The Desert of Altar is transcendence of silence. From the savage Growler range in Arizona south to the obsidian bastions of Pinacate, by the dead Gulf, is space to crowd five million people with their tumult of cities, their crash of machines, hoot of locomotives and shriek of steel under stress. Yet in all this blank waste not a sound.
The chirp of the wren from her hole in thesahuarocarries not even so far as the watching hawk on nearby skeletonocatillastalk. The meat cry of the prowling cat in the mountains where the wild sheep range is swallowed in the muffling depths of the canyon under her feet. Thin air seems too tenuous to conduct sound waves. Creatures of the wild lands move mute under the oppression of unbounded space.
Yet nowhere does rumour fly swifter than here in this vacant land. Comes a strange prowler to the waterholes of Tinajas Altas, and the antelope fifty miles away know thenews and seek the hidden springs at Bates’ Wells. A Papago three days’ journey from the nearest rancheria stumbles onto hoofprints of six horses away over where tidewater climbs into the delta of the Colorado, and he turns back to carry report of revolution in Baja California. Strange signs tell their tales from the sands; the arrangement of little sticks conveys whole chapters of information to the wayfarer. When man meets man, be he white, brown or copper coloured, news is a torch to be passed on to a new hand. Nothing can be long a secret. The latent must out.
Even as the worthy Doc Stooder in his shabby office at Arizora had a never-ending messenger service from all the Border and the lands beyond, carrying scraps of oblique news, another far distant in the Garden of Solitude enjoyed the same intelligence. This was Don Padraic O’Donoju, last of the line of masters over the once-great principality of El Rancho del Refugio. Though a hundred years of revolution, of uproar and the teetering of political balances in the more populous Mexico to south and east of him had left to the last don of the O’Donojus little more territory than that comprised in the oasis of the Garden, still he had cattle enough to be counted a rich man and sixgenerations of custom gave him unbroken sway over the Papagoes. From the Sand People of the Gulf away up to the San Xavier rancheria at Tucson extended the secret kingdom of Don Padraic’s influence. His only tithes were those of loyalty and the bringing of report. What the Papagoes thought Don Padraic should know, that he knew as speedily as word could be passed.
So, a week after Benicia had returned to the Casa O’Donoju, came a runner from the eastward—one sent by El Doctor Coyote Belly, whose winter house was at Babinioqui near the railroad. The runner had big news. El Doctor, known all over the Desert of Altar because of his reputed skill at curing hydrophobia and the bite of the sidewinder, had a sick white man—a seriously wounded white man who might be an American—in his house at Babinioqui and he asked Don Padraic what he should do with this man.
El Doctor was returning from the Medicine Cave of Pinacate—this was the runner’s tale—when on the road that runs from Sonizona to Hermosillo he found seven dead men; dead men with the marks of fetters on their left wrists. A little beyond he found still another; this one, lying in an arroyo, had been shotthrough the shoulder from behind and he still lived. El Doctor had tied the living man to his burro and taken him to his winter house at Babinioqui, where he had treated him with the most powerful herbs and had massaged the wound with the lizard image. The wounded white man would live. Coyote Belly did not wish to turn him over to the Mexicans, for he was a victim ofley de fugaand the Mexicans undoubtedly would shoot him again.
Don Padraic, whose charity was wider than his acres, made his decision instantly. He ordered Quelele to go, with the runner to guide him to El Doctor’s house, in the little desert car and to fetch the white man to the Garden of Solitude as soon as he was able to be moved. It was best, the master instructed, that Quelele travel in the night, returning with the wounded man, and tell no one of the object of his mission.
The big Indian stocked the car with gasoline from the tank behind the master’s house—a reservoir filled monthly from drums brought by ox cart from the distant railroad point—strapped canteens and oil containers on his running boards and was off. Don Padraic said nothing of the incident to his daughter.
That night Don Padraic and Benicia sat inthe candlelight of the big salon or living room which filled the space of one quadrangle off the patio. In all Sonora there was no counterpart of this chamber of mellowed antiquities, the collection of generations of the O’Donoju. Low ceiled and with crossing beams of oak, whereon the marks of the hewer’s adze showed like waves; walls hung with tapestries between the heavy frames of portraits of grandees and their ladies of forgotten days; a great fireplace wherein a man could stand upright, with its hand-wrought andirons and heavy crane shank; floor almost black from a hundred years of polishing and with the skins of animals floating there like so many islands:—here was a magic bit of old Spain lifted overseas to find root in the heart of the desert.
Benicia, in a gown of rippling lines which left her strong young arms bare to the shoulder, was seated behind the great golden span of her harp. Candlelight falling across her shoulders made ivory the flesh of her bare arms as they moved rhythmically back and forth over the wilderness of strings. She was playing the Volga Boatsong, a peasant melody whose minors rose and fell to the sweep of oars. As the girl gave her heart to the music, the thrumming strings wove a picture of some barbaricsteppe coming down to a sluggish river; boatmen chanting at the sweeps. The ancient room was a-thrill with resonance.
She finished with just a breath of melody, the song of the boatmen dying in the distance. Her eyes fell on the face of her father; it was deeply etched by the play of flames from the mesquite logs in the fireplace. Always he sat this way, moveless before the fire, when she played on the great harp o’ nights, freeing his soul to drink in the melodies; but to Benicia’s understanding eyes appeared now the semblance of a deeper shadow not of the firelight. She softly left the instrument and stole over to nestle herself on the broad chair wing, with her coppery head laid against the snow white one.
“Pobrecito”—this was her pet word carried through the years from childhood—“Pobrecito, thy face is as grave as the owl’s. Some secret? Remember, there are no secrets between us two—no worry which the other does not share.”
Her coaxing hand played through the heavy mane of hair; her cheek was against his. Don Padraic slowly turned his head with denial in his eyes; but that denial could not sustain the accusation in the steady blue eyes of the daughter. During the week Benicia had been home a secret doubt had steadily pressed upon the father;he had been waiting some word from her which did not come. Now one of his hands stole up to tweak her ear—signal of surrender.
“’Nicia, great-heart, you have told me all about your two years in the cities—your two years of life in the great world outside? There is something you have withheld?”
“Nothing, little father.” She gave him a peck on the forehead. Don Padraic appeared to be groping for his words.
“You met—many American men—young men who—ah—might have been attracted by the beauty of my desert flower?”
A ripple of soft laughter and the girl pressed closer to him.
“Ah,Pobrecito, you forget that your desert flower carries thorns. Ask that ridiculous Hamilcar Urgo; he has felt the thorns.”
“But”—Don Padraic was not to be put off by evasions—“was there not one whose heart was conquered by a girl of such fire, such beauty? Come—come! These Americans are not men of ice.”
For a minute Benicia was silent. She was weighing in all sincerity the only shred of a secret she had in her heart; testing it for genuineness as fairly as she might.
“Yes, daddy, there were many with bold eyes and ready tongues; but hardly had they begun to speak as friends or companions when their talk was all of money—how much they were planning to make that year; the ‘big deal’ they were going to put through. All were like this—but one.”
“Ah,” breathed Don Padraic.
“That one I have told you of,” she continued. “The man on the train who was so masterful with little Hamilcar. He was not like the others. A man of wit—of sympathies; one who seemed to have understanding of life—”
“And he—?” the father prompted.
“We said ‘adios’ the night before we came to Arizora. I did not see him in the morning, though he said that was his destination.”
They were silent once more. Finally from Benicia a wraith of laughter on fluttering wings of a sigh:
“But, my grave old owl, why these questions? Never before have I seen my daddy play the prying duenna.”
“Heart of mine, thou canst not be blind”—the father’s voice trembled over the intimate pronoun. “I have been thy father, mother, elder brother, all in one. And selfish—selfishbeyond measure! Keeping thee chained here to an old man in the wilderness when all the world of love and life lies beyond—”
“No—no, daddy mine!” Tears dewed blue eyes as yearning arm strained him to her.
“—My ’Nicia has her years ahead of her. Her love life must be awakened and given freedom to unfold like a flower in a garden. Yet I have permitted her to come back to me here in the Garden of Solitude because I was lonely. Better far that I sell what we have here and take you back to the world. In these evil days there is no fit mate to be found for you in all Sonora. Hamilcar Urgo has threatened me if I do not give you to him; he is of our blood, but he is abominable. I—”
A soft hand clapped over his lips. He heard passionate words:
“Father mine, stop! Never—never whisper again that you will sell our Garden. For I love it, next to you, above all the world. We are desert people, little father. We live in God’s hand and are happy. The cities crush me with their noise, their confusion.”
“But, ’Nicia—”
“And, dearest of daddies”—her lips against his ear were giving kisses light as thistledown—“I want no lover but you—no happiness butwhat I have returned to here in the Garden. Now, not a word more!”
She was on her feet and with the skirts of her gown caught in her fingers was making him an old-fashioned curtsy. Then she slipped into the shadows where the great golden harp stood, and in an instant the ancient room began to hum with spirited arpeggios—rush of many waters over a fall.
Bim Bagley, on the trail of the information brought by Doc Stooder’s pipe line, found himself against a blank wall the instant he passed through the barrier of the Line into Sonizona. He was too conversant with the ways of Mexican officialdom to make any inquiry in high places, knowing that to do so would be but to jeopardize Grant Hickman, however he might be placed, and win for himself naught but suave denials. Nor did he even go to the American consul, who, in the usual course of things, would be the last man in Sonizona to hear of the disappearance of an American citizen there.
Rather, with Doc Stooder’s counsel, Bim circulated warily among the gambling halls and in thecantinaswhere the rurales were wont to go for their salt and mescal. Here ten pesos slipped into a complacent palm; there twenty. Then weary waiting for results.
Bit by bit the story came to him, and behindthe fragments was always the dim figure of Colonel Hamilcar Urgo. Bagley knew Urgo for the tyrant politician that he was: how he used his position in the garrison as a cloak to cover his manipulations of government all along the Sonora border. No man was stronger, not even the governor of Sonora himself; and the central regime in Mexico City was forced to wink at Colonel Urgo’s obliquities else run the risk of his firing the train to revolution.
But why this little sand viper in uniform should have conceived a desire to be rid of Grant Hickman, a total stranger to the country, not even the most astute of Bagley’s informers could guess. “’E’s not like theese gringo” appeared to cover the whole case.
The saturnine doctor, repenting him of his brusque reception of the New York man—prompted, after all, by his superlative caution in the presence of a possible impostor—sent the tip to the farthermost ganglions of his news system: “Fifty gold dollars to the man bringing information of the missing American’s whereabouts.”
Doc Stooder’s proffer of that amount of money was not all humanitarian. Below his surface show of concern, designed for the benefit of Bim Bagley, good Dr. Stooder didnot care a plugged nickel what might be the fate of the Eastern man. He was not one to lose sleep over the misfortunes of others if those misfortunes were not attributable to strictly physical causes and under materia medica. Then only they interested him.
No, Doc Stooder’s real concern was the delay caused by the disappearance of this third party to his scheme for a “great killing.” The killing in question was one he could not make single-handed. Circumstances which have no place in this tale had forced him to share the secret of it with Bagley, and the latter had refused to move a step in the enterprise until he had his pal from overseas in on the game. The Doc fretted aloud one day, which was the tenth after Grant had dropped from sight.
“Son, I’m tellin’ you ’less we make tracks for that Four Evangelists mission purty pronto this here O’Donoju Spaniard down in the Garden’s goin’ to get what’s in the wind and shove in on us. He’s got every Papago from here to the Gulf runnin’ to him with every whisper a little bird lets spill. He gets wind you an’ me are raising sand to lay hands on an engineer out from Noo Yawk an’ he smells a mice.”
“You go dig alone for your dam’d mission.” Bim Bagley’s temper had been ground fine bydays of restless anxiety. “Me, I roost right here till I get the lay where my buddy is.”
Next day all the silver of subsidy Bim had distributed bore fruit an hundred-fold. There came to the office of Doc Stooder unquestioned report that the missing American was alive, though shot through the body, and under the care of El Doctor Coyote Belly at a speck in the desert called Babinioqui away down beyond the Line.
Bagley was off in his car that night. Doc Stooder, alone in his office and with a graduating glass and bottle of fiery tequila at his elbow, dreamed of gold plate brought to light from caverns of sand, of altar jewels and hoards of nuggets—riches of crafty priests—salvaged from the crypt of a holy place lost to sight of man a century and a quarter.
“Gold all hammered into crosses an’ such!” The Doc tipped his brimming graduating glass against the electric bulb and studied with fond eye the liquor made golden by the light.
“—Pearls, my Papago says. Pearls big asbisnagafruit an’ greeny-white like a high moon. Gold an’ pearls! Pearls an’ gold! Stooder, you’re goin’ be a prancin’, r’arin’ aristocrat!”
Six days after Quelele the Papago set out on his mission of mercy from the Casa O’Donoju he returned to the oasis. It was in the first flush of dawn that theshuf-shufof the little car roused master and servants; Quelele had travelled all night and at a pace to conserve the strength of the wounded man, who lay on thick straw in the box body. All night without lights save the thickly strewn lamps in the firmament, wending hither and thither through the scrub where half-guessed lines in the sand marked the Road of the Dead Men—a journey weird enough.
For Grant Hickman it was but part of the moving drama of a dream. That instant of flight from the chain gang, when a bullet tore through his shoulder and sent him toppling into the arroyo, was the visitation of death; in his flickering perceptions all else following was but adventuring in the country beyond death—incidents to paint impressions on a consciousness otherwise wiped clean of otherworldrecollections. First of these exposures on the cloudy plate of his mind came many days after the rurales had left him for dead in the desert: a face deep-dyed as mahogany and with white bristles of a beard about chin and lips, a face kindly withal, which bent near his as a hand lifted his head to bring his lips to a vessel of pungent brew. Then another age of drifting and swimming through soft clouds.
Grant had just come to accept the grey-thatched face of El Doctor Coyote Belly as part of a permanent picture when another Indian appeared between himself and the bundles of sticks making a roof over his head. This second personage in the world of the unreal, a giant with the features of a boy, had spelled El Doctor in ministering herb brews and keeping the wet cloths under the burning wound in his back for what seemed many years. Then Grant had felt himself lifted, carried from the hut with the bundles of sticks for a roof and laid on sweet smelling straw. In the starshine he felt the hand of El Doctor close over his own with a heartening squeeze.
Then—wonder of wonders!—the racking cough of a gas engine, and Grant was soaring back to that familiar earth which had been lost to him so long.
Upon the arrival of the car bringing Grant to the Casa O’Donoju Don Padraic, hastily dressed, superintended the moving of his guest to a small, clean room, candle lit. The wounded man felt the gracious softness of feathers under him, the suave clinging of sheets. An aged Indian woman, working under the white man’s direction, divested him of his tattered clothes and patted everything comfortable. Drowsy luxury stole across his consciousness to cloud it and bring sleep.
Sunlight flooded the room when Grant awoke. He was alone. His mind was clearer than it had been since he was shot. Only the steady burning in his vitals linked this moment of comfort with the tortured past. His eyes roved about the room to take in its appointments. White walls devoid of ornamentation; by the heavy door with its curiously wrought iron latch a single chest of drawers of some antique pattern; the bed he lay upon massive as a galleon of old days and with a canopy of carved wood and tapestry for a sail: here was a room from the period department of the Metropolitan Museum.
Grant was patiently trying to fit together the jig-saw scraps of his memory when the dooropened and the white man he had seen the night before entered. Seeing the light of reason in the patient’s eyes, Don Padraic smiled and bowed. Something mighty heartening lay in that welcome and the warm cordiality of Don Padraic’s features.
“I am rejoiced to find you better to-day,” he said as he drew a chair to the side of the bed. “Yours was a hard journey last night.”
“I am still a little uncertain up here”—Grant tapped his forehead with an attempt at a laugh. “For instance, I was just thinking I had been lifted straight into a room of the Metropolitan in New York.”
The host’s brows were knitted an instant, then he caught the allusion and smiled.
“Ah, yes; we have rather ancient furnishings here. But you are quite a distance from New York, señor. This is the Casa O’Donoju in the Garden of Solitude, and I am Don Padraic O’Donoju.”
The name crashed into Grant’s consciousness like the clang of iron. His heart gave a great leap. Could it be possible—? No, this must be but part of the aurora dreams of the vague eternity still just behind his back. Grant wished to make no blunder which might beliethe present soundness of his mind, so he held his tongue over the question burning to be asked. Instead:
“My name is Grant Hickman, sir. I am deeply obliged to you for your charity in bringing me here. Of course, I do not know quite how it all happened—my coming here from some place else, where an Indian, or two of them—seemed to be caring for me. And I fear I am hardly a presentable guest.” The sick man’s hand passed ruefully over his stubby chin.
Don Padraic made a gesture dismissing Grant’s fastidiousness. “Señor, a gentleman should not consider the state of his beard and the state of his health with equal seriousness. The one may be repaired at once even if our wishes cannot immediately effect a cure of the other. Permit me to retire, señor, and not tax you with questions until you are stronger.”
Shortly after the gentle host had bowed himself out an Indian servant entered with basin and razor and effected an agreeable change in the patient’s appearance. Then Grant was left alone with the tab to a wonderful possibility to turn over and over in his mind.
He was in the house of the O’Donoju. Couldthere be more than one family of that unusual name in the desert country; or had fate thrown him a recompense for all he’d suffered by lifting him from a line of chained convicts to carry him through a nightmare straight to the one spot in all the world he most desired to be in? Perhaps under the same roof, near enough to him to permit the carrying of her laughter, was Benicia, the vivid creature who had won his heart into captivity.
He was not kept long in suspense. The door opened and Don Padraic’s white clad figure appeared, behind it Benicia. She was in khaki, as Grant had last seen her at the Arizora station, wide-brimmed hat noosed under her chin just as she had come in from a ride through the oasis. All the wild, free spaces of the wilderness seemed compacted in the girl’s trim figure, in the flush of her browned cheeks touched by the sun.
“Señor Hickman—” Don Padraic began introduction, but Benicia was at the bedside; her cool hand was given to Grant’s clasp with a gesture of boyish comradeship.
“We need not be introduced, father,” Benicia laughed, and there was a queer catch in her throat. “Señor Hickman did me a service onthe train which served as the best introduction in the world.” Turning back to Grant—“I did not know, señor, you were the wounded man Quelele brought into our home so early this morning—did not even know we had a guest until my father told me when I returned from my ride a few minutes ago.”
Grant strove to put all his heart prompted in words that were mete: “And I did not dare hope that this house to which a miracle has brought me was the desert home you described on the train.”
Benicia’s eyes read surely what his lips would not frame. She saw in the white face of the wounded man a touch of that old hardihood and forthright spirit of address which had commended this American to her at first meeting—commended him even against her own impulse to resent his self-assurance. But she saw, too, how suffering battled to dim the valiant spirit, and something deeper than abstract sympathy stirred in her heart.
“But, señor, to meet you again this way! Father has told me the message brought from El Doctor: how you were found among dead men on the Hermosillo road and brought back to life by that old Papago. You, a strangerand unknown here in the desert country—how could this happen to you, señor?”
Don Padraic interposed:
“Perhaps, ’Nicia, when Señor Hickman is stronger he will answer questions. Would it not be better—?”
The girl was quick to appreciate her father’s considerate thought. Again she laid her hand in Grant’s.
“If you will permit me to play the doctor—at least to see to it that lazy old ’Cepcion, your nurse, does not neglect you?” The smile that went with this promise was tonic for the sick man. It remained like an afterglow when the door was closed behind the girl. And when the wrinkled Indian woman came an hour later with broth on a silver tray that smile reappeared, translated into the fragrant beauty of rose petals laid by the side of the bowl.
Five luxurious days passed—days each with a wonderful spot of sunshine in them—that when Benicia accompanied the aged ’Cepcion to his chamber. On these daily visits she would draw her chair to the side of the great bed—she looked very small below the high buttress of the mattress—and while he quaffed his chicken broth and nibbled his flaky tortillas Beniciawould talk. ’Cepcion, like some mahogany coloured manikin in her flaring skirts and winged bodice, always stood, arms akimbo and features passive as a graven image, behind her mistress’ chair.
The girl’s talk was directed away from the personal; with an art concealing art she evaded Grant’s frequent endeavours to swing conversation into more intimate channels. She brought the world of the desert into the sick room, unconsciously revealing herself as a flashing, restless creature of the wastes: now on horseback and threading dim trails over the Line to carry quinine to a family of Papagoes down with the fever; now beside Quelele in the little gas-beetle and skimming to Caborca, the southern town, to buy a wedding dress for an Indian belle.
Not once did she touch again upon the subject of Grant’s misadventures and how he came to be found on the road to Hermosillo. A delicate sense of the fitness of things prompted her to await the moment when he himself should volunteer explanations. Grant, on his part, felt an impelling reluctance to give details, for to do so would necessitate his revealing his conviction that little Colonel Urgo’s was the hand that had pushed him so near death. A delicate—perhapsquixotic—sense of personal honour prompted that he keep his enemy’s name out of any explanations. He could not know how close might be the little Spaniard’s relations with Benicia and her father—even discounting Urgo’s boast that he expected to make the girl his wife—and, besides, he felt the score between himself and Urgo must be evened before he linked the Colonel’s name with his experiences.
With Benicia’s father Grant modified his resolution to a certain degree. It was no more than proper, he argued with himself, that the master of the Casa O’Donoju have some explanation for the presence in his house of a man from a Mexican chain gang.
“Señor O’Donoju,” Grant addressed his host when the latter was come on one of his daily visits, “you have been more than kind to me, but I fear I may be an embarrassment to you—a fugitive, you know, if that is my status before the law.”
“My dear sir”—the courtly Spaniard waved away Grant’s scruples with a smile—“you forget that the evidence El Doctor Coyote Belly found on the Hermosillo Road—you the only survivor among eight men who had been murdered, eight men with marks of fetters ontheir wrists; that this evidence, I say, clearly indicates you now have no status whatever before what the Mexicans call their law.”
Grant looked his surprise. Don Padraic continued easily:
“You are officially dead, Señor Hickman. It is theley de fuga—the law of flight. You were shot trying to escape while being transferred from one prison to another. Monstrous barbarism! So the president, Francisco Madero, met his end; so, perhaps, Carranza. When you were chained to other convicts and sent afoot out into the desert you were doomed; the men responsible for that act counted you as dead the minute they ordered you overland to Hermosillo.”
Grant recalled the mask of fear he’d seen settle over the features of the big Indian, his chain mate, when the rurales began to loose the fetters in the sunset hour of that fateful night on the desert; how the asthmatic little Chinaman had commenced his chant to the joss—men who had known every weary hour of that march brought them nearer to the stroke of doom.
“I have no direct evidence to explain why I was in that chain gang,” Grant began, honestlyenough; then he told the story of the fight in the gambling palace after the discovery of the counterfeit dollars in his pocket, reserving only all reference to Colonel Urgo. His host heard him through with a grave face.
“Perhaps,” he ventured, “you were on some mission to the Border which ran counter to the interests of a scheming official on the Mexican side.”
“To be honest, I do not know yet on what mission I came to Arizora,” Grant conceded with a laugh. “A friend of mine wrote me in New York he wanted me to join him in ’a whale of a proposition’ out here along the Border. I was fool enough to come just on that, and when I had an interview with a Dr. Stooder—”
“Ah!” The interjection escaped Don Padraic against instant reflex of judgment, as his hand part way raised to his lips betrayed. Grant caught the other’s quickly covered confusion and suddenly was sensible of his careless garrulity. Here he was bandying names in a matter his friend Bagley had surrounded with unexplained secrecy. He finished lamely:
“And so on my first night in Arizora I fell into a trap.”
When Don Padraic left the chamber Grant still was dwelling upon his host’s involuntary exclamation at the name of Doc Stooder. What was there about the saturnine physician, what notorious reputation which could lead a hermit such as Don Padraic away off in this desert oasis to evince surprise that one under his roof had had dealings with him? More and more an undefined regret for his mention of the name of Stooder plagued him.
In truth, the whole reason for his coming to Arizora and whatever fantastic project might be at the bottom of it appeared now strangely linked with this latest turn of fate, his coming to the Casa O’Donoju. Grant became aware of a duty long overlooked and wrote a brief and non-committal note to Bim Bagley, in Arizora, saying only he had suffered an accident and would return to the Border town as soon as he was able. This Benicia took from him to give to Quelele when he should go to the nearest railroad town.
Two days thereafter befell a boon the wounded man had dreamed of during many yearning hours. Two male servants of the household came to dress him in one of Don Padraic’s white suits—his own clothes were rags—and assisted him down a long hall whichturned into the green paradise of the patio. There under the royal date palm they sat him, with the fountain pool and its magic purple sails of the hyacinth at his feet, behind and on either hand the green and crimson glory of the geraniums.
Benicia was awaiting him there alone. The girl, in a simple green frock which revealed bare arms and the warm round of her shoulders, was the embodiment of the garden’s fairy essence. She was a sprite of this green and glowing place. Hot sunlight falling upon her head made it a great exotic flower.
“Now both of us can revel in being lawbreakers,” she exclaimed when the Indians had bowed themselves out. She was hovering about Grant, patting into place the gay serape which covered his knees.
“Lawbreakers!” Grant’s glowing eyes bespoke the intoxication of pleasure. “I feel, rather, like a prisoner whose sentence is commuted.”
The girl’s rippling laughter ended with, “Oh, but my father said you should not be moved for three days yet. Now he has gone into town with Quelele and you and I are breaking the law—with you equally guilty.”
“What man would not rush into crime withyou to lead?” he rallied, and the little game of give and take in joke and repartee which had been of their devising these last few days of Grant’s convalescence, when Benicia made her daily visits at his bedside, was resumed. It was in this course their friendship had grown: on a basis of comradeship and with healthy minds in apposition, giving and finding something of humour, of rollicking fun. No angling for sickly sentimentalism on the part of this unspoiled girl of the waste places—so Grant during hours of staring at the ceiling had appraised the heart of Benicia O’Donoju; no place in their communion for any of the trite nothings a man burbles into concealed ear of a flapper over tea or whatever else comes from the sophisticated city teapot.
During these delicious hours in the shadow-dappled patio, as heretofore, Benicia continued a tantalizing enigma to the man of cities. While seeming to give so freely of herself in laughing quip and quick answer to his sallies, never was there that least suspicion of some overtone to her buoyancy the man yearned to catch; not the quick revealing of secret depths in the eyes which would betray a heart responsive to the waves of the man’s love enveloping her. Yet the lips of the girl, full, soft,trembling with unconcealed promise of richness to the one conquering them: these were not the lips of one devoid of love’s alluring tyrannies. Nor was the rounded body of her, fully ripened to share in the law of life giving, one to wither outside love’s garden.
Grant could not speculate, with tremors of eagerness, on the flood of passion that was dammed behind the girl’s sure mastery of herself. Dare he believe that he might be the one to loose that flood? As he sat there in the odorous garden the nimble, superficial part of his brain was playing with bubbles while the deeper fibre of him resolved that nothing in the world mattered beyond possessing Benicia’s love.
When luncheon was cleared away—it had been a veritable feast of laughter—Benicia clapped her hands and gave some direction to the servant answering. The Indian woman disappeared in the body of the house, soon to come waddling out under the weight of the great harp. Grant gasped his surprise; he never had associated harps with any surroundings other than the orchestra pit.
“My Irish ancestors, who were kings in Donegal, always called for their harp after a feast,” Benicia declared with laughter in her eyes. “That is the reason we Irish are suchdreamers. The harp is the stairs to dreams. Listen, señor, and hear if I tell the truth.”
Grant watched her, fascinated. Her slender body was in the shade of a great palm frond, but when she leaned her head forward against the carved sounding board a narrow lance of sunshine shot down to kindle her hair to flame there against the gold. As her bare arms passed in swift flight of swallows across the field of strings shadows and sunlight played upon them in gules and chevrons of black and ivory.
First she gave the solo,Depuis le Jour, from some opera Grant vaguely recalled; it was a mad thing, wherein the great instrument thundered to the far recesses of the patio garden. Then the girl’s mood changed and was interpreted in the sighing motif ofIn the Garden. It was all bird song and lisping fountains. Grant allowed his eyes to close so his soul could take flight with the music.
Slowly, reluctantly, Benicia’s fingers swept the final chords. The great harp was still.
Out from the shadow of a flanking archway stepped a dapper little figure in a cloak. Heels clicked sharply and the marionette bowed low. It was Colonel Hamilcar Urgo.
Colonel Urgo straightened himself, and the smile that had twisted his little waxed moustache awry suddenly was smudged out. For his eyes encountered what they were hardly prepared to see—a living dead man. His face went sickly white; one hand arrested itself in the motion of making the sign of the cross. He stared at Grant, fascinated.
Grant himself was little less shaken at the appearance of his enemy. It was as if a cobra suddenly had lifted its head from the patio’s flowering jungle. In a moment of dreamy ecstasy, when he had felt his heart yearning toward the girl’s over a bridge of music, came this sinister apparition of evil. It was not fear of the man that caused Grant’s heart to pound—the waspish little Spaniard possessed no essence of malignity sufficient to terrify one of the American’s fibre; rather a loathing and instinctive reflex of anger gorged his combative nerves with blood. Grant read surelyenough the shock of surprise in his enemy’s eyes and cannily laid this revelation away as a weapon to hand should necessity demand its use.
As for Benicia, she made no pretence of concealing her annoyance. Quick perception seized upon the coincidence of her father’s absence and Colonel Urgo’s coming; she knew the wily little suitor had somehow managed to time his visit to that circumstance. In the first flush of her surprise Benicia caught herself feeling a great thankfulness that Grant Hickman was in the house.
“If you have come to see my father”—Benicia did not rise to greet Urgo when he took a tentative step toward her—“he is absent at the moment. I am sorry you have not found him at home.”
Urgo’s lynx eyes darted from the girl’s face to Grant’s and back again. Plainly he was in a quandary, not knowing how much—if anything—this American had told his hosts of the circumstances of a night in Sonizona and its consequences. Benicia, misreading his perturbation, was quick to interpose with a smile all irony:
“This is Señor Hickman, whom you mayremember having seen on the train. Señor Hickman, this is a distant cousin of mine, Colonel Hamilcar Urgo, of the garrison at Sonizona. He is the gentleman who believed you occupied his berth out of El Paso, if you recall. There was some slight misunderstanding—”
Grant flashed a glance at the girl, read the mockery in her eyes and took his cue from her:
“I believe I have seen the Colonel subsequently,” this in heavy seriousness. “Was it not somewhere in Sonizona?”
“I do not recall having had that honour.” Teeth flashed in a nervous smile and the man’s eyes veiled themselves furtively. He caught the challenge to battle of wits with the American and entrenched himself accordingly. Colonel Urgo found himself at a momentary disadvantage, however; he did not know what ammunition his rival would choose. Essaying a diversion, he addressed the girl in rapid Spanish.
“Our guest, Señor Hickman, does not understand Spanish,” Benicia insinuated reproof. “Yes, it is quite true, as you have judged, that he is recovering from a wound—a slight misadventure on the road to Hermosillo. But pray be seated, my cousin, and let me order wine and a light luncheon. You are visiblyfatigued.” With a slight bow to Urgo Benicia arose and crossed the patio to disappear in the shadows of the arcade.
Urgo, surprised into an unpleasant situation by being left alone with the man he had sent to death, fidgeted with the hasp of his cigarette case. He made great difficulty of scratching a match. Grant, watching his every move, decided to play some of the cards fate had dealt him.
“I guessed you were inquiring of Señorita O’Donoju about my condition, Colonel. You are charmingly solicitous. I was shot in the back—bullet through my shoulder. Left for dead with the other convicts.”
The little Spaniard let smoke seep through his nostrils and spread out his hands to say, “So much for that!” Grant was not to be denied his advantage:
“Of course, Colonel Urgo, I remember you were good enough to be present when I was arraigned at the jail on a false charge of counterfeiting; I shall not soon forget the promise you made then to do what you could for me. You did—all you possibly could!” Grant’s smile had become set and one hand resting on his blanketed knees flexed into a fist, white across the knuckles.
Urgo expelled a cloud of smoke from his lungs and showed his teeth in a wolf’s smile.
“You remember much, señor. Do not fail to remember, too, you are a criminal under the laws of Mexico, to be tried on charge of counterfeiting at the court of Hermosillo.”
“Yes?” Grant was cool under the other’s counter. “And will you move to take me to Hermosillo after what happened—out yonder on that road through the desert?”
“I?” Urgo’s shoulders lifted. “I am a soldier, señor. I have nothing to do with justice and the courts. But assuredly you will be taken to Hermosillo and put on trial.”
The little Spaniard had fully recovered his poise by now. The uneasy light in his eyes had yielded to a dangerous flicker of craft. Suavity of a tiger’s purr lurked in his voice. Grant mastered the rage which ridged all his fighting muscles despite the weakness of his body; this was no moment to be betrayed into throwing away a trick.
“But before I go to Hermosillo, Colonel, of course I shall take precautions to insure that I get there—that there will be no moreley de fugain my case. Don Padraic O’Donoju, who is an honest man; I shall take him more fully into my confidence and—”
“Then you have told—?” Urgo bit his lip in mortification over having fallen into a trap. Grant’s answering smile was innocent as a babe’s.
“I might prefer, Colonel Urgo, to confine our affair—call it a misunderstanding between two gentlemen—strictly to yourself and myself, trusting to take care of myself when I have recovered my strength. But should I be driven to seek the assistance of an honest man—”
Benicia appeared that instant; behind her was ’Cepcion with a silver tray. Before Colonel Urgo bobbed to his feet Grant caught a shaft of cold fury from his eyes which said that if the girl’s presence forced an armistice no promise of peace lay at its termination.
Followed an interlude of quiet comedy. Grant, content to leave the first move in the hands of his enemy, eased his shoulder lazily against the chair back and let his eyes play over the Spaniard’s face and diminutive figure. There was an indolent suggestion of probing, of detached appraisal in the steady scrutiny which bit into Urgo’s pride. That and dull rage over the unexplained presence of his rival here in Benicia’s home kept the little whippet fidgeting.
He essayed addressing the girl in her owntongue, but again and more pointedly Benicia reminded him of this breach of courtesy. She made no effort to conceal the imp of humour that tugged at the corners of her mouth; this flickering of a smile and the dancing of her eyes made farcical the sober decorum of her speech. Urgo, no fool, was not long realizing he was being made the butt of his cousin’s sport. Thin lines of strain began to appear about the mouth that smiled so smugly; just below his temples irritated nerves commenced setting the muscles a-twitching. Grant, who did not fail to note these reflexes, saw in the figure opposite a preying animal setting himself for a spring.
Urgo and Benicia had been exchanging commonplaces. Suddenly the man leaned forward tensely and returned to the forbidden Spanish in a hurried burst: “For your own good, my cousin, I must have a few minutes with you alone. Arrange it, I command you.”
“You are hardly the one, sweetest cousin, to be the judge of my good. Nor the one to command me.” Benicia retorted in the same tongue. Then, turning with a smile of mock apology to Grant: “You will excuse Colonel Urgo his occasional lapse from a tongue that is difficult for him.”
The Spaniard took a final draught of wine and pushed back from the table where his luncheon had been spread. As he idly tapped the corn husk of one of his cigarettes Grant thought he saw resolution shape itself in the narrowed eyes. There was a moment’s silence, then Urgo addressed himself graciously to Grant:
“Señor Hickman, perhaps my adorable cousin here has not found opportunity to tell you anything of the history of this remarkable house in the desert where you have found such agreeable convalescence.”
“I believe not.” Grant spoke warily, his senses alert for some pitfall. He shot a warning glance at Benicia; but the girl, ignorant of the grim feud between the two, could not read it understandingly. Colonel Urgo surrounded his head with a blue cloud and continued:
“An engaging history, señor. Not a house in all Sonora with such romance behind it, such—how do you say it?—such legend, eh? Though I am distantly of the same family, our branch cannot claim the distinction that falls to my cousin, who is the last of the veritable O’Donoju.
“Behold her glorious head, Señor Hickman!” Urgo waved his cigarette to point the burningof sunlight above Benicia’s brow; his own head inclined as if in reverence. “There in my fairest cousin’s so-marvellous hair lies all the legend and the history of the great family O’Donoju.”
The girl, frankly amused at what appeared a turgid compliment, tossed back her head in a gust of laughter. But Grant could not join with her. As from some iceberg veiled in fog came to him the cold feel of malignity moving to some unguessed purpose. Was Urgo planning to strike at him through the girl he adored? Yet what possible obloquy could he call up against Benicia, whose soul was unsullied as the winds of the wastes? Urgo spoke on:
“Undoubtedly, my cousin, Señor Hickman has felt his heart snared by those burning meshes of yours or he is not a judge of beauty”—gesture of impatience from Benicia. “So it is for the benefit of the señor as well as for your own, fairest cousin, that I recite this legend of the red hair of the O’Donoju. Strange, is it not, that all Sonora knows it and has told the story to its children for a hundred years, yet you,chiquita”—a wave of the cigarette toward the girl—“who should be most interested are the only ignorant one.
“There was in the long ago, señor, a Michael O’Donohue—what you call of the wild Irish, who had flaming hair and an untamed spirit. A king in Spain gave him the whole district of Altar for his estate, and he came here to the Garden of Solitude with his Spanish lady and built him this house where we sit. He was a man who considered the safety of his soul, so he built a mission to the glory of the four evangelists out yonder by the Gulf where the Sand People needed the comfort of the Mother Church and—”
“He lived a life any one of his descendants might pattern after,” Benicia put in with a smile carrying a sting. Urgo touched his breast with delicate fingers and bowed. Then turning again to Grant:
“When the Apaches burned that mission, señor, a pious O’Donoju restored it and the family, then numerous, endowed that mission altar with much gold and silver. There was, too, a great string of pearls—pearls with a green light, legend says, which the Sand People brought from the shell beds of the Gulf to show their piety. You are following me, Señor Hickman, eh?”
Grant made no sign. His eyes were uponBenicia’s face, reading there a slow change. Now she, too, had begun to feel a nameless portent stealing over her like the chill from hidden ice. The wells of her eyes were deeper; faint colour came and went in her cheeks and throat. Grant, certain that Urgo was preparing torture for her under the innocent mask of narrative, was helpless to intervene; no diversion short of the work of fists was possible, and that his weakness denied him.
“There was of that generation which restored the mission, señor, a wild youth, true descendant of the original O’Donoju. He was known from Mexico City to Tucson as El Rojo—the Red One—for his hair was the veritable colour of that which our cousin possesses. And the devil rode his heart with spurs of fire. You have never been told of El Rojo, Benicia?”
The girl made no answer. Her level gaze was a mute challenge. The little colonel rerolled one of his eternal cigarettes, lighted it and drank smoke with a sensuous inhalation.
“At the feast of the re-dedication El Rojo, banished from the family, appeared out of nowhere. Conceive the consternation, señor! The red head of the devil’s own come to sanctified ground. This fiery head, so like our Benicia’s,swooping as a comet into the feasting place of the family; well might the pious O’Donojus be fearful.
“And their fears were not without grounds. Before El Rojo quit the Mission of the Four Evangelists he had murdered the priest, his own uncle, and stolen the rope of pearls from the sacred image of the Virgin. He rode away with one of his cousins, a foolish girl of the Mayortorenas, who was wife to him in the desert without priest or book.”
Urgo let his voice trail away as with a tale finished. His teasing glance lingered on the faces of his two auditors. Benicia drew a tremulous breath and forced a smile, as though she were relaxing from strain. On this cue the story teller unexpectedly continued:
“But I hear Señor Hickman ask, ‘What part has all this ancient legend with Señorita Benicia’s red hair?’ Patience, señor. We approach that.
“Legend says that though El Rojo’s wife worked upon his heart and brought repentance, it was too late. He returned to the mission a year after his double crime to restore the Virgin’s pearls to the sanctuary. The Apaches had been there just before him. The priests were slain and the mission burned. El Rojoburied the pearls within the stark walls, hoping the good God would accept this his acknowledgment of sin. There the pearls lie to-day beyond sight of man, for the desert has blotted out the last remnants of ruins.
“But the sin of El Rojo was not so easily to be forgotten in sight of the good God, sweetest cousin.” Urgo suddenly turned away from Grant, to whom he had been addressing his story, and fixed his eyes on Benicia; almost there was the click of snapping fetters in his glance. “You bear the mark of it above your brow like the mark of Cain—his fire-red hair!”
“Stop!” The girl leaped from her chair, blazing wrath in every line of her face. “I shall not listen—”
“The grandson of El Rojo and his grandson,” Urgo purred on with his smile of a hunting cat, “every second generation of the O’Donoju has one born with the curse of the red hair to tell all Sonora God does not forget. And now you, the last of an accursed family, its great estates gone—its power gone—your own grandfather with his red hair shot with Maximilian!—You with the red head—daughter of a murderer—”
A hand closed over the collar of the colonel’s military jacket, gave it a twist, throttling hisspeech. Grant had leaped from his seat—a pain like a bayonet point shot through his shoulder at the sudden movement—and come upon the spiteful little slanderer from behind.
“Gringo assassin!” whistled the little Spaniard, and his right hand groped backward to a concealed holster. It fell into a grip too strong to be broken. Grant was bearing all his weight on the other’s back, for the instant he was on his feet he discovered a weakness of his knees which would not support him. The impulse to shut off Urgo’s venomous tongue had been acted upon without calculation; now that he had committed himself to action the American realized how heavy was the hazard against him. One arm useless, all the other muscles once ready to respond instantly to call for action now seeming to be palsied. A paralytic boldly attempting to bell a wildcat; this was the situation.
Benicia saw the American’s face over the squirming Urgo’s shoulder; it wore a strained grin which hardly served to mask the toll taken of weakened muscles. She whirled and ran out of the patio to call aid in the servants’ quarters.
Now the hot fire from his wound was spreading across Grant’s back and down his fightingarm as he swayed across the patio half supported on the Spaniard’s back. The frantic jerkings of Urgo’s pistol arm in Grant’s grip threatened momentarily to loosen the restraining fingers; that done, the American’s end would be speedy.
Grant found himself near a wall, braced one foot against it and lunged outward. Down went both men. Urgo twisted out from under the heavier body, pinning him, and raised himself to one knee. Grant saw a tigerish gleam of triumph in the other’s eyes as his right hand whipped back to the holster on his hip.
Some power more rapid than thought moved the American’s sound arm outward in a wild sweep which encompassed a giant fuchsia bush growing in a Chinese tea tub. Over went the bush just as Urgo fired from the hip, its branches swishing down over the latter’s head.
The bullet went wild. Grant, near swooning from the consuming pain of his wound, scrambled for his enemy—went up with him when he found his feet. The revolver had been knocked from Urgo’s hand by the avalanche of greenery; a sideways kick of Grant’s foot sent it spinning into the fountain.
Now the wounded man sent a final summons to his last reservoir of strength. Slowly—slowlyhe forced the little Spaniard out of the patio and down the long corridor toward the front door of the house. When Benicia came running with two husky Indians they found Grant with his man waiting before the heavy oaken portal. One of the Indians swung back the door. Grant gave a supreme heave and the colonel went sprawling like a straddle bug out onto the gravel.
The great door slammed behind him.
Consider now the interesting activities of Doc Stooder, fallen angel of Æsculapius:
On a March evening of sunset splendour the worthy doctor descended from the single combination coach and baggage car which a suffering locomotive drags once daily from a junction point on the transcontinental line south through naked battalions of mountains to the ghost town of Cuprico. Once Cuprico was famous; once when primitive steam shovels nibbled at solid mountains of copper up back of Main Street Cuprico roared with a life that was dizzy and vaunted itself the rip-roarin’est copper camp in all the Southwest. But the glory that was Cuprico passed, even as that of Rome; to-day they tell of the town that when its mayor fell dead on the post office steps his body remained undiscovered for three days.
No romantic craving for revisiting scenes of his youth had prompted the Doc to his journey Cupricoward—he had been its premier studplayer in a day of glory fifteen years before. No, a far more material urge had ended a period of fretting in Arizora by shunting him on a westward-wending train. For a week Bim Bagley, his partner in a secret enterprise, had been absent on his quest of El Doctor Coyote Belly and the New York engineer, Bim’s friend, who was reported to be wounded and under the care of the Papago medicine man. Ten days prior to Bagley’s excursion into Sonora had been frittered away in groping for information concerning this vanished engineer. All precious time wasted!
It has, perhaps, become apparent that Doc Stooder was not enthusiastic over the inclusion of Grant Hickman, the Easterner, in his golden scheme of treasure trove in desert sands. The stubborn refusal of Bim Bagley to move without this fellow Hickman’s being party to the enterprise had prevented a start on the expedition for the Mission of the Four Evangelists six weeks before. The canny physician—whose share in the joint endeavour was to be his exclusive information concerning the whereabouts of the Lost Mission—possessed in large degree that sense of divination bestowed upon folk of the desert which gives their imagination wings over the horizon of time. Each day of delayhe read a day to the advantage of Don Padraic O’Donoju, certain sure as he was that the master of the desert oasis had come by knowledge of his own treasure hunt intent through mysterious desert channels.
The vision of gold and pearls Doc Stooder had seen in the depths of raw alcohol on a night of dreaming in his office had become a goad. So he came to Cuprico, the ghost town not seventy miles away from the supposed site of the buried mission; his intent was to pick up his Papago informant, who lived midway between Cuprico and the Border, and, as Stooder happily phrased his purpose, “give things a look-see.” If his luck was with him and he should stumble onto the mission during this solo game so much the better. Conscience nor maxims of fair play were any part of the doctor’s moral anatomy.
The Doc upon his arrival did not pervade Cuprico’s centres of evening society—the Golden Star pool hall and soft drinks emporium and the back room of Garcia’s drug store—for reasons sufficiently potent to merit a paragraph of explanation.
Years before, when he was a resident of the mining camp and had money, Doc Stooder took unto himself a Mexican wife who had a passionfor diamonds. Mrs. Apolinaria Stooder had a way with her which seemed to win deep into the atrophied heart of her spouse, and he showered her with the stones of her choice. No woman from Yuma to Tucson—so legend still recites—“packed so much ice” as Doc Stooder’s. Then in an epidemic of typhoid, which the Doc combated with the heroism of a saint, Apolinaria died.
Alone and with his own hands her sorrowing widower gave her sepulchre somewhere amid the gaunt hills surrounding the town. He let it become known after the interment that since Apolinaria loved her diamonds so he had buried them with her, adding for good measure of gossip that he figured their total value at round $5000. Immediately and for several years thereafter all the prospectors for fifty miles about gave up their search for dip and strike and prospected for Mrs. Apolinaria Stooder. Failing to find so much as a “colour” of her diamonds, the profession drew the conclusion that Doc Stooder was a monumental liar. His popularity waned accordingly.
Shadows were lengthening when Stooder tooled a rented desert skimmer out of Cuprico’s single garage and brought it to a stop before the general store. Into the wagon boxbehind the seat went his bed roll, brought from Arizora and containing certain glassware whose contents were more precious to their owner than life itself; boxes of grocery staples; extra cans of oil and gasoline. Two big canteens on the running board were filled. Plugs of chewing tobacco heavy and broad as slate shingles were stowed in the tool box. In all this preparation the doctor’s long legs calipered themselves from counter to car with remarkable efficiency.
“Goin’ on a little prospecting trip?” the storekeeper had volunteered when the Doc first commenced his stowing. No answer.
“Figgerin’ on a littlepaseardown ’crost the Line?” hopefully from that worthy as he helped noose the tarpaulin over the dunnage. The Doc’s head was buried above the ears among the engine’s naked cylinders and he professed not to hear. When Stooder was seated at the wheel and the storekeeper had the edge of the final pail of water over the radiator vent he feebly flung out his last grappling hook:
“Reckon you might be selling Bibles to the Papagoes.”
“Come here, friend,” sternly from the doctor. “Now I give you the way inside if you’ll promise to keep it mum.” The storekeeperhopped around to lean his ear over the wheel in gleeful anticipation.
“I’m a-goin’ south from here to give a Chinese lady a lesson on the ocarina. So long!”
When the Doc skittered down the brief Main Street and out onto the thread of grey caliche that was the road to the mysterious south all of the west was a-roil with the final palette scrapings of the sunset—umber, pale lemon and, high above the mountains standing black as obsidian, cirrus clouds dyed a fugitive cherry. Ahead showed the ragged gate into the valley of El Infiernillo—the Little Hell—place of bleak distances between mountain ranges bare as sheet iron; place of unimaginable thirst when summer sun hurls reflected heat back from burning walls. Beyond El Infiernillo just a hint of peaks like fretwork spires marked destination for the doctor; there at the foot of the Growler range and where the Desert of Altar washes across the imaginary line between two nations, lay the land of his desire. Somewhere on the Road of the Dead Men passing through that savage waste perchance a nubbin of weathered ’dobe wall lifted a few inches above the sand to mark treasure of gold and pearls below; maybe naught but a charred timber end concealed bya patch of greasewood and crying a secret to the ears of the searcher.
Gold and pearls—pearls and gold! The Doc’s rapt eye caught the colours of sacred treasure in the dyes of the sunset and read them for a portent of success.
“Me, I’m a-goin’ just slosh around in wealth! Doc Stooder, the man with thedinero—that’s me!” The gaunt head behind the wheel of the desert skimmer was tilted back and A. Stooder, M.D., carolled his expectations at the new stars. Then he reined in his gas snorter long enough to fumble with his bed roll in the wagon box. Out came a square bottle of fluid fire, such as passes currency with the international bootleggers in the Southwest. The Doc drank heartily to the promise spread across the western heavens. The bottle was tucked in a handy coat pocket for future reference.
Nights in the desert along the Line are psychic. They are not of the world of arc lights, elevated trains and the winking jewels of white ways. In that world man has so completely surrounded himself with the tinsels of his own making, the noise of his own multiplied squeakings and chatterings, that he comes to accept the vault above him as under the care ofthe city parks department. His little tent of night is no higher than the towers of his skyscrapers. But in the desert it is different.
Emptiness of day is increased an hundred fold at dark because it leaps up to lose its frontiers behind the stars. Silence of the day is intensified to such a degree that the inner ear catches a humming of supernal machinery in the heavens. The eye measures perspectives between the near and far planets. And the soul of man hearkens to strange voices; sighings from the pale mouths of the desert scrubs, born to a servitude of thirst; whisperings passed from mountain top to mountain top; faint stirrings of the earth relaxed from the torsion of the sun.
Doc Stooder, desert familiar as he was, never could blunt his senses to this emptiness of night in the wastes. It awed him, left him itching under half-perceived conceptions of the infinite. Hence the bottle carried handily in his pocket. From time to time as he careered over the road faintly marked by the feeble sparks of his headlights he braked down to have a swig. The more he felt lifted above sombre unrealities about him the greater his impulse to break into song. The iron gate of El Infiernillo heard his roundelay.
Miles unreeled behind him. Dim shapes of mountains dissolved to new contours and were left behind. The Doc came to a sharp eastward turning of the road but kept straight ahead out over the untracked flats to southward. He knew his way; the packed sand gave him as good traction as the road. Down and down into the unpeopled wilderness of sandhills and buttes bored the twin sparks of the little car.
Another shift of direction and the Doc was teetering up a narrow cañon between high mountain walls. His course was a dry wash, boulder strewn. Only instinct of a desert driver saved him from piling up on some rough block of detritus. Sand traps forced him to shove the engine into low, and the snarling of the exhaust was multiplied from the cañon walls.
A light flickered far ahead. A dog barked. The car wallowed and snuffled out of the wash to come to a halt before several silhouettes of huts. People, roused from sleep by the car’s clamour, stood ringed about in curiosity; one held a torch of reeds.
“Ho, Guadalupe!” Doc Stooder bellowed. A solid looking Indian with a mat of tousled iron-grey hair stood out under the torch light, grinning a welcome to “El Doctor.”
“Show me a place to sleep,” commanded the visitor, and the one called Guadalupe carried the doctor’s bed-roll to his own hut, of which squaw and children were speedily dispossessed. So the good doctor from Arizora slept the rest of the night in the rancheria of the Sand People, last remnant of that Papago family for which the Mission of the Four Evangelists was reared to save souls. In five hours the Doc had covered by gasoline what it would have cost Guadalupe of the Sand People as many days in painful plodding.
Morning saw the rancheria in a ferment of excitement and Doc Stooder viciously tyrannical in reaction from his accustomed alcoholic night. Guadalupe found himself in a difficult position. Once in a moment of gratitude when the white doctor had snatched his squaw from the tortures of asthma—the miracle had occurred in Guadalupe’s summer camp near Arizora—the Indian had babbled his knowledge of the buried mission, its treasure. But he had not counted upon this unexpected appearance of the white doctor, demanding to be led to the place of wealth. It is common with all the Southwestern Indians to believe naught but ill luck can follow any revelation to a white man of the desert’s hidden gold; some say theearly padres, themselves consistent hoarders, inculcated this lesson. With the eyes of his fellow villagers disapprovingly upon him, Guadalupe first attempted evasion.
Stooder in an ominous quiet heard him through. Then without a word he opened a small medicine chest he carried in his bed-roll and took therefrom two tightly folded pieces of paper—blue and white. While Guadalupe and the rest watched, round-eyed, the doctor made quick passes with each bit of paper over the mouth of a small waterolla. The surface of the water sizzed and boiled.
Guadalupe, two shades whiter, babbled his willingness to go at once to the place where the mission lay hidden.