“... I know just how hard it is for you to settle down to office routine after the Big Show. All of us are in the same fix, Old-timer, but I have the edge on you because out here in this man’s country there’s something breaking every minute. That’s the reason I’m writing you this mysterious letter.... Old Doc Stooderis counted the prime nut of Southern Arizona, but I believe he’s got a whale of a proposition and that’s why I’m counting myself—and you—in on the deal.“I’ve sewed myself up with him—promised not to peep a word of the real dope to you in this letter. The old Doc says, ‘We’ll need a good engineer and if your buddy in France has a head on him and knows how to keep his mouth shut tell him to come out here.’ ... So if you still have that old take-a-chance spirit that hopped you through the Big Mill from Cantigny to Sedan I’ll see you in Arizora. If I’m not in town when you arrive dig up Doc Stooder—everybody knows him.“Yours for the big chance,“Bim.”
“... I know just how hard it is for you to settle down to office routine after the Big Show. All of us are in the same fix, Old-timer, but I have the edge on you because out here in this man’s country there’s something breaking every minute. That’s the reason I’m writing you this mysterious letter.... Old Doc Stooderis counted the prime nut of Southern Arizona, but I believe he’s got a whale of a proposition and that’s why I’m counting myself—and you—in on the deal.
“I’ve sewed myself up with him—promised not to peep a word of the real dope to you in this letter. The old Doc says, ‘We’ll need a good engineer and if your buddy in France has a head on him and knows how to keep his mouth shut tell him to come out here.’ ... So if you still have that old take-a-chance spirit that hopped you through the Big Mill from Cantigny to Sedan I’ll see you in Arizora. If I’m not in town when you arrive dig up Doc Stooder—everybody knows him.
“Yours for the big chance,
“Bim.”
Grant folded the letter with a smile. Good old Bim with his “whale of a proposition.” Running true to form was Bim in this characteristic letter. Just as Grant had come to know and love him in training area and dugout: Bim Bagley, six-feet-one of tough Arizona bone and muscle and brimful of wild optimism. Always ready to take a chance, whether at the enemy on all fours through midnight mud or at fortune in the wild lands of the Border: that wasBim Bagley of Arizona, “the finest country in the Southwest.”
And Bim had shot truer than he could know when he sent this hint of big things in the offing back to a man two years out of uniform and moping for excitement on the sixteenth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Two years of civilian’s life had been just that span of slow moral suffocation for Grant. For all his thirty years, for all his better than moderate success in a profession of sharp competition, Grant Hickman still could hear the call to the swimmin’ hole of adventure. How he had yearned to hear it these past two years when the springs of his soul still tingled with the high tension of battle lines! Then this letter from a pal, promising all the substance of his dreams. It had not been a week in the engineer’s pocket before he was on the train for Arizora.
Grant went out to find Bagley. He located his office—“Insurance, Bonds, Investments” was the sign on the glass of the door; but the lock was turned and no one opened at his knock. His eye caught a corner of white paper projecting through the letter slot.
“Grant:—Called out of town—back Friday. B. B.” was the scrawl across the face of it. A stab of disappointment was his; he had buildedheavily on that moment of meeting when Bim’s big hand would have his own in a vise. Nothing to do now but see the town and amuse himself as he might, or call on that mysterious Doc Stooder and discover why Grant Hickman had come racing out to this Arizora. He decided to do both.
The Arizora Grant saw in an hour’s swinging round the circle was something different from the “hick town” his New York smugness had pictured in anticipation. It was a condensed El Paso, jammed in the narrow compass of a mountain gorge, with railroad yards monopolizing the whole of the flat space between crowding hills. A man could go from his home to business by the simple trick of leaping off the front porch of his bungalow with an opened umbrella. Arizora’s streets were jammed with cars—fantastic desert coursers stripped to the nines and with canteens strapped to the running board. Sidewalks swarmed with men—big men with steady eyes looking out from beneath sombreros the size of a woman’s garden hat; men with high-heeled boots and the pins of many lodges stuck on their unbuttoned vests; lantern-jawed, hollow-templed men of the sun, whose bodies were indurated by the desert law of struggle and whose souls were simple as a fairy book.
Across Main Street stretched a fence of rabbit-proof wire with three strands of barbed wire topping that; a fence with something like a pasture gate swung back for traffic. This was the Line. On the hither side of that rabbit-proof wire web the authority of a President and his Congress stopped; on the far side the authority of quite a different president and his peculiar congress began. Over yonder, where stood a man under a straw sombrero and with a rifle hung on one shoulder, lay Sonora and the beginning of a thousand mile stretch of fantastic land called Mexico. A cart with solid wooden wheels and drawn by oxen under a ponderous yoke blocked the way of a twelve-cylinder auto seeking clearance at the international gate.
When he had tired of sight seeing Grant inquired at a cigar counter where Dr. Stooder could be found. The breezy man in shirtsleeves grinned and glanced at the clock on the wall behind him.
“Well, sir, usually mornings he’s over across the Line getting organized for the day on tequila. Mostly he comes back to his office round noon time, steppin’ wide and handsome. Office’s over yonder, top-side of the Bon Ton barber shop. You might give it a look.”
Grant acted on the cigar clerk’s advice. Helocated a dingy door at the end of a dark upper hallway with the lettering, “A. Stooder, M.D.,” on a tin sign over the transom. Entering, he found himself in a sad company. Three Mexican women and a man of the same race sat like mourners on chairs about the wall; a big-eyed child squatted in the middle of the floor and listlessly pulled a magazine to bits. The stamp of woe and of infinite patience was set on all the dark faces. Mephitic smell of iodoform was in the air. Grant hastily withdrew. After an hour’s walking and when the whistles were blowing noon he returned. A different collection of patient waiters occupied the chairs; evidently the doctor was in and at work.
He took a chair by the window where he could look down into the street and so keep the set masks of misery out of his eyes. After fifteen minutes the door to the inner office was violently opened and a Mexican woman shot out of it as if propelled by a kick. Thundering Spanish pursued her. Grant saw a scarecrow figure framed in the doorway.
Tall beyond the average and gaunt almost to the point of emaciation; frock coated like a senator of the Eighties; thin shoulders seeming bowed by the weight of the garments hung thereon; enormous, heavily veined hands carriedas if hooked onto invisible hinges behind the stained white cuffs:—this the superficial aspect of Dr. Stooder. Vital character of the man was all summed up in his face: skin like wrinkled vellum stretched on a rack; eyes glinting from deep caves on either side of a veritable crag of a nose which had been broken and skewed off the true. A great mane of grey hair reared up and back from his high forehead; tufts of the same colour on lip and chin in the ancient mode of the “Imperial” added the last daguerreotype touch to his features.
Black eyes roved the room and fell on Grant, who had risen. The doctor crooked a bony finger at him and he passed through into the private office, taking the seat indicated. Without paying his visitor the least heed, Dr. Stooder went to a closet, poured two fingers of some white liquid into a graduating glass and drank it. His lips smacked like a pistol shot. Then he returned and took a swivel chair before a very shabby and littered desk.
“I never seen you before, sah”—the man’s accent reeked of Texas, the old Texas before the oil invasions. “So I’ll answer the question every stranger’s just mortal dying to ask and don’t dare. How’d I come to get this scar?” The surprising doctor tilted his great head backand traced with his fore-finger an angry weal which encircled his throat like a collar gall. “Well, sah, I was informally hanged once—and cut down. Now we can get down to business. What’s your symptoms?”
Grant, caught off balance by so unconventional a reception, stammered that he had no symptoms.
“My friend, Bim Bagley, who is out of town for a few days, told me to look you up. My name is Grant Hickman. I’m from New York.” The black eyes, never deviating from their disconcerting stare, showed no flicker of recognition at the name.
“What you want of me if you have no symptoms?” abruptly in the doctor’s nasal bray. “I’m not in the market for the World’s Library of Wit and Humour. I’ll cut you for a tumour or dose you for dyspepsia; but I won’t buy a book.”
“I have no books to sell.” Grant found his temperature rising. “I have come out from New York because you told my friend Bagley to send for me.”
Doc Stooder suddenly snapped out of his chair like a yard rule unfolding and strode to the closet. With bottle and graduating glass poised he bent a severe eye upon his visitor.
“You say you don’t drink. Highly commendable. I do.” Again the pistol shot from satisfied lips. He replaced the bottle and tucked his hands under the tails of his coat where they flapped the sleazy garment restlessly.
“You call yourself an engineer. How do I know you are?”
Grant had said nothing about being an engineer. Doc Stooder had identified him right enough. What reason for his bluff, then?
“My dear sir, graduates of Boston Tech. do not carry their diplomas round with them on their key rings. You’ll have to take Bagley’s word for it that I’m an engineer if my own is not convincing.”
The gangling doctor took two turns of the office with enormous strides; one hand tugged at his straggling goatee. Abruptly he stopped by Grant’s chair.
“Young man, what need do you figure a doctor in Arizora would have of an engineer—more especial an engineer from New York? Why should I tell this Bagley, who’s as crazy as a June-bug, to fetch a graduate engineer out to Arizora? Engineers are a drug on the market here—and every one of ’em a crook.”
Grant’s patience snapped. He rose and strode to the door.
“Dr. Stooder, I didn’t come away out here to your town to have somebody play horse with me. When you are sober you can find me at the International Hotel.”
A grin started under Doc Stooder’s moustache and travelled swiftly to his ears.
“God bless my soul, boy! When I’m sober, you say. I’m never sober and I hope I never will be—”
Grant slammed the door behind him.
Before he had descended to the street Grant began to regret his flash of anger which had launched him out of Doc Stooder’s office. To be sure, the unconventional doctor had been insulting; his was hardly the orthodox reception to be expected by one who had crossed the continent to become his partner in some hidden enterprise. Equally certain it was that, to apply the cigar clerk’s pat phrase, Stooder was “organized for the day”; the finishing touches to that organization had been made in two trips to the closet in Grant’s presence. Need one have been so touchy under these alcoholic circumstances?
Strive as he would to put the best face on the matter, the man from New York could not escape a lowering of the spiritual barometer. Here he was, a stranger in an outlandish desert town with none to give him so much as a friendly glance. Glances enough came his way, but they were inspired by his clothes, the cut of whichseemed to put them beyond the pale. Grant pleasured himself by reviewing his case in the most pessimistic light. He had been but a fortnight ago a sober and industrious citizen. Came to him a wild letter hinting darkly of some shadowy enterprise in a bleak land. Instantly he had quit his work and galloped across two thousand miles to encounter a scarecrow cynic who greeted him as a book agent.
He wandered aimlessly beyond the town and out onto a road which wound up to the edge of one of the mesas which were the eaves of Arizora. Well might drivers of passing cars stare at the figure of a broad-shouldered young man in a black derby and double-breasted coat, who was afoot in a country where no man walks unless he carries a blanket on his shoulders—unless he is a “stiff,” in the phrase of the Southwest. Even though February was but on the wane, already the sun was guarantor of a promise to pay with heat interest in sixty days.
He came to the top of the rise and halted under the psychic compulsion of boundless space. For space, crystalline and ethereal as the gulf between stars, flowed from him as an ocean. The air that filled this space was so thin, so impalpable as to seem no air at all, and it wastinted faint gold by reflection from the desert below. Mountains near and far were so many detached reefs taking the silent surf of the ocean of space; they were tawny where shadows did not smear purple-black down their sides. Near at hand showed the grim desert growths: prickly clumps ofcholla, whose new daggers sparkled like frosted glass; fluted columns ofsahuaro, or giant cactus, lifting their fat arms twenty and thirty feet above the ground; vivid green of cottonwoods laid in a streak to mark a secret watercourse.
To the man just come from the softness and languor of Eastern landscapes, where lakes lie in the laps of green hillocks, this first intimate view of the desert carried some subtle terror prick. The iron savagery of it! What right had man or beast to venture here?
Then flashed to his mind the picture of Benicia O’Donoju, the girl who loved the desert, who felt she was prisoner only when hedged about by the walls of cities in the East. Somewhere to the south where a higher raft of peaks marked Sonora’s mystery land—somewhere in country like this she was speeding to her home. What kind of a home might that be? How could a girl with the bounding vitality that was hers find life worth living in a land enslaved bythirst? A hundred miles from town or railroad, she had said:—a hundred miles deep in such a wilderness her home! Heavens, how he pitied her!
Grant turned back to the town, revolving over and over in his mind the first steps he would have to take to learn where Benicia O’Donoju lived; and, haply discovering the place of her abode, how to get there.
By the time night fell the restless visitor to Arizora had exhausted the town’s opportunities for amusement. He crossed the Line into the companion Mexican community, Sonizona. Here was beguilement enough. The rabbit-proof fence which converted Main Street into a Calle Benito Juarez also marked a frontier no less obvious. North of the fence was aridity to rejoice the conscience of the most enthusiastic prohibitionist; south of it the frail goddess Virtue tottered in her step. In Arizona a man sought traps and deadfalls consciously and with a secret thrill of bravado; in Sonora he avoided them only by the most circumspect watching of his step. Dark streets winding along the contours of the crowding mountains were raucous with the bray of phonographs and the tin-panning of pianos. Lattices over darkened windowstrembled as one passed and the ghosts of whispers fluttered through them. Where an occasional arc lamp threw a spot of radiance across the ’dobe road lurked shadowy creatures who whined in an American dialect for money to buy drugs.
Grant did not realize that when he passed through the rabbit-proof fence he left behind him everything for which he paid income tax and other doles—protection, due processes of law, all the checks and balances on society and the individual painstakingly built up under the Anglo-Saxon scheme of things. He did not conceive himself in the light of an alien—of a not-too-popular nation—gratuitously placing himself under the protection of laws quite the opposite in terms of interpretation. Nor did he appreciate that, save for his suitcase and a signature on a hotel register, he had left behind him nothing to bear testimony to the fact that a man named Grant Hickman had come to Arizora and had left the United States to enter Mexico. All these inattentions he recalled later when opportunity for correction had passed.
Grant was circling the plaza, where the municipal band was giving a concert, when amid the strollers he thought he saw a familiar face.He looked again and was sure. Little Colonel Urgo, in a snappy uniform of dark blue with back-turned cape, was walking with a woman whose beauty was that of the blown peony. Chance brought Urgo’s eyes Grant’s way. They lighted with sudden surprise, then the colonel brought up his hand in a salute. A flash of teeth was cut by the travelling hand; it was like a too quick shutter on the villain’s smile in Way Down East.
Grant doffed his hat and passed on. Half an hour later a particularly glittering sheaf of lights he had noted in earlier saunterings pricked his curiosity and he turned into a low building just off the plaza. A bare front room easily visible from the street was a too obvious blind for complacent police inspection; through an open arch in its rear wall a crowded gambling room was given false length by wall mirrors in dingy frames. Fifty or more men and women were clustered about roulette, faro and crap tables. A fat Chinaman with a face expressionless as a bowl of jelly sat on a dais behind a little desk stacked high with silver and with deft movement of his fingers achieved nice problems in international exchange. Pursuit of the goddess Luck was being engaged inwith a frankness and business-like absorption quite different from furtive evasions of hidden attic and camouflaged club across the Line.
Grant exchanged a ten-dollar note for a heavy stack of Mexican silver and moved over to a table where two ivory cubes were dancing to the droning incantations of a big negro game keeper. He was curious to see whether Big Dick and Lady Natural were as temperamental a couple in Mexico as he had discovered them to be in many a front-line dugout in France.
“Come to papa!” A raw-boned Arizonan across the table was singing to the dice held in his cupped palms, huge as waffle irons; a humorous imp of strong liquor danced in his eyes. “Cap’n come down the gangplank and says, ‘Good mawnin’, Seven!’”
The ring of dark faces about the green cloth stirred and white teeth flashed unlovely smiles when a six and a one winked up from the dice. A chinking of silver dollars as a red paw gathered them in.
“Baby! Now meet you’ grandpaw, Ole Man E-oleven. Wham! Lookit! Five an’ a six makes e’oleven! How’s that for nussin’ ’em along, white man?” The crap wizard looked across to Grant and grinned in amity. Mexicanscowls accompanied the covering of the winner’s pile left temptingly untouched. Grant felt an undefined tugging of race bonds here in this ring of alien faces, and he backed the Arizonan against the field. On his third throw the big fellow made his point.
“That’s harvestin’! That’s bringin’ in the sheaves! Now here’s my stack of ’dobe dollars for any Mex to cop if he thinks the copping’s good.”
When it came Grant’s turn to throw his new-found friend played him vociferously against the Mexican field, calling upon all present to witness that a white man sure could skin anything under a sombrero, from craps to parchesi. For the first time since he had left the train that morning the New Yorker felt the warming tingle of fellowship; the gaunt, sunburned face of the desert man with the dancing imps of humour in the eyes was a jovial hailing sign of fraternity.
“Shoot ’em, Mister Man! You’re rigged for Broadway, Noo Yawk, but I can see from here that you has the lovin’ touch.”
Grant rolled and won, rolled and won again. Carelessly he dropped the heavy fistfuls of dollars into the side pocket of his coat. Even when he lost his point, he had a bulging weight of silver there. Grant was enjoying the game itselfnot nearly so keenly as he did the Arizonan across the table, his Homeric humour and the bewildering wonder of his vocabulary. So intent was he that he did not see Colonel Urgo enter, nor did he catch the almost imperceptible nod toward him that the little officer passed to a furtive-eyed tatterdemalion who accompanied him. The latter by a devious course of idling finally came to a stand behind Grant and appeared to be a keen spectator of the game.
“Ole Man Jed Hawkins’ son is a-goin’ splatter out a natch’ral. Ole Man Hawkins’ son is a-goin’ turn loose the hay cutter an’ mow him a mess of greens. Comes Little Joe! Dip in, Mexes, an’ takes yo’ fodder! Now the man from Dos Cabezas starts a-runnin’—”
A hand was busy at Grant’s pocket—a slick, suave hand which replaced weight for weight what it subtracted. Just three quick passes and the tatterdemalion who had been so intent on the prancing dice lost interest and moved away.
It came Grant’s turn to roll the dice. He dipped into his pocket and carelessly dropped a stack of eight silver dollars on the table. One of them rolled a little way and flopped in front of a Mexican player. The latter started to pass the dollar back to Grant when he hesitated, gavethe coin a sharp scrutiny, then balanced it on a finger tip and struck its edge with one from his own pile.
“Señor!” An ugly droop to his smiling lips. “Ah, no, señor!”
He passed the dollar over to Grant with exaggerated courtesy. Eyes all about the table, which had followed the pantomime with avid interest, now centred on the American’s face. As if on a signal the fat Chinaman at the exchange desk waddled over to shoulder his way officiously to Grant’s side. He growled something in Spanish and held out his hand. Dazedly Grant laid the suspected dollar in a creasy palm. The Chinaman flung it on the green felt with a contemptuous “Faugh!” and he pointed imperiously at Grant’s bulging pocket.
“It’s a frame, pardner,” called the Arizonan. “If your money’s bogus it’s what the Chink himself handed you.”
“I came in here with American money and changed it at your desk,” Grant quietly addressed the Chinaman. “See here; this is the money I either got from you or won at this table.” He brought from his pocket a brimming handful of Mexican dollars and dumped them on the cloth. Two or three of the heavy discsshone true silver; the others were clumsy counterfeits, dull and leaden.
A cry, half snarling laughter, from the crowd about the table, now grown to a score: “Aha—gr-ringo!”
A movement of the crowd forward to rush Grant against the wall. Then with a cougar’s spring the big Arizonan was on the solid table, feet spread wide apart, head towering above the tin light shade. He balanced a chair in one hand as the conductor of an orchestra might lift his baton. His gaunt features were split in a wide grin. Before Grant could gather his senses a big paw had him by the shoulder and was dragging him up onto the green island of refuge.
“They don’t saw no whizzer off on a white man wiles ole Jed Hawkins’ boy got his health,” Grant’s companion bellowed a welcome. “I got these greasers’ number, brother!”
Grant’s gaze as he rose to his feet over the heads all about encountered two interesting objects. One was Colonel Urgo, who stood alone in a far corner of the room; the colonel was smiling with rare good humour. A second was a man wrapped about with a blanket, over whose shoulder appeared the tip of a rifle; he was just coming through from the front room on arun and there were three like him following. Rurales, the somewhat informal bandit-policemen of Mexico.
Just what ensued Grant never could quite piece together. He remembered seeing Hawkins wrench off a leg from his chair and send it whizzing at a central cluster of light globes in mid-ceiling. They snuffed out with a thin tinkling of glass. Then the rush.
Out of the dark swirl of figures about the table’s edge a vivid spit of flame—roar of a pistol shot. Hands grappling for braced legs on the table top. “Huh” of breath expelled as Hawkins swung his chair in a wide sweep downward. A cry, “Hesus!” Oaths chirped in the voice of songbirds. A knife missing its objective and trembling rigid in the midst of the baize.
The table collapsed with dull creakings, and then the affair of mauling and writhing became a bear pit. Grant fought with steady, measured short-arm jabs delivered at whatever object lay nearest. When one arm was pinioned he swung the other against the restraining body until it was freed. Some one sank teeth in his shoulder.
“Ride ’em, Noo Yawker!” came the shrill cry of battle from somewhere in the mill. Then ablow at the base of the brain which meant lights out for Grant.
When consciousness came halting back he found himself standing half-supported by two of the rurales in a dark street and before a high gate in unbroken masonry. The gate swung inward. He was propelled violently through the dark arch and into a small room, where sat a man in uniform under a dusty electric globe. He did not look up from the scratching of his pen on the desk before him.
A door behind the writing man opened and Colonel Urgo entered. His start at seeing the bloodied and half-clothed figure which the rurales supported was well acted. A hand came to the vizor of his cap in mocking salute. Then he turned to the man at the desk and exchanged low words with him.
“Ah, Señor ’Ickman”—Colonel Urgo’s voice was tender as the dove’s—“I regret to learn you are here in thecarcelon serious charges. The one, counterfeiting the coin of Mexico; the other, resisting officers of the law. Very regrettable, Señor ’Ickman. But, remembering your courtesies toward me on the train yesterday, let me assure you of my willingness to serve you in any way. You will command me, señor.”
A sudden lightning flash of comprehensionshot through the clouds that pressed down on the prisoner’s mind. He saw the whole trick of the counterfeit dollars in his pocket and remembered the little Spaniard’s threat on the observation platform of the train the night before: “To-morrow we touch Mexico, where it is known that Colonel Hamilcar Urgo is a law unto himself.” Grant strained forward and his mouth opened to incoherent speech.
“And now, señor,” Colonel Urgo continued blandly, “unfortunately you will be locked up incommunicado.”
Five minutes later Grant Hickman, behind a steel-studded door in a Mexican jail, was as wholly out of the world as a man in a sunken submarine.
Benicia O’Donoju by the side of the big Papago Quelele and with the twin towns on the Line behind her—ahead the unlimned immensity of the wilderness—gave herself to the exhilaration of flight. For the skimming and dipping of the little car over the wave crests of the desert was like the flight of the desert quail, who rarely lifts himself above the height of the mesquite in his unerring dartings from bush to bush. On its partially deflated tires, provision against sand traps and the expansion of imprisoned air under heat, the skeleton thing reeled off its twenty miles an hour with snortings.
The final incident at the Arizora station—little Colonel Urgo and his unceremonious jettisoning—left no abiding impression with the spirited desert girl. His struttings and posings, his humorously impetuous wooing, resumed at the El Paso station after the two years’ interruption of her stay in the States, were for her nomore than the high stepping of some barnyard Lothario. Benicia, little given to the morbid business of self-analysis, was not sensible of how exactly the dual strain of blood in her had reacted to Urgo’s advances; how it had been the swift thrust of Spanish temper which had prompted her to resort to the pronged weapon from her hair at El Paso even as the persistent Irish humour tang inherent in the O’Donoju name had flashed out in the dumping of the suitor at Arizora.
No, Hamilcar Urgo’s dapper figure was as evanescent as the mirage, but there was another which appeared to replace it. A man with the figure of an athlete and a forthright way of looking at one—perhaps the least bit too self-assured, perhaps inviting rebuke did one but feel in the humour of rebuking. One of those quick-witted Americans, ever ready on a hair trigger of resourcefulness yet seeming to carry a situation as if no situation existed. Nice eyes, yes. A pleasant laugh, rich in humour. But so New Yorkish! He thought the desert a place where no one lived willingly. Amusing conceit! And his name was—? Ah, yes, Hickman—Grant Hickman. One would try to remember that name.
Retrospect could not long hold Benicia’s mindagainst the joy of the homing journey. For the desert she loved spoke to her a welcome long dreamed in the stifling precincts of cities. There was the sky she had yearned for, something of infinite depths which did not shut down over the earth like an inverted cup; rather an impalpable sea wherein the earth swam free. Morning gold still tinted it. And the mountains that rose sheer from the desert floor with no lesser foothill heights: under the sun they were blue in the east and where slant rays fell upon western barriers a tawny strength of naked rock clothed them. Between the feet of the mountain stretched the level desert plain far and far beyond the power of eye to compass; grey with the grey of saltbush and greasewood, overtones of green where the first leaves of the mesquite and ironwood answered the call of the spring sun.
Quelele had turned the machine onto a westward wending road once the Line was crossed at Sonizona. A few straggling ranches near the border town, then the unsullied desert. Westward and southward sped the machine, deep into the greatest stretch of unpeopled wilderness between the Barren Grounds of the Dominion and Panama.
The Desert of Altar lies there. From theLine south to the Yaqui River and from the Gulf of California, once called the Sea of Cortez, eastward to the Sierra Madre:—here is the terra incognita of Sonora; here is the dominion of thirst. A territory large as New England and with a population smaller than the average New England mill town. A vast graveyard of vanished peoples, who left behind them mountains terraced with fortifications laid in unbroken breastworks of porphyry and rocks pictured with their annals of life and death. Rain comes only with occasional summer thunder storms up from the Gulf, storms which wake dead rivers into furious flood. So precious is this water from the sky that the primitive peoples weave mystic rain symbols into their basketry for a fetish, and their songs are all of thunderheads and croaking frogs.
Here in the Desert of Altar the impossible becomes commonplace. A man caught in a river bed by the spearhead of a freshet drowns in sand made mud and irresistibly rushing. Cattle drink no water for months on end but are sustained by munching cactus whose spines can penetrate sole leather. In the furnace heat of summer furious rain storms occur in the higher air but the moisture is sucked up by the sun before it touches earth. Gold lies scattered onthe surface of the desert and water must be mined. The desert kind slay after the manner of the ages but declare a truce at the waterhole. Death of all life is ever-present, yet grant so much as a permanent trickle of the life-giving fluid and the dust is covered with a glory of green.
For its devotees the desert holds mysteries potent beyond comprehension of folk in a softer land. The venturing padres of an elder day called it the Hand of God; they walked in the hand of God and were not afraid. Divinity, force, original cause—whatever may be your term for that power which jewels the grass with dew and swings the suns in their courses—this is very close in the desert. In great cities man has driven the Presence far from him by his silly rackets of steam and electricity, by his farcical reproductions of cliffs and pinnacles. In the Desert of Altar he walks in silence and with God. The very air is kinetic with the energy that brought forth life on a cooled planet.
The desert had been Benicia’s teacher; had moulded her spirit to its own pattern of elemental strength. Born the last of the O’Donojus in the desert oasis that was the ultimate remnant of the once kingly Ranchodel Refugio—grant of a Spanish Philip to her ancestor—she had been reared in the asperities of the land, had absorbed into her bone and tissue the rigours and simple verities of a wilderness. Because there was no son in the Casa O’Donoju and because, too, this only daughter came into the world with the inheritance of a spirit impetuous and errant as a desert bird, Don Padraic, her father, gave over all attempts at imposing on her the straight decorum that shackles the Spanish maiden of gentle blood. With the death of her mother when Benicia was still in short skirts came this loosening of the bonds. Instead of growing to maturity a shy creature who must never quit the sight of a duenna and whose eyes shall tell no secrets, the girl warmed to a wonderful companionship with her father, lived the life of a boy.
Her flaming red hair bobbed about the fringe of milling cores of wild cattle at the round-up. AtSahuarofeasts of the Papagoes, Mo Vopoki (Lightning Hair) added her shrill soprano to the chorus of the Frog Doctor Song. She learned where gold lay in shallow pockets and winnowed it from the sands in the Indian fashion. She brought home a mewing, spitting kitten she had taken from a bobcat’s litter.Her doll was discarded for a rifle before her strength could shoulder it.
Schooling came in her father’s library, filled with books in three languages. English and music, the music of the great harp, became her passions. The harp had been her great-grandmother’s; Don Padraic could make the mesh of strings sing with the sound of rain on flowers. He was her first teacher. Then, when twenty years were hers and Don Padraic realized something besides the wild desert life was needed to round out the full beauty of his daughter’s soul, he had urged further studies on the harp as the excuse for Benicia’s two years in the cities of the States. Those two years had served well to overlay upon the rugged handiwork of the wild the softness and subtleties of culture.
Benicia believed she possessed all her father’s confidences. So she did—all but one. She did not know that when she came into the world with tiny head furry in burning red Donna Francisca, her mother, had cried herself into hysteria and Don Padraic’s heart had gone cold. Nor was she ever told that her flaming hair marked her with the finger of Nemesis.
This day of the return from exile no premonition of the inheritance of fate arose to disturbthe singing heart of the girl. She rattled on to the stoical Papago at the wheel unending questions concerning her father and the most humble of the Indian retainers living on the rancherias about the oasis, Don Padraic’s fief in the waste lands. She told the credulous Quelele stories of the cities she had seen; of white men’s wickiups climbing as high as the hill of La Nariz; of water so plentiful that it was launched at a burning house out of a long serpent’s mouth; how men lifted themselves above the earth in machines like the king condor and flew hundreds of miles between sun and sun. To all of which big Quelele, never lifting his eyes from the thin rut lines in the sand, answered with a single monosyllable “Hi,” wherein was compounded all his capacity for wonder.
South and west about the skirts of the Pajarito they went, and then into the old road up from Caborca, the ancient highway called the Road of the Dead Men which swings north parallel with the Line, cutting the tails of numerous ranges that are great in Arizona. And so, when the day was hardly more than half spent, the little car crawled to the height called the Nose of the Devil, and Benicia saw below her land of desire.
Fists of the mountains grudgingly opened out to permit a broad basin running from east to west, and there against the savage baldness of sentinel ranges showed a ribbon of green. Green of precious gems it was. So vivid in the setting of the drought land. So cyclonic its assault of colour against the eye inured to the duns and greys of a hundred miles of parched terrain. And in the midst of the oasis the shining white dot, which was the house of the O’Donoju; of Benicia’s father and his fathers before him back to the day of a royal favourite baptized Michael O’Donohue. The Casa O’Donoju in El Jardin de Soledad—the Garden of Solitude.
Indian women, in skirts of orange and cerise and with gay mantles over their sleek hair, lined the way to the avenue of royal date palms which led from the bridge over the Rio Dulce straight to the white single-story house of ’dobe, heavy walled and loopholed like a fort. They waved and sent shouts of welcome to the mistress of the casa as she passed.
Benicia knew her father would not be outside the house to greet her; their love was not for the servants to see. Rather he would be waiting in their own trysting place, the place where he had given her farewell two years before. Thegirl leaped from the car before the heavy studded oak door breaking the solid white front of the house at its centre. It was opened to her by old ’Cepcion, feminine major domo of the household servants. Benicia paused to give the parchment cheeks a kiss, then she danced down a flagged hall to the flare of green marking the patio garden in the centre of the house.
Here was a place of beauty and a fragrant cave of coolness—the very secret heart of the Garden of Solitude. Open to the sky and with cloistered dimness of the four sides of the house all about, the patio was a tiny jungle of climbing things, all green and riotous blossoms. A stately date palm reigned in the centre behind the little basin of the fountain; curtains of purple bougainvillea draped themselves down its shaggy ribs; lavender water-hyacinths sailed their little barques in the pool; geraniums flamed in living fire against the pillars of the arcades.
There in the garden waited a man all in white. Snow white his heavy hair and beard, though the life in his deep-set eyes and the vigorous set of his shoulders belied age; white were his thin garments of silk and flannel.
He caught the flash of a red head throughthe greenery, saw an eager, breathless face turned questioningly.
“’Nicia, heart of my heart—!”
Then she ran to him, paused just an instant to lift swift fingers under his chin and tilt his head. Their eyes measured each the love that welled brimming in the soul’s windows. Then the father drew his daughter close to his heart and his lips brushed her forehead.
“’Nicia, my strong one, your father has great need of you.”
The Mexican theory of the treatment of prisoners, their status before the law and the responsibilities of government toward them has few complexities and knows no interference on the part of prisoners’ welfare leagues or humanitarian congresses. When a man is arrested south of the Line he straightway ceases to be enumerated among the living; if, haply, he reappears in the course of weeks or years his family looks upon the prodigy in the light of a resurrection. Such resurrections do not occur often enough to dull the edge of the popular interest attending them. There are several dim roads, peculiarly Mexican, down which a prisoner may march to oblivion, with no record of his expunction left behind. Officials with easy consciences find these extralegal methods of clearing the docket handy and expeditious.
Grant Hickman, new to the Border and utterly ignorant of customs and manners in the republic ofpoco tiempo, necessarily could notpossess a background of sinister knowledge against which to build doubts of his immediate future when he found himself locked in a cell. He was in darkness deep as Jonah’s. He ached from his scalp to his toes. A gingerly groping hand applied to various parts of his body took stock of the exterior costs of that healthy fight in the gambling palace. The heat of battle was still on him. He recalled how nobly the big Arizonan swung his chair from the vantage of the crap table; what a virile call to battle was the stranger’s “Ride ’em, Noo Yawker!”
As for Colonel Urgo’s clumsy frame-up—the handful of lead dollars in his pocket to prompt arrest for counterfeiting—Grant dismissed the trick as childish spite. When he appeared before a judge in the morning he could easily prove that the only Mexican money he possessed was that given him in change by the fat Chinaman and what he had taken in across the baize. Some tool of the vengeful little wooer of Benicia had “salted” him during the progress of the game.
But when morning light through a four-inch slit in the wall roused him from a restless sleep long hours of doubt were ushered in. Came a jailer with dry tortillas and water but no summons to appear before a magistrate.Three tortillas—clammy rolled cakes of meal tasting strongly of a cook’s carelessness in matters of excluding the unessential—were the sum of his receipts from the outside world that day. The jailer, who had the features of a bandit, merely grunted a “no sabe” at the volley of questions the prisoner launched at him during the minute he was in the cell.
Those hours of solitude in the six-by-ten box of stone gave opportunity for much thinking. Little by little it was borne in on Grant how completely he was a victim of whatever spite Colonel Urgo might care to devise; and recollection of his smiling face seen in the prison office the night before—thin lips parted over teeth in a ferret’s grin—confirmed the assumption that at devising mischief Colonel Urgo would be hampered by no lack of ingenuity.
Grant weighed the hope of aid from the other end of the town across the Border fence. Bim Bagley, the only friend he had in all the Southwest, was still out of town and would not be back until the morrow. Doc Stooder—small chance! The worthy doctor was velvet drunk when he received Grant in his office; for reasons which only his satiric humour could explain he had elected to consider his visitor an impostor. Little chance that Doc Stooder wouldpay him a thought until Bagley returned and inquired of his whereabouts. Remained just the cobweb contingency that the Arizonan who had fought beside him had escaped the clutches of the rurales; Grant was certain the big fellow’s simple loyalty to a fellow countryman would prompt him to set going some kind of inquiry from across the Line.
Night came, with it three more tortillas and a bowl ofcarneseasoned with chili sufficient to burn the gullet of a bronze image. Then, several hours after the scant meal had been shoved in to him, the bandit jailer opened his cell door and motioned him to step into the corridor. Two men with rifles were waiting there; they stepped to his side and marched him off between them.
Down a flight of steps, through a courtyard heavy with shadows, then up tortuous stairs to a door beneath a dim electric globe. The door opened from within, and Grant found himself in a chamber which might have passed as a courtroom. At its far end on a raised dais was a long desk lighted from above, three men sitting behind it. A sort of wooden cage stood apart on a platform by itself. Six men with serapes over their shoulders and rifles hanging by straps across the blanket stripes wereslouching before the judges’ dais. A black headed peon crouched timorously on a seat to the left and behind the guards.
Grant’s escort halted him before the judges. He kept silence, studying the faces of the three. Not pleasant faces. A hardness of eye and cat-like bristle of moustachios over thin line of lips was common to the trio.
“Grant ’Ickman?” challenged the man in the middle.
Grant nodded. His interrogator gave a sign to one of the rurales. The latter turned to the peon on the bench, dragged him to his feet and hustled him to the cage-like affair to the left of the dais, evidently a witness box. The little fellow’s head hardly showed above the top rail that fenced him in; his eyes were all whites.
The examining judge jerked a thumb toward Grant as he shaped a question in Spanish for the witness. The peon bobbed his head emphatically. Another question and, “Si,” chirped the witness. Then a lengthy flow of interrogation prompted by reference to some dossier in hand.
“Si! Si!” The witness hurried to oblige. Cat whiskers lifted in a smile as the judge turned back to Grant.
“You unnerstan’?”
“I don’t,” bluntly. More twitching of the spiked moustachios.
“Zeese man, ’oo’s make confession of counterfeiting and ’oo ees to be shot to-day, says ’e sells you thirty pesos made with bad metal—counterfeit. An’—”
“He lies!” Grant interrupted.
“Quieto!” The judge banged his fist on the desk and fixed the prisoner with a savage glare. “’E says, zeese man, ’e meets with you las’ night on Calle San Lazar outside Crystal Palacio gambling ’ouse an’ for ten veritable pesos ’e gives to you thirty pesos of bad metal. Then zeese man ’e says ’e sees you enter Crystal Palacio. What remark you make for zeese?”
The monstrous farce of this accusation numbed Grant. Judicial subornation fabricated to give colour to what was already determined in the minds of these three puppets. As clearly as if they were bearing on him he could see the cold, mocking eyes of Colonel Urgo behind the shoulders of his pawns on the bench. Perception of his peril steadied him.
“I demand a lawyer if I am to be tried on this outrageous charge. And I demand that the American consul in this town be told of the accusation against me.”
The interrogating judge turned to his confreres with a bland outspreading of the palms. Then to Grant:
“American consul ’as no business with crime against state of Mehico. You will ’ave lawyer when you are tried before court at Hermosillo. Zeese court ees not court of condemnation. Court of condemnation ees at Hermosillo. W’en you arrive there, w’ere you make for a start to-night, Señor ’Ickman, you ask for American consul if you desire.”
“But you cannot send me to this Hermosillo place without trial.” Grant took a step toward the bench in his vehemence. He was roughly jerked back by his guards. The interrogating judge beamed on him.
“In Mehico, Señor ’Ickman, it ees folly to say ‘you cannot.’ Much ees possible in Mehico. To-night prisoners make start for Hermosillo. You go weeth them.”
He nodded to Grant’s guards and they closed in on him. He heard a farewell, “Adios, Señor ’Ickman,” from the bench as he was rudely hustled out of the courtroom.
An hour later he stood with seven other shadows in thecarcelcourtyard. About them were the rurales with their rifles; four were mounted on horseback and a pack mule, lightlyladen, slept on three legs behind the horsemen. Men came with lanterns and heavy loops of something which chinked metallically when it was dropped. They fixed a broad steel shackle on the left wrist of each prisoner and linked them all to a bull chain. Then the door of a courtyard swung inward, the mounted rurales closed in and the eight chained men went clinking out to the dark street.
A few midnight dawdlers paused to watch the shadowy procession stumbling over the cobbles. No word was spoken. The clink of the horses’ hoofs, the patter-patter of the short-legged pack mule and the metallic whisperings of the chain fitted into a measured cadence. Despite the presence of the pack mule, Grant first had thought the journey would be a short one, ending at the railroad station. But after fifteen minutes’ marching no railroad line was in sight and the houses began to be scattered. Suddenly houses ceased; nothing but the hump-shouldered shapes of mountains about; clear burning stars and ahead a dim ribbon of road leading out into the desert.
To Hermosillo, a town unheard of and at a distance unknown—across the desert to Hermosillo afoot and chained in line with seven men. In the slim rifle barrels so carelesslyslung under shadows of sombreros was the sullen emblem of that unwritten law of Mexico which stills so many accusing mouths:ley de fuga—law of flight.
Out into the desert of Altar marched the American, whose name appeared only upon a secret cachet in the hands of the puppet judges—a man gone, as a German once put it, “without trace.”
“But, Doc, I tell you you’re crazy! How could a tenderfoot like Hickman just in town from the East breeze across the Line and get into a jam the first night he’s in town—drop out of sight completely?”
Bim Bagley, back in Arizora and distracted by the unexplained mystery of his pal’s name on the hotel register, his pal’s suitcase in a hotel room but no more material trace of Grant Hickman, was knee to knee with Dr. Stooder in the latter’s office. The Doc made judicious answer:
“Well, son, Jed Hawkins’ specifications of the gringo he fought with atop the crap table in the Palacio tallies pretty closely with the young man as I saw him in my office earlier in the day. But here’s the funny thing: the rurales let Hawkins go even though he laid out two of ’em with a chair. Let that fightin’ wildcat go and trotted this fellah Hickman off to thecarcel. That’s what gets me.” Doc Stoodergave his decision with a wave of the hand. He jack-knifed his bony knees up to his chin and waited the younger man’s comment.
“But what did Hawkins say started the big row?” Bim’s long face, all criss-crossed with the wind wrinkles that make desert men look older than their years, gave a vivid picture of his distress, of his eagerness to seize upon any detail that might point a solution of the mystery. Doc Stooder recited with picturesque detail Jed Hawkins’ story of the battle in the gambling palace as the redoubtable Jed himself had narrated it in the Border Delight pool hall before returning to his ranch at Dos Cabezas.
“That give me a clue,” he concluded, “so I laid my pipe lines an’ I’m looking for to tap a well any time now.”
Doc Stooder’s pipe lines—of information, if not of wealth—were the most productive of any along the Border. He was one of those rare white men in the Southwestern country who enjoyed the unreserved respect if not the love of the Mexican population, among whom nine-tenths of his practice extended. Though he bawled at his patients, stricken dumb with terror of their ailments, though he cursed the women and manhandled the men, no poorMexican’s hovel of ’dobe was too far out in the desert to discourage Doc Stooder’s night prowling gas-wagon. Through dust storm and withering heat this blasted jack-pine of a man flitted on wings of gasoline, with his nostrums for dysentery and asthma, his splints for broken bones and needles for knife thrusts.
Drunk he might be half the time, an indifferent physician all the time—for the Doc had not been away from the Border for twenty-five years and never read a medical magazine. But under his hard rind of brutalities and cynicisms the Mexicans and Indians had come to discover a deep sympathy with their homely tragedies, their patient sufferings. Sometimes they paid him in coin; more often they paid him in slavish fealty the coin of which was information. Of gold strikes in the far hills; of shrewd business deals to be wrought through connivance of knavish officials across the Line; even of stolen jewels to be picked up from a pawnbroker:—these the flow of Doc Stooder’s pipe lines. No man on the Border for a hundred miles each way knew so much of the scrapple of life as A. Stooder, M.D.
“I’m lookin’ to hear of a woman,” the Doc drawlingly resumed, a wry smile greeting Bim’s gesture of negation. “Yep, son, whenany likely lookin’ young fellah along the Border drops outa sight—and this Hickman fellah’s got an eye with him for all his Noo Yawk bridle trimmin’s—they’s a swish of skirts comes to my ears. Or”—he sat up suddenly and threw a bony finger at Bim—“or he knows somethin’ about why he’s come out here an’ went an’ babbled.”
“Rot!” Bim’s grey eyes were clouded with anger. “I told you he doesn’t know why we got him out here—and he’s not the babbling kind if he did.”
“Well, it sizes up thisaway,” the Doc continued, ignoring the other’s flash of temper. “They’s one man down in Sonora who knows all we know about the Lost Mission and like’s not a dam’ sight more. That’s this proud old don who lives down in the Garden of Solitude with his red-headed daughter—name’s Padraic O’Donoju, if I haven’t told you that before. If he ever got a line on the fact we’ve asked a Noo Yawk engineer to come out here to Arizora he’d put two an’ two together an’ figure we’re after that Four Evangelists church his ancestors built. You know he’s sorta king of all the Papagoes in Altar and—”
“How about your Papago who’s going to lead us to the Mission?” Bim interrupted. “Ifthere’s any leak likely as not it’s through him.”
Stooder’s great head wagged slowly; a grin tilted the rabbit’s tail tuft under his lip until it stood out a quizzical interrogation point.
“No, son; no. I got that Papago brother where he thinks all I got to do is crook my little finger an’ his wife passes away with asthma overnight. We can rely—”
A timid knock on the office door giving onto the hall. The Doc bellowed a command to enter. A wizened Mexican peon whose left arm was a stump sidled quickly through the doorway and stood bowing, shaggy head uncovered. He cast a quick glance at Bagley, then to the doctor for reassurance.
“Go ahead, Angel—shoot!” commanded Stooder.
“Señor, I hear from Jesus Ruiz, ’e’s cousin to me an’ rurale at thecarcel; Jesus Ruiz ’e says the gringo arrest’ at Palacio goes last night in chain gang for Hermosillo—”
Bim leaped to his feet with an oath. The peon’s eyes were on Doc Stooder in an hypnotic stare.
“The gringo goes in chain gang for Hermosillo, but my cousin Jesus Ruiz ’e says that gringo mos’ like never arrive.”
That hour when Doc Stooder’s pipe line began spouting information Grant Hickman was discovering deep down within him an unguessed hardiness of spirit. A trial was on him, a test of his moral fibre no less than of his physical powers. At the end of twelve hours’ steady plodding across the desert he was coming into his second wind. Every effort a devilish ingenuity could contrive had been tried out by the four rurales, his guards, in their common endeavour to break down this gringo’s fighting morale. The single result was a fixed grin on features smeared with dried blood and sweat—a challenge provoking the Mexicans to fresh barbarities.
During the first dark hours of the march Grant had nursed the hope that at some point outside of town he and his fellow prisoners would be brought to a railroad station to await the coming of a train. He could not conceive a reason for transferring prisoners afoot when a railroad would serve. But with the coming of the dawn and the lifting of the dark from an empty land not even a telegraph pole raised above the scrub to point fulfilment of his hope. Just the dry ribbon of road stretching ahead and empty speculation as to the number of days or hours which must intervene betweenpresent misery and journey’s end. Grant never had heard the name Hermosillo until it was spoken by the examining judge the night before; he did not know whether the town was just over the horizon or half way to Panama.
Morning brought him the chance to study the men chained with him who, during the night hours, had been just so many disembodied shadows marching in a nightmare. The one ahead of him was a shrivelled little Chinaman, whose legs were so short he was forced to a skipping step to keep slack on his segment of the chain; his breath came in asthmatic pipings and wheezes like the noise of a leaky valve in some midget engine. Behind him was a giant of an Indian, almost the colour of teak. With a timed regularity this Indian spat noisily all through the dark hours and until the sun rose to dry up his throat. The rest were in character with Grant’s nearer companions—just flotsam.
The guards were typical of their class; Mexican peons brutalized even beyond the inheritance of their mixed bloods by their small taste of power. The quarter-blood Indian south of the Line, whose ancestry is devious as his own starved dog’s, knows but a single law of life and that the law of fear. Lift himby ever so little from the station of the one who fears to that of the one to be feared and he has no counterpart for studied cruelty anywhere on earth.
The one who rode to the right of the line in which Grant’s position was fourth from the front, had commenced with the dawn a calculated campaign of nasty tortures. He would suddenly swerve his horse against Grant, threatening his feet with trampling hoofs. He held his lighted cigarette low at his side with elaborate air of carelessness, then pressed in close for the burning tip to eat through the white man’s shirt. Once he aimed a vicious backward kick at his victim; his heavy spur left a line of red through the torn sleeve from elbow to shoulder.
At each of these refinements of humour the rurale’s snickering laughter was met by the American’s wordless grin. Just a tense spreading of lips and baring of teeth, which carried to the guard’s savage perception a taunt and a threat. Always in Grant’s twisted grin lay the unspoken promise of retribution once the odds against him were lightened.
The desert under sun at the meridian flexed its harsh hand to pinch the crawling caterpillar of chained men. Heat waves made all theragged summits of the Sierras pulsate. A dust tasting of desert salts spread a low cloud about the marching column. Thirst that was a poignant agony was made all the more unendurable by the tactics of the guards. From time to time one of them would unhitch a canteen from the pack mule’s burden and in the sight of the eight helpless sufferers tilt his head and guzzle noisily. Even he would allow some of the water to slop from his mouth and be wasted in the sand.
When the little Chinaman marching before Grant sighed and dropped, the line was halted for half an hour. First the yellow man was revived, then the canteen at which he had sucked so noisily was passed down the line to the rest of the prisoners. It was their first taste of water since the prison gate was passed. After the canteen circulated, black strips of jerked beef, sharp with salt, were distributed. Grant never had seen the “jerky” of the Southwest; the leathery stuff would have revolted him did his body not cry out for food. He tore at the tough substance after the manner of his fellows while the guards brewed themselves some more complicated mess over a fire of greasewood sticks.
Then the march again. Dragging hour afterdragging hour. Clink-clank of the swinging chain. Pad-pad of feet in time. Snuffle and wheeze—snuffle and wheeze of the asthmatic Chinaman’s breathing. All in an unvarying synchronism which tore at the nerves. All the world—Grant’s world of a great city—was reduced to this dreadful monotony of movement and sound.
He tried to think. Came to his mind a picture of his office in the Manhattan skyscraper—his desk with the mounted bit of shrapnel for a paperweight, its clear greeny-white glass top, the two wire baskets which held his correspondence. He saw the squash court at the club—men in sleeveless shirts straining after a white ball. Henry’s bar in the little side street off the Rue D’Anou in Paris; Henry selling stolen American cigarettes for five times their value at the commissary. St. Mihiel and the old woman who knitted lace. Then the girl—Benicia O’Donoju. Grant called to his mind the vivid glory of her hair, the trick of her short upper lip in curling outward like the petal of a tea rose, a something roguish always lurking deep down in the warm pools of her eyes.
“Not Mexican. We are Spanish folk.” That was her sharp reproof when he, blundering, hadasked her if she was of Mexican blood. That night on the train—it seemed a year back. “Not Mexican.” Now he understood why the girl had corrected him so pointedly. Thank God she was not of that breed!
Near dusk the line was halted and one of the guards dismounted. Grant saw him fumble in his shirt and bring out a bright bit of metal, saw him approach the head of the line and tinker with the first fellow’s wrist shackle. He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him and, turning, caught the stamp of terror on the giant Indian’s face. Something was going forward which he could not comprehend, something to shake the stoicism of this Indian. Within five minutes the steel band about his wrist was unlocked and he stood free of the chain with the rest of the prisoners. He saw on the faces of all of them that same terror mask the Indian wore.
The freed men cast covert glances at the guards, followed their every move with cat-like slyness. The little Chinaman began a falsetto sing-song under his breath, which might have been a prayer to his protecting joss. One of the guards turned in his saddle and called some jocular order to the prisoners. They moved on in the wine-light of the sunset, falling preciselyinto the line they had held when chained, their eyes vigilant for every move of a hand on the part of the mounted men.
The rurales now carried their rifles swung free across the saddles.
Though he could understand no word of the muttered scraps of speech passed between man and man behind him, the magnetic fear waves possessing all the rest began to prompt Grant to some comprehension. The coming night—dropping of the chain—those rifles unslung from shoulders and carried free across the saddles:—did these things presage the near end of this farce of a pilgrimage across the desert to a court?
Light now was nearly gone from the western sky and the guards were riding farther away from the trudging line, deliberately inviting some one to offer himself for fair target practice while gunsights still could be seen. Grant faced the hazard squarely. Certain he was that none of the eight would see another sunrise, that butcher’s work would commence the minute sporting chances were definitively ignored by the victims. He was of no mind to be the passive party to a hog killing. Better a quick dash—a bullet from behind—
The line of men had just emerged from anarroyo with almost perpendicular sides; the bed of the dry stream was thick with shadow. Grant leaped from line and ran straight for the guard who rode between himself and the course of the stream. Almost at his stirrup he swerved and cut under the horse’s rump.
Shouts. A shot gone wild. Grant, zigzagging, was at the brink of the arroyo. Two shots almost as one. A lance of fire through his shoulder. Up went his arms and he plunged headlong into the gulf of blackness.