffers, and he learns through his suffering. (“Singing Sand,” 32)

Mile for mile the desert is the crudest country in the world, and therefore the kindest. Desert rabbits are the swiftest; desert rattlesnakes are the deadliest; desert coyotes the most cunning. Even the plants have to be coated with a natural varnish, studded with thorns.

Life progresses through overcoming obstacles, and the desert is the greatest natural obstacle. (“Stamp of the Desert,” 203)

Things seem sort of out of place to us when they’re cruel. That’s because we’re soft. But it’s cruelty that develops character. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 268)

There’s too much mercy in connection with man-made justice. After all, an immutable law that never varies is the one that gets the respect. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 202)

The desert doesn’t save her weaklings. It’s as remorseless as the ocean. A mistake, and the desert strikes. Those who have lived with her are the ones who have learned the ways of the desert. That’s her law. Learn her ways or die. (“The Big Circle,” 100)

But that’s the desert. It’s a wonderful mother, and a cruel one. And the cruelty teaches self-reliance, and self-reliance is pretty nearly the object of life, after all. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 202)

I’ve seen men stand on the edge of the Grand Cañon and say that it was a manifestation of the Eternal, a temple of nature and so forth. It’s all of that. It’s God, showing himself. But those same people turn away with a shudder when they see a cat torturing a mouse. If they only knew it, there’s just as much of God manifesting himself in that as there is in the Grand Cañon. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 268)

It’s the law of nature that only the fittest survive. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 273)

The reason men don’t know the law of life is because they’re afraid to look Eternity in the face. Out in the desert they have to look at Eternity. It’s on all sides of them; they can’t turn their eyes away. That’s the spell of the desert. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 268)

The desert is peculiar. It’s something that can’t be described. You either feel the spell of the desert or you don’t. You either hate it or you love it. In either event you’ll fear it.

There it lies, miles on miles of it, dry lake beds, twisted mountains of volcanic rock, sloping sage-covered hills, clumps of Joshua trees, thickets of mesquite, bunches of giant cactus. It has the moods of a woman, and the treachery of a big cat.

And always it’s vaguely restive. During the daytime the heat makes it do a devil’s dance. The horizons shimmer and shake. Mirages chase one another across the dry lake beds. The winds blow like the devil from one direction, and then they turn and blow like the devil from the other direction.

Sand marches on an endless journey, coming from Lord knows where, and going across the desert in a slithering procession of whispering noise that’s as dry as the sound made by a sidewinder when he crawls past your blankets. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 178)

Now desert whispers are funny things. Maybe you’ve got to believe in the desert before you believe in desert whispers. At any rate, you’ve got to know what it’s like to spend the long desert night bedded down in the drifting sand before you’ll know much about the desert, or the whispers, either. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 177–178)

It’s at night when the desert’s still and calm and the steady stars blaze down like torches that you can hear the whispers best. Then you’ll lie in your blankets with your head pillowed right on the surface of the desert, and you’ll hear the dry sagebrush swish in the wind. It sounds as though the leaves are whispering. Then you’ll hear the sand rattling against the cactus, and it’ll sound like a different kind of a whisper, a finer, more stealthy whisper.

And then, usually just before you’re getting to sleep, you’ll hear that finest whisper of all, the sand whispering to the sand. Of course, if you’d wake up and snap out of it, you’d know that it was just the sound made by windblown sand drifting across the sandy face of the desert.

But you don’t wake up like that. You drift off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the sand whispering to the sand. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 178–179)

And if you’re one of those who love it, you’ll get to the point where the whispers mean much. (“Golden Bullets,” 290)

You’ll finally get so you can almost interpret ’em. Sounds funny, but it isn’t. It’ll come just as you’re dropping off to sleep. You’ll hear the sand whisper to the sand, and the sand answer, and you’ll be just drowsy enough so you’ll nod your head in confirmation. But the next morning you can’t tell what it was you were agreeing to. (“Golden Bullets,” 291)

But a tenderfoot who’s frightened of the desert can go crazy if he gets to listening to the slithering comments of the desert. (“Sign of the Sun,” 112)

When he becomes afraid of something, he wants to get away from that something. When he starts to run from the desert and finds that it’s all around him, he goes clean batty. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 274)

Nobody knows all that happens, right at the finish, when the desert has her way with a man. It’s a grim secret that only the desert herself and the buzzards can tell.

But this much is certain. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 169)

When a man finally feels the last agony approaching in the desert, he starts to tear off his clothing and begins to run. Then, at the last, he stops and starts to dig at the desert with his bare hands, shredding the flesh away from the bone. It is a horrible death — even for a murderer. (“The Land of Painted Rocks,” 88)

Go through the desert in a Pullman car and you’ll be bored. Travel through it in an automobile and you’ll be mildly interested, but disappointed.

“So this is the desert,” you’ll think. “This is the place about which I’ve heard so much! Shucks, it’s nothing much, just sand and mountains, cacti and sunshine; gasoline stations, not quite so handy.”

But get away from the beaten trail in the desert. Get out with your camp equipment loaded on the backs of burros. Or even take a flivver and get off the main roads. See what happens.

The spell of the desert will grip you before you’ve left the main road five miles behind. (“Golden Bullets,” 290)

No more civilization, no more tourist cars, no more roadside hot dog stands, no more fool questions. Just the night — silence — and the desert. (“The Land of Painted Rocks,” 60)

By morning you’ll either hate and fear it, or you’ll love it. I never knew any middle point, not with any one. The desert engenders either fear or fascination, either love or hate. (“Golden Bullets,” 290)

There’s the sense of being all alone, yet not being alone. A man comes to know himself when he’s in the desert. Lots of himself is a lot littler than he ever thought, and a lot of himself is a lot bigger. It’s the little part that shrivels away and the big part that grows and becomes company when a man gets out into the desert.

Unless, of course, a man’s just naturally a little man all the way through, and then the little part comes leering out through the cracks of the character, sees the naked desert, and gets out of control, like the fabled genie that came out of a bottle. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 249)

Which is why I love the desert. (“The Land of Painted Rocks,” 78)

When you burn off the veneer of convention in the tempering fires of the desert you find what’s underneath. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 286)

Turn a man loose in the furnace heat of the desert for a couple of years and things start happening to him.

If he has courage, the desert will make him. If he hasn’t, it’ll break him. But there’s one thing that’s certain, a man won’t be a hypocrite with the desert. (“Sign of the Sun,” 110)

It’ll kill off four-flushers and cowards and make a man find himself. (“Singing Sand,” 32)

That’s why the desert shapes character better than any other thing on earth. (“Sign of the Sun,” 110)

Charles G. Waugh and

Martin H. Greenberg