That day omniscient will of the desert moved to point a murderer’s guilt the same inscrutable power flexed a finger to mould events some seventy miles away from the Garden of Solitude where the worthy doctor from Arizora and his Papago had been nibbling at a mystery. Though Doc Stooder moved in a haze of strong waters, though he looked upon the face of the desert through a golden veil of his own weaving, yet was he not the least immune from the law of the waste places. The Doc walked with God, even as did the pioneer fathers of the Church; the fact that he did not admit the companionship had no influence on the operations of destiny.
We left Stooder on his knees before the uncovered bell with its inscription carrying identification. His excitements, his hysterical grubbings, soundings and prospectings of the ensuing twenty-four hours were heroic. After the uncovering of the bell he had paced off a squarethrough the scrub thirty or forty feet each way and with the corroded cone of metal for a centre; then the Indian and he had gone on their hands and knees over every inch of this square. Result, a single stick of hewn timber whose fire-blackened end had projected but an inch above the sand; digging revealed a twenty-foot beam, dry as a puff-ball and almost ready to disintegrate.
That was all: the bell and the uncovered beam. But that was enough. Doc Stooder knew that beneath him lay the mission site; how deeply the blown sands of more than a century had buried it he could not guess. But it was here! Here lay the rich core of a legend that had sent many a man out into the desert to chase rainbow ends. His—Stooder’s! A’mighty God! how he’d riffle those pearls through his fingers—lay ’em all out on a piece of velvet under some secret lamp and match ’em, pearl with pearl.
But twenty-four hours in the desert exact their price; and that price is in measure of water. The Doc did not drink water so long as his store of contraband liquor held out; but the Papago did. Great was the Doc’s rage and disgust when his companion called him away from sinking a prospect shaft to pointthe single remaining water container, now much lighter than it should be. He tested the little car’s radiator to find that evaporation had left almost none of the necessary fluid therein. No use buckin’ fate; if he wanted to get back to the village of the Sand People on four wheels he’d have to give the radiator a drink and that would leave none for himself and the Papago.
It was near noon of their second day at the treasure site when the Doc whipped his reluctance into acceptance of the inevitable. He made certain preparations. First he copied into a prescription book the inscription on the bell; that would do to convince somebody whose financing of the excavation operations might have to be invoked. Then he sketched a map of the vicinity with meticulous care, marking in the jagged spurs of the nearby mountains for bearing points and indicating the position of the bell in reference to a dry wash which was traced down from a gash in the mountain wall.
“Guadalupe, old son, your old friend Stooder’s goin’ rustle back here with an outfit right soon an’ dig himself right down to them pearls. So he’s just a mite p’ticular about this map.”
Access of caution prompted the Doc to dismountfrom the car after he’d set the engine to humming. He ran back with a shovel and covered the bell with sand; the haggled bush above it would be a sufficient guide for him and no significant landmark for the possible prying stranger. The beam he hid in the wash. Then they trundled down their own track and back to the Road of the Dead Men. Doc Stooder cursed the necessity of automobiles leaving tracks. Some snoozer amblin’ along the main road would just’s like as not turn out to follow these two lines out into nowhere to see what he could see. Then perhaps—
Summer had come miraculously to the desert overnight, as the seasons in Altar have a way of doing. Yesterday the pink convolvulus of spring lay in scattered coral patches amid the scrub and the greasewood was showing its midget spots of yellow. Now every glistening clump ofchollawas aglow with the blood-red flowers of its kind; the occasional pillars of the giant cactus were wreathed each at its top by fillets of creamy blossoms—grotesque masquerading of these withered old men of the wastes. First hint of summer’s heat was abroad. It came from the west on puffy little winds like the back-draught from an oil-burning boiler.
The Doc found himself in a frolicsome mood, for his night’s potations, predicated on a dwindling supply, had recklessly drained that supply but availed to carry him over to another day with the stars of his dream world still burning. Hunched low in his seat so that the tip of his goatee waggled against the rim of the wheel, with his flopping black hat all grease streaked pulled low against the sun glare, the tramp physician chewed tobacco with all the unction of a care-free conscience and indulged himself in wandering monologue. Guadalupe’s meagre stock of Spanish made him anything but a lively conversationalist, so the Doc was constrained to carry on a vivid conversation with himself.
Into what penetralia of reminiscence this auto-dialogue carried him! Back through the years—through countless dim valleys of a Never-Never Land of alcoholic fantasies where his spirit had been wont to pitch its tent. Scraps of jest and shreds of song stirred the ghosts along the Road of the Dead Men.
No such exuberance from Guadalupe, slave of the desert. They had not been an hour on the road when the Papago began to feel a crawling of the nerves along the spine and the pressure of invisible fingers across the brow—evil signs! No less than the mountain sheep orthe road-runner in the scrub could the Papago interpret the desert’s forerunners of portent. A feel in the air—hue of the mountain rims—colour of sunlight against a rock: these things had their meaning.
Away off to the northward where a patch of gypsum showed white as film ice the Indian’s eye caught the first tangible evidence of trouble ahead. A dust whirlwind like a gigantic leg in baggy trousers was wavering across the flats; the thing possessed volition of its own so surely did it map its course across a five-mile span in less than five minutes. Guadalupe nudged his companion timidly and pointed to it.
“Uh-huh, old Peg-legged Grandpap,” chuckled the Doc. “Seen him lots times. Gotta hole in his peg-leg you can drive a car through slick’s a whistle—allowin’ you can find the hole.”
A half hour later the sun changed colour. Like the passing of a shutter across a calcium light: now blinding white, now blood-orange. Instantaneous.
Three gusts of sand-laden wind came sweeping toward them from the west. A long lull, then the storm.
It pounced upon them with a sibilant whistle growing momentarily to a roar which wasengulfing. The little desert skimmer bucked like a wild colt against the onslaught of the wind; but when the Doc dropped the engine into low the car wallowed on in the face of the gale. The air was thick as flour. Wind-driven sand had the bite of an emery wheel at high revolution; it rasped the skin and drove eyelids tight shut. The two in the car buttoned jackets above their noses to breathe.
All the space of the desert was a poisonous yellow glare. Minute by minute density thickened until the car’s radiator was hardly visible.
Then the sturdy engine quit. First a tortured grinding of clogged cylinders, puny explosions from the exhaust, a bucking and quivering. After that sudden stoppage of movement as if the car had plumped into a stone wall.
The Doc and Guadalupe tumbled out of the seat and crawled beneath the car for protection. A stab of fear shot down through Stooder’s disordered thoughts—the water! None in the canteens, for they had drained the last into the radiator before starting from the treasure ground. Was there—could the sand have—?
He inched himself through a new sand drift below the front axle to where the drain cock projected below the radiator base. Like a suckling kid he lifted his lips to the steel teat andturned the cock. A trickle of heavy mud filled his mouth with grit, then stopped.
Radiator a mess of mud—cylinders clogged—feed pipes all choked and water—gone!
Doc Stooder pulled his floppy hat over his face and whimpered the name of God.
And on the back trail where the bell of the Lost Mission had been found; over that site which the Doc had so carefully mapped and measured the wind scoured and builded—scoured and builded. Obliterating, changing, re-creating.
The sun went down before the sand storm abated. Two men, the one called civilized, the other a savage, crouched like rabbits in a covert beneath the body of the little car with a high sand drift piled up to windward even over the radiator top. Two mites in the wind-scourged wilderness of Altar with love o’ life the leveller that made them kin.
When the last vagrant wind fury had passed fell silence almost terrific by contrast with the uproar of the storm. In place of the slithering and whistling of driven sand an oppressive stillness, which seemed dropped from the void of the stars, now showing. Occasionally the dry rustle of sand dropping in rivulets from some desert bush lifting its head after the scourging; that was all.
When the two crawled out from beneath their shelter Guadalupe was for an immediate start afoot in the direction of the faint pencilings of red marking the west. But Doc Stooder possessedan abiding glimmer of faith in the soundness of the car and insisted on taking stock of its motive possibilities. A cursory examination convinced him of the hopelessness of his trust, for the sand was heaped entirely over the unprotected engine—desert cars dispense with a hood because it blankets the engine’s heat—and he knew that even with water in the radiator he couldn’t get a kick out of the thing before a thorough overhauling. This was out of the question. They must achieve their escape from the desert’s trap afoot.
The Papago started on a swinging walk a little north of west, the Doc following. They had not gone far when the white man discovered they were not following the road; each step was through loose sand which received the foot with a viscous hold and reluctantly released it. The Doc snarled a query at his companion: why in the name of deletion had he quit the Road of the Dead Men?
“Not quit—finding him,” came Guadalupe’s grudging answer. Then Stooder admitted to himself the possibility that during the time the little car had pushed on into the storm he had tooled it off the road. How far he had driven away from the single track which spans Altar he could not hazard a guess. Anyway, he knewone thing: he was dog tired, and if this mangy black coyote thought A. Stooder, M.D., was going to wallow through sand all night without a sleep he had another think coming.
Reaction from the excitements of the past two days added extra weight to the Doc’s already none-too-light handicap of alcoholic repercussions. The storm had torn his nerves to tatters; his mouth was as dry as an old church pew cushion; each of his legs felt as if they were dragging an Oregon boot. Stooder’s mind was too dulled to probe down below these afflictions and read the real seriousness of his situation; it dealt only with cogent aches and reluctances.
“Hey, Guadalupe! We take a sleep right here.” The Doc halted. Great was his surprise when he saw the Papago striding on. Hot rage bubbled to his lips in an explosive Mexican oath.
“Hey, you lizard-eatin’ mozo, hear me? We stop here for the big shut-eye!” The Doc spurred his long legs into a gangling run to overtake the Indian, who had plodded on unheeding. All the arrogance of the white man in his fancied superiority fell with the doctor’s hand on the Indian’s shoulder. Guadalupe wrenched free and turned to face him sulkily.
“Sleep here—to-morrow much sun—no water. Maybe to-morrow we die here. Walk!”Guadalupe’s sparse vocabulary of Spanish words was drained; but the manner of his resuming the forward hike was sufficiently eloquent. Guadalupe, born to the desert code and grown to manhood under the inexorable desert law, had in mind but a single impulse—to survive. His mind plumped through the bog of discomforts wherein Stooder’s was mired to read clearly the tablets of the desert’s decalogue: ten commandments in one—live! In extremity throw over loyalty, discard obligations of oath or of blood, strip the soul to its elemental selfishness; but live!
Guadalupe strode on, still bearing to the north and the west, and still no road. Stooder, growing more weary each step, spent his strength in blind rage at the stubbornness of the Papago. He conned over various capital operations he would like to perform with Guadalupe for a subject. His brain tired of that and began to nurture the germ of a new thought. Why strain himself keeping up with that ring-tailed kangaroo rat who skipped on and on without rest? Guadalupe left the print of his foot every step he took; those footprints would point to wherever Guadalupe might go—and the Papago, of course, knew the shortest way out of this hellhole—so why break his own neck? The old Docwould take a little snooze and then just follow the footprints when he felt good and ready to do so.
The gangling form crumpled up as if cut off at the knees. Guadalupe heard a thud, turned for a half-glance over his shoulder and pushed steadily on under the stars. It was not in the Papago’s code to add one ounce to the weight of circumstance obtruding between himself and water. In a dozen steps his figure was swallowed up in the dark.
Stooder may have allotted to himself only that minimum of sleep designated as a snooze. But a high sun pried open his reluctant eyelids. He sat up and sent a dazed glance around an unfamiliar world. Mountains tawny and black with knife-edge water scores down their flanks; a sea of scrub stretching interminably from their bases; patches of gypsum andsalitreshowing dull white as scars of leprosy here and there amid the grey-green of thecamisa. The sky already was taking on the yellow-white glaze indicative of imminent heat.
The Doc arose and shook the sand out of the creases of his clothing. First definite impression coming to him was the need of a drink: his favourite tequila if might be, water in a pinch. All the nerves in his body twittered“Hear—hear!” to the first of the alternatives. Then, his mind beginning to function along the line of the night’s impressions, Doc Stooder read the story of the footprints leading off to the north and west. There they were: good li’l signposts; they’d take him to a drink just as easy!
Stooder’s renewed strength carried him easily along the trail the Papago had left. For an hour, that is; then trouble. For the sand disappeared under a broad apron ofcaliche—a hardpan of baked mineral salts and earth almost impervious even to the shod hoof of a horse. It was like a door swung shut on the trailer—the locked door to some labyrinth beyond. Here the last firm print of a boot in the sand, there nothingness. The Doc paused, looked back over the cup-like shadows marking the footprint trail he had been following to take its line of direction, then he pushed ahead along that line.
Another hour, and he still was on thecalicheoutcrop. He stopped to consider. Where in the name of all the angels was that road—the Road of the Dead Men? If he’d driven the car a little south of it during the sand storm, surely Guadalupe must have cut tangent to it by this time. And if the road passed over thecalicheflat there’d be wheel marks; that was sure. Miss that road and miss the Papago’s trail both—why then old Doc Stooder’d be a goner!
He tried to follow his own back trail by such small signs as the scratch of a hobnail against an embedded rock and a thin print of a sole in a pocket of dust. A while and he had lost even that. He stopped and swabbed his streaming face with a shirtsleeve—he now was carrying his coat.
“By the eternal, Stooder, you gotta do something—and do it dam’d pronto!”
Once more he turned on his own tracks. Better go back and find that putrid Papago’s trail and let the road go to the devil. Whole half hour wasted a’ready—good half hour, by criminy! with a drink just that much farther off.
It was not so easy finding the scored rocks and the stamp of a heel in pools of dust; not so easy as the first essay. For the sun was at meridian now and foreshortened little shadows to nothingness. Plump! he came to the edge of the hardpan and into the sandy soil. No tracks there. Should he bear to right or left in circling the edge of thecalicheon his hunt for the footprints? If he guessed wrong where’d he be? “Oh, dear God!”
He turned to the left and resumed his tramp.Furnace light refracted from the sand seared into his eyes, which must be always kept downward peering—spying. His mouth now was dry as rotted wood. Something alien there kept bothering him by pressing against the roof of it. He explored with his fingers and discovered the alien object to be his tongue, which was swelling.
“But my mind’s clear—clear as a bell. Got a steady mind anyway. Gotta hold onto that or I’m a gone coon.”
A slight breeze struck his right arm more penetratingly than it should. Stooder shifted his glance to his arm, held crooked.
“Good God! Coat’s gone!” Dropped somewhere—that coat in whose pocket was a prescription book; among its pages the map of the treasure site. The precious map showing where lay the bell and the beam! The man whirled and started on a staggering run along the rim of thecalichehe had been travelling.
“Must find that coat! Don’t find the coat an’ I lose the pearls an’ the gold—the pearls an’ the gold!”
He halted as if shot. Down the wind came to him the faint tolling of a bell.Dong—dong.Silvery throb of a swinging bell. Measured, unhurried; like the sounding of a bell for massof a Sunday morning. The Doc had heard the bell of San Xavier sending its call across the alfalfa fields of a Sunday morning, just like that.
Even as he strained his ears to drink in the full miracle of it the sound faded, ceased.
“I heard it! A bell! No illusion. Mind’s still clear—still clear!” On he went, his gaunt legs weaving in wide circles. He came to a dark patch on the hardpan and strided over it, unheeding. It was his missing coat, in the pocket the precious map of the treasure site. The Doc did not see the coat because again his ears were drinking in the maddening tolling of the bell; this time a little clearer down the wind in his face. An animal cry, half articulate, burst from his swollen lips:
“The mission bell! Bell of the Four Evangelists which I found t’other day! Callin’ me back!”
Right over yonder where the mountains cracked apart to let that arroyo down onto the plain: that’s where the bell sounded. Yes, sir, no mistake about it. ’Bout four-five mile, judgin’ from the sound. Hear what that bell’s a-callin’? “Gol-l-ld! Gol-l-ld!”
Doc Stooder, coatless, hatless, the high roach of his streaked hair fanning in the hot winds,was stumbling and falling—stumbling and falling ever forward toward the crack in the mountains. Light of madness flamed in his eyes; his great arms clawed forward as if to catch invisible supports to pull him the faster. Gol-l-ld—Gol-l-ld!
“Old mind’s still clear, else couldn’t hear that mission bell so plain— Gotta keep old mind clear—”
The way of the desert god, always beyond man’s comprehending, nevertheless sometimes approaches so close to the human scheme of thought and motive as to permit of analogy with it. When the director of destinies in the dry wastes seems to make a travesty of such a sacrosanct quality as human justice we may be moved to call the impulse satiric for want of a better name. Satiric, then, that reversal of the decree of death passed upon the Papago youth who confessed to murder before the overturned kettle at the Casa O’Donoju; more than satiric the moving finger now directing his path through the dead lands up to a union with the crazed doctor’s.
According to ancient custom the Indian retainers of the O’Donoju had taken the youth—his baptismal name was Ygnacio—down to thecrater land of the Pinacate and there turned him loose without water to wander for a while and finally to die miserably. Other murderers had been so treated and never had been seen of men again. But the desert god who slays so peremptorily knew that Ygnacio had done the bidding to murder to save his brother from death—had killed without malice and only as the price of redemption for one of his blood. Wherefore the arbiter of life and death flung life at Ygnacio.
When he was athirst almost to the point of exhaustion he found a knob-like growth a scant two inches above the surface of the ground, recognized it for a promise of succour and with the last ounce of his strength dug the deep sand all about it. The end of his effort gave to him a strange and rare vegetable reservoir like an elongated radish, which miraculously holds scant moisture of summer rains the year round. “Root-of-the-sands” the Sonorans have named it. In the desolation between the Pinacate and the Gulf even the coyotes have the wisdom to dig for this precious sustainer of life.
Ygnacio devoured the whole of the root and was revived. He found others, which he tied into a bundle to carry over his shoulders. Food and drink had come to him from the hand ofElder Brother himself when it was decreed by man he should have neither. Wherefore love o’ life once more burned strong in the man. He set his course northward, travelling only by night when the heat had given place to the biting desert chill, keeping his precious roots buried in the sand while he slept by day so that evaporation would not rob him of the promise of escape from inferno. Straight as an arrow northward where, beyond the Line, lay tribes of Papagoes who never had heard of Don Padraic O’Donoju nor of a murderer named Ygnacio.
So it happened that on the third night of his march, when Ygnacio had paused to munch a segment of the sustaining root, came to his ears the sound of a voice, faintly and from a great distance. It might be a human voice, though there was a burred and thickened quality to it almost like a burro’s bray.
The Indian boldly followed where his ears gave direction. “Gol’—gol’—gol’” was the monotonous iteration, sounding almost like the muffled tapping of a clapper against metal. He walked a mile—so clearly do sounds carry in the desert night—and suddenly came upon the figure of a white man. Naked above the waist,wisp of a goatee tilted at the stars, arms rigid at sides and with fingers widespread, the spectre of a white man chanted the single word, “Gold.”
The sandstorm that overwhelmed Stooder and his guide on the Road of the Dead Men brought the mighty voice of the desert to the Garden of Solitude in requiem for the soul of Don Padraic O’Donoju. Savage elegy of a life lived in communion with the spirit of the wild.
There was no priest to order the funeral rites of the Church. Though a day’s journey in Quelele’s car to Caborca and back would have fetched a minister of religion, Benicia was determined word of her father’s death should not reach the man who provoked it sooner than the courses of rumour allowed. The Caborca priest posting out to the Casa O’Donoju would set tongues wagging instantly and the seal of silence imposed by miles of unpeopled space between the casa and the nearest community would be broken. “The service of the heart will be just as acceptable to my father’s spirit,” wasBenicia’s simple justification to herself of breach of custom.
So in the heat haze preceding the storm six Indians bore the body of their master through fields of alfalfa behind the white house down to a grove of shimmering alamo trees which fringed a reservoir of the oasis’ precious water. Here beneath the white and silver-green tent of the trees was sanctified ground. Here lay the dust of lords and ladies of a desert principality who, for their spans of years, had been inheritors of the desert’s cruelties and benefices.
Grant fell in with the file of dark-skinned mourners that followed behind the body of Don Padraic, with him Bagley. They did this unbidden of Benicia. Neither had seen her since the dramatic climax of the ordeal of the kettle the day before; no word had come from her. Yet each had felt the need to succour the bereaved girl in her great loneliness, forgetting unhappy events of the dawn in the patio.
For Grant there had been a brief struggle with pride and outraged sensibilities—blessedly brief because a broader tolerance and finer manhood had rallied to overthrow the narrower view of selfishness. In the light of the terrific blow that had been dealt the girl he loved—all the more crushing because of its suddenness—thesavage reaction of a high spirit seemed to him not so to be wondered at. Nor Benicia’s silence since. In these dark hours there was no place in her heart for aught but unassuaged grief.
Arrived at the alamo grove, all the Indians of the village and household massed themselves a little way apart from freshly turned sod, their glistening black heads dappled by the silhouettes of the leaves, their eyes restless and awestruck. Benicia, garbed in dull black which made the whiteness of her face and uncovered glory of her hair the more striking, stood at the head of the rude housing fashioned by the Papagoes for her beloved clay; her calm was absolute as that of the iron peaks beyond the oasis green. In her hand was a wreath the Indian women had woven—scarlet flowers of the cactus with feathery acacia intertwined.
In a steady voice the girl read a Latin prayer while the Indians knelt. Then with a lingering touch she laid the scarlet and olive-green wreath upon the pall and watched the glowing spot of colour slowly sink from sight.
Suddenly the recessional: the sand storm with its clamour of incoherent desert tongues crying hidden tragedies, its blinding sheets of sand. When the first blast struck the group turningaway from the grave Grant stepped quickly to Benicia’s side, drew her arm protectingly through his and bent his body to shield her from the myriad chisels of the driven sand. He fought for footing for them both.
At his touch Benicia turned dry eyes to his. Swiftly she read the love there—love triumphing over the hurt she had so lately given him. On the instant tears filmed the hard brightness of the orbs Grant looked down upon. Her lips moved in some halting speech of contrition, but the savage blast snatched away the sound of her words. In the softening of those eyes and the weight of her body clinging nervelessly to him the man was told the whole story of a girl’s amends for hasty and unconsidered action. All her iron will which had carried her head high through hours of grief suddenly had sped from her, leaving her groping and dependent.
An exalted sense of guardianship came to Grant—swept over him like a cool breeze to a fever patient. Almost it was a feeling of holy trust bestowed. At last—at last the woman he loved had battled against bitter fate beyond the limit of her endurance and was turning to him to fend for her. Unheeding the twinges his wound gave him, he bent to the blast with hisprecious burden. Oh, if only he could be given liberty to sweep her into his arms, to call her name in the piety of supreme love, snatch her away from the incubus of dread which had settled upon her so relentlessly.
He would not wait for such opportunity—so the thought came lancing at him in a lightning flash of resolution; he would create it! No longer stand idly by with footless compassion while the girl of his heart remained in chains of a fixed idea too strong for her to break. He himself would free her of those shackles even if he had to fight her fiery will to do it!
While the storm furiously grappled with the palms outside, Bim and Grant sat in the dark music room of the great-house. With hushed voices the two friends conned over the situation facing them and the girl now left alone in the immensity of Altar. Not a simple exigency. On the one hand promptings of delicacy and the dictates of custom ruled against their remaining longer in the Casa O’Donoju. Opposed to this was the alternative of leaving Benicia to become a prey to the schemes of Colonel Urgo—a girl fighting single-handed the craft of an implacable enemy. Without a protector other than the Indians of the oasis—and they had the minds of children—the girlcould not combat this unscrupulous wooer for long. What then?
Bim finally summed the situation: “It comes down to this, old side-pardner; either you’ve got to persuade her to come back to Arizona with us mighty pronto or to marry you, putting it bald-headed like.”
Grant’s mind leaped to grapple with the flash of an idea—the one that had come to him when he and the girl breasted the sandstorm. Resolution crystallized on the instant. He silently quizzed his friend with an appraising eye.
“And if I can’t persuade her?” he queried softly.
“Then you simply trundle yourself away from here and up across the Line, knowing that, sure as shootin’, this wolf Urgo’ll be down on her just as soon as he makes up his mind to move.” The big fellow in the firelight stressed inevitability in his dictum. Grant gave him a cryptic smile.
“Suppose I take her anyway if she will not be persuaded?” Bim jerked back his head and surveyed his friend with startlement which speedily softened to a wide grin. Out went his hand to clap Grant’s knee.
“Now you’re tootin’!”
Once he had put his resolution into words, theidea back-fired to scorch Grant with sudden comprehension of what would be involved in such a cavalierly course of action. Actually to steal Benicia O’Donoju! Take her by force from the home which now was hers to rule. Play the very part which he feared Colonel Urgo would pursue if left alone. He scarcely heard Bim rumbling his enthusiasms.
“That’s the pure quill!” the desert man was saying. “That’s the Grant Hickman who brought me in on his back from a section of Heinie’s first line trench with H.E.’s droppin’ round like gumdrops from a baby’s torn candy bag.” He checked himself to launch the question, “Have you got a line on the girl yet? I mean, do you think she fancies you enough to be glad—after you’ve run away with her?”
“I think so,” was Grant’s simple answer.
“Fine business! The sooner the quicker, young fellah. You an’ her an’ me in the li’l old desert skimmer. ’Cause I gotta get back to Arizora. The old Doc’ll think I’ve thrown him down an’, besides, my own business—”
“You mean you’ll go ahead with Stooder on his scheme for finding the Lost Mission?” Grant cut in impetuously. The big love he bore Bagley jealously demanded an answer. The other reached over to lay a hand on Grant’s shoulder.
“No. That’s all off, old son. I couldn’t go prying around after lost treasure that belongs to the girl’s family—more particular not after what you’ve told me I couldn’t. I promise you I’ll head off the Doc if I have to get him thrown in thecarcelfor boot-legging.”
The storm wore itself to a final sibilant whisper among the tortured palms and the two continued to sit in the room of shadows with the complexities of the daring plan of kidnapping still bulking large. ’Cepcion tip-toed in to announce to Bim in an awed whisper, “El Doctor Coyote Belly from Babinioqui has come through the storm. Shall I disturb the mistress?”
Bim translated to Grant with a questioning tilt of the eyebrows. Grant started at the name of the medicine man who had been his rescuer and to whom he owed his life. What could have brought this old Indian away across the expanse of Altar to drop out of the storm upon the house of mourning?
“Tell her we will see him first,” Grant directed, moved as he was by some half-sensed instinct of protection for Benicia; evil tidings—if such the Indian bore—must be kept from her. The two rose and followed the waddling Indian woman through the halls to the servants’ quarters in the rear. Under a pepper tree in thefading dusk they found the squat figure of Coyote Belly. The Indian doffed his hat at the approach of the white men and stood smiling; there was in his pose something of quiet dignity which bent little before the centuries-old convention of the white man’s superiority. His beady eyes, well larded in creasy folds, possessed intelligence beyond the ordinary.
Grant impulsively took El Doctor’s hand in a strong grip carrying the thanks he could not speak. El Doctor’s eyes mirrored recognition and he bobbed his head with a broadening smile.
“Tell him, Bim, I could not thank him for all he did for me. He is the chap that found me on the Hermosillo road, you know, and pulled me through.” Bim put the words in Spanish and El Doctor bobbed his head again. Then the Indian began haltingly in the same tongue. Bim’s eyes narrowed to a quizzical pucker as he progressed. Grant could read a spreading wonder in his friend’s features.
“The old bird says he came here because he knew Don Padraic had been killed,” Bim repeated. “Says he knew it the night of the murder because a star fell in the west and he saw the picture of the old Don with a knife in his heart—saw it in the water of his medicineolla. So he’s been on the trail ever since becausehe’s got to tell Señorita Benicia something.”
“But,” Grant began incredulously. Bim caught him up with, “Sure, I know it sounds phoney. But I know, too, the old boy’s telling the truth. These desert people have a way of seeing across space—reading signs and such—which leaves us white folks gasping— How’s that?” He turned an ear to El Doctor, who had begun to speak again.
“Standing-White-in-the-Sun was my father and my brother,” the medicine man gravely intoned. “He gave mepinolewhen I was starving. He came to my house at the festival of thesahuarowine and drank with me as a brother. His child, Lightning Hair, is as my own child.”
Depth of feeling was sweeping El Doctor like a storm. His grey head trembled and drops of moisture stood in his eyes. Bim gently checked him with, “The señorita is oppressed with grief. If we could take your message to her—” But El Doctor shook his head.
“She will see me. She will hear what El Doctor Coyote Belly has come through the storm to tell.”
“Yes, she will hear,” came an unexpected voice from the direction of the doorway, and Benicia walked up to the Indian. El Doctormade a step forward to meet her; with a gesture of reverence he took the hand stretched out to him and placed it first on his brow then over his heart. His old eyes shone. The two white men turned and walked beyond earshot. From a distance Grant saw the girl lead the medicine man to a rustic seat beneath the pepper tree; snatches of barbarous Papago speech came to his ears.
The glory of sunset, more glorious because of the dust held in suspension in the air, came and passed and still Benicia and the medicine man talked beneath the pepper tree. The evening meal was a mournful affair, with only Grant and Bim at the candle-lit table. Grant, unable to contain his restlessness, quit the house alone when supper was finished; he walked down the avenue of palms in the direction of the red fires marking the Indian village. The night was luminous with that sheen which covers the desert heavens like a bloom. Thin rind of a moon hung low in the west, a cold glow of nacre.
He had crossed the bridge and was about to turn off into an adjacent field when he heard a footstep in the shadowed aisle below palm tops ahead of him. A figure scarce discernible in its black garb came upon him.
“Benicia!”
She stopped, startled. “Ah, it is you,” was her murmured greeting as Grant stepped to her side.
“Alone and in the dark,” he chided, but the girl tossed off his fears with a gesture of the hands. “I have been with El Doctor down to the village to find a place for him to lodge.” Grant imprisoned her arm and gently persuaded her steps back down the aisle of darkness toward the village. For a minute they walked in silence. Each knew there were things to be spoken, yet each was reluctant to break the silent communion their nearness wrought.
“And El Doctor gave you the message he came to bring?” finally from Grant. Her head nodded assent.
“Not bad news, I hope,” he hazarded. A tightening of fingers on his arm as she answered, “The best—and the worst.” Grant drew a long breath.
“And may I share with you—the worst?” he managed to murmur. Now once more that dragging weight on his arm as when he guided Benicia through the storm—mute signal of surrender from one spent in the fight.
“El Doctor says—oh, my friend, you must not stay here in the Garden longer. The rurales are gathering at Babinioqui, El Doctor tells me—withUrgo. That means but one thing: Urgo is bringing them here, and you—”
“But you!” Grant interrupted almost fiercely. “What of you? Must I run away and leave you unprotected from that man?” The girl drew away from him as if in very defiance of some mastering impulse which would push her into his arms.
“I—my people will fight for me if need be. Urgo comes for you this time, and I cannot be sure these children”—a vague sweep of her hand toward the winking village fires—“that these children would fight for you, whom they scarcely know.” There was that brave yet pitiful resolution in her tone when she spoke of the hazard of Urgo’s probable sally upon her own person which crashed through all a lover’s carefully built barriers of restraint. Unmindful of the events of recent hours, of the girl’s fresh bereavement, Grant crushed her to him hotly.
“Oh, ’Nicia—’Nicia, can’t you understand! I must go—yes, to-morrow! Not because Urgo is coming to get me but because your being here alone forces me away from you. Yet I cannot think of leaving you to fight that man single-handed. ’Nicia—precious!—you will come—you must come with me up over the Line where—”
“Oh, please—please stop!” Hands were feebly pressing him away. Glint of starlight revealed tears a-tremble on her lashes. “Grant—great heart—I understand. I cry for you. See! My eyes tell you what is in my heart. But I cannot give myself to you when that—that terrible thing of misfortune and death goes with me. I—the mark I bear brought death to my dear father!”
He looked down into her eyes, appalled at this last speech. Before he could hush her she faltered on:
“But El Doctor brought me also good news—wonderful news! It is that I can lift this evil from me if—if”—she seemed to falter before a possibility scarce credible—“if the finding of the gold and jewels El Rojo stained with his sacrilege and their restoration to a sanctuary of the Church will be acceptable in God’s sight.”
The hint of purpose in Benicia’s voice revealed the edge of the truth. “Do you mean El Doctor knows where the Lost Mission lies and that you intend to find it?” Grant pressed her. The girl gave answer:
“He knows where the gold and pearls of the Lost Mission are. He knows, too, the story of El Rojo and how I bear the weight of his guilt.Because he loved my father he says he loves me too much to have me go on and on under an evil spell. Father’s death opens his lips and—”
“You are going with El Doctor to find those things?” breathlessly from Grant. She nodded. “Then I will go with you. At once! To-morrow!”
Decision came on the wings of inspiration. Better this flight into the desert on treasure quest, with its promise of exorcism of all the devils that plagued the girl—better this venture than that other he had determined: to play the strong hand willy-nilly.
Colonel Hamilcar Urgo was not addicted to introspection. He took himself as he found himself and as a rule was well pleased with the find. Had any non-partisan voice of conscience told him cruelty played a large part in his make-up undoubtedly the little Colonel would have denied the charge with hot indignation. Cruelty, to his way of thinking, was exclusively a feminine defect; a woman was guilty of cruelty, for example, when she spurned the honourable advances of so honourable a suitor as Hamilcar Urgo. Benicia O’Donoju was the cruelest creature he knew; wherefore like a fractious horse she must be broken.
No, Señor Urgo found nothing reprehensible in his orders to Ygnacio, the Papago, that Don Padraic must be put out of the way. The same impulse had prompted him to strip the bandage of ignorance from Benicia’s eyes during that interview in the patio without the least compunction.These headstrong women! There was a way to handle them just as there was a way to break the heart of a high-spirited mount: curb bits that tear and spurs that gouge. Let him have possession of a spirit-broken woman for a little while, to play with and then discard; possession was not nearly so diverting as the game of spirit breaking. At that Urgo considered himself rather a master hand.
He had not hated the master of the Casa O’Donoju. Aside from the necessity of clearing the field of a possible objector to his suit and bringing pain to the haughty desert girl, Urgo’s murder impulse was prompted by no personal bias. But with all the deadly spleen compacted into his wispy body the little man hated the gringo Grant Hickman. Hated him because the American was in the lists against him; hated him, especially, because twice Hickman had humiliated him before the eyes of Benicia: once in the Pullman out of El Paso and a second time—searing scar in memory—when the man, though weakened by a bullet wound, had hustled him out the door of the desert manor.
If whole-heartedness gives any palliation to hatred then was Hamilcar Urgo’s passionalmost to be forgiven him. For very dynamic force no impulse in his twisted career matched it. The vision of this gringo’s impudently smiling face went to bed with him at night and abided with him all day—a veritable ache. Come what might, he would destroy Grant Hickman and in a manner such as to entail the most refined tortures.
So this was his single purpose—possession of the girl would be a mere by-product—when he used his power with the police arm of the Sonora state government to assemble ten ruffians of the rurales force at a point on the railroad within striking distance of the Road of the Dead Men. Desert cars were at his disposal but he preferred to head a mounted force because his plans looked to an excursion into country where autos could not go, once Hickman was his prisoner. A complaisant spirit of justice at Hermosillo would accept in lieu of the escaped convict’s person some token symbolical of a justice already wrought through the instrument of the state’s worthy servant, Urgo.
The day after the sand storm Urgo and his rurales set out from the railroad for the west and the Garden of Solitude at the end of a long road. They were superbly mounted; twopack animals trotted behind the file of horsemen. Revolutions had been squelched by a less imposing force.
After the cleansing storm the desert was bland and tolerant. Air clear as quartz, sun tempered by fresh winds from the west, on every club and spike of cactus fresh flowers born overnight to replace those destroyed by the driving sands. One of the rurales unslung a guitar from a mule’s pack and strummed minor chords to the accompaniment of a song in which the rest joined. The ballad was gentle as a butterfly’s wing, telling of roses over a lady-love’s window.
Urgo, lulled by the immensity of the desert peace, perhaps even by the tenderness of the song his murderers sang, pleasured himself by building pictures in prospect. He saw himself riding alone up to the door of the Casa O’Donoju—the rurales would be disposed beyond sight of the door but within call; saw the courteous bow he would make to Señorita Benicia; heard himself inquiring in polite phrase concerning her health and that of her respected father. Ah, Don Padraic dead—murdered! Grace of God, but that was sad news. But the American gentleman who was a guest at the Casa O’Donoju; did his unfortunatewound still keep him under the beneficence of the casa’s hospitality—?
Five hours of the second day out on the Road of the Dead Men the rurale who was riding at the head of the file reined in with a shout. His arm stretched to point a tiny black beetle away off to the westward: a beetle skittering down the long slope of a divide and in their direction. In ten minutes the beetle showed again, but it had grown to the dimensions of an auto. It was upon them almost before the horsemen had spread themselves in a fan across the road. Quelele, whom Urgo instantly recognized, accepted the implied hint to halt; in the seat beside him was a strange white man—a gringo by his looks. This man let a bland, incurious eye range over the band of horsemen until it settled upon Urgo; there it rested with a dispassionate stare somehow affronting to the Spaniard’s dignity.
Urgo stiffly bowed and waited for the gringo to speak. Instead of returning his salutation the white man searched the pockets of his vest for tobacco bag and papers and bent all his attention upon rolling a cigarette.
“You have come from the Casa O’Donoju, señor?” Urgo asked in English. Bim Bagleygave the clipped Spanish “Si” of assent and drew his rolled cigarette across his lips with a languid air. Urgo in a growing rage wondered if this boorishness were the stranger’s typically American manner or assumed to provoke hostility. His voice was silken as he put his next question in Spanish:
“The Señorita O’Donoju and Don Padraic, her father, they enjoy the best health, I hope.”
“I hope so, too,” was Bim’s short reply as he put a match to his smoke. Urgo’s brows knitted. Here was no boor but a wise gringo with a chuckle behind every word.
“I am doing myself the honour to call upon Don Padraic and his charming daughter,” his temper pushed him to volunteer. Bim swept the company of horsemen with a lack-lustre eye and then let his glance return to the dapper figure of the Colonel.
“Do tell,” he drawled in broadest Border dialect. “See you brought all the boys with you. Well, so long!” He nudged the Indian a signal to go ahead. Urgo would have liked to detain this impudent gringo for a lesson in manners did not more pressing pleasure lie ahead. He gave an imperceptible nod and the horsemen who blocked the road moved aside. The little car shot back a pungent cloud ofsmoke for a parting insult as it took the road in high. Urgo watched it rise to the low crest of a divide and disappear. Insufferable gringo! What had he been doing at Casa O’Donoju? What did he know of recent events there?
A shrug dismissed Bagley, and the file of horsemen resumed leisurely progress along the desert road. A night’s dry camp, and early morning would see them in the oasis green at journey’s end.
Colonel Urgo miscalculated when he dismissed Bim Bagley with a shrug. Did the little Spaniard but know it, this meeting in the wastes was the objective point in the gringo’s strategy. Even under certain heavy handicaps ten gallons of gasoline in the desert can achieve more than ten horses with rurales on their backs. It all depends upon the hand that nurses precious jets of this gasoline across the path of the spark. And Quelele’s was a master hand. Wherefore the second phase in Bim’s strategy was entered upon.
Bim and the Indian had made perhaps five miles along the eastward-bearing road beyond the point of the meeting with Urgo’s ruffians when the Papago turned off the single wheel track and into the sparse scrub. A low rangeseparated them from the rurales; the crumbling of that range into desert flatness lay a good ten miles to southward. Once around that, the little car could be tooled behind a screen of hillocks back onto the Road of the Dead Men and ahead of the rurales, but only by exercise of the most delicate driving judgment. “Smack through the country—without roads?” whiffles the incredulous driver of limousines along sedate highways in Pennsylvania and New York. Exactly that. It is done in Arizona and Sonora—thirty or fifty miles of unfenced desert; compass to pick up direction and shovel to dig out of arroyos. Johnny Cameron, of Ajo, even herds wild horses on a motorcycle.
Quelele stopped to let air out of his tires that they might better grip the sand and pad through soft places. Then began a jackrabbit skittering and twisting ’cross country, with every hundred yards offering the hazard of a broken axle and the little desert skimmer standing on its nose at the brink of a dry wash while its passengers flattened the descent by hasty shovel work. Like a rowboat in mid-Atlantic the puny contraption of tin and steel took the long waves, snarling and grumbling over sand-traps, boggling through thickets ofchollawhich rigged its tires with festoons ofprickly stubs. Quelele’s hands possessed magic. They knew just when to give a twist to the wheel, when to shoot the spark ahead. Every hummock and pitfall was read by them surely and swiftly.
The little car rounded the end of the mountain range and shot back on a tangent for the road where Urgo and his rurales were travelling. With a grunt Quelele suddenly let the car trundle to a halt; he clambered out and knelt by the radiator. Drip-drip of precious water from some stab of brush through the honeycomb of cells there. Bim sacrificed his tobacco in the emergency. The flaky mass was poured into the radiator with fresh water from a canteen; the stuff found the leak and, swelling, stopped it.
Then on and on, around the flanks of the little hills and across wide flats where the brush was scattered. Always Quelele was sure to keep a height of land between the car and the Road of the Dead Men until finally he brought his gas mustang to a stop on the crest of a lava ridge and pointed back. Against the eastern horizon showed a crawling inch-worm in the desert’s immensity—Urgo and the rurales. Below the lava crest and near at hand was the objective of their detour, theroad that led to the Casa O’Donoju and those who must be warned.
It was after sunset when the little car hiccoughed up under the avenue of palms. An hour later in the first dark of night a file of horsemen quit the perfumed precincts of alfalfa fields behind the Casa O’Donoju. At the head, driving a pack-mule, was El Doctor Coyote Belly, big Quelele riding beside him. Behind were Benicia and Grant. Bim Bagley was file closer. In scabbards at the saddle of each hung carbines.
El Doctor, the guide, set the course away from the Road of the Dead Men which, passing through the Garden of Solitude, buries itself in the Yuma Desert. His direction was south and west toward the Gulf and the labyrinth of volcano craters on its hither shore called Pinacate.
Dawn marched over the mountains like a phalanx of Alexander: spear points of light on long hafts, which drove at the zenith in solid bundles. Then the mercenaries of the sun trooped across the vacant desert floor wave on wave and strength following strength. All the dead world of Altar stirred and set itself for the ordeal of a new day.
The figure of a man that had been Doc Stooder, cynical tinker of life’s rusts and corrodings, stirred under the trampling of the light—stirred and stretched its members in dull protest of unconsciousness. Finally when the arrows of the new day drove at his eyelids the man opened them and lay staring up into the sky’s opalescence. For a long minute they probed the marbled colour depths uncomprehendingly, then turned to find the rim of the iron mountains to the east. Comprehension came at last; with it a distorted memory image of hours of madness and wandering, agony ofthirst, despair pressing upon footsteps that carried nowhere. Sleep which had put a period to all this nightmare had also mercifully rallied the man’s nervous forces to a new effort of self-saving. Men die hard because the instinct locked up in their sub-conscious minds always prevails over surrender of the conscious will.
The Doc lifted an arm to shield his eyes and felt something sinuous slide off his body. An instant his heart was chilled, for the feeling was of a desert serpent trailing over his form. He dared lift his head ever so little and let his eyes rove down his body. A queer something, not snake, lay in a curve by his side; a pallid, root-like thing the size of a man’s wrist at one end and tapering to a stringy point. He raised himself on his elbow and drew the vegetable serpent to him. Just as he did so his eyes discovered the prints of a man’s feet in the sand by where he lay.
“Glory be!” came the croak from stiffened lips, and the Doc concentrated all his scattered wits on an examination of the prodigy. Yes, footprints. They came from behind him; they were printed in a semi-circle about him to mark where one had stood hesitantly looking down at him while he slept; they marchedoff in line with their approach straight toward the tawny mountains ringing the northern horizon.
Guadalupe’s footprints—the trail he had followed and lost the day before! So Stooder thought.
A great sense of security pushed through the daze in his brain. Here, at last, lay the way to salvation. That thought having been duly relished, he turned his attention once more to the mysterious vegetable whip by his side. He never had seen its like. How it came to be there he had no notion. The thing was unlike any desert growth in his experienced observation, wherefore it seemed to represent some prodigy of the desert god dropped by him for a purpose.
He gripped the heavier end of the root between his hands and gave it a twist. The thing broke like an over-ripe radish and a thin spurt of water shot from the severed ends. Greedily he thrust one stump into his mouth and clamped his jaws upon it. Gracious fluid, mildly acrid, drenched the parchment-like membranes of his throat. The Doc sighed once, then wolfed the whole stub of the root he had broken off. As the pulp was swallowed he felt immediate access of strength and sanity.
From somewhere deep in the corroded heart of him welled an emotion whose like he had not known during all the years of his warped and weathered manhood. As if a child prompted him the gaunt, half-naked creature on the sands lifted his eyes to the glowing blue.
“Thanks, dear God!”
So the sardonic genius of the waste places permitted the cloak of divinity to fall upon Ygnacio, fugitive and murderer, for that a surprising charity had prompted him to pause in the night by a raving man, divide with him his slender store of insurance against death, then pass on.
The root-of-the-sands which Stooder half devoured quickly restored him to something like the normal. Gone were the deliriums that had dogged him those hours of horror. He heard no longer the ghost bells of the Lost Mission summoning him to treasure buried in the bleak mountains yonder. Rational thought was his after all the wanderings in Bedlam. He mapped his strategy against the ever-present menace of the desert.
Here were Guadalupe’s tracks—the Papago hound; wait till he could get hands on the devil! Of course they would lead to the villageof the Sand People on the edge of El Infiernillo. Well and good; but that might still be a long way ahead. Could he make it just on what was left of this mysterious root? About one chance in ten; and the old Doc wasn’t taking any more chances. What then?
Why, follow the tracks back to the stalled auto. Water might be there. Surely were cans of tomatoes—about a dozen of ’em. A dozen tomato cans would carry him a hundred miles on foot; he knew because he’d drunk uncooked canned tomatoes many a time—food and drink in small compass. All right; follow the tracks back to the auto, rest up a bit and then get a fresh start back over those same tracks and straight into the Sand People’s rancheria.
Stooder wrapped the precious remains of his giant radish in a strip of his shirt and started back over the line of blue shadow cups in the sand. As he laboured through the heavy going he reviewed all he could remember of yesterday’s terrors, and a great fear began to build in the back of his mind. Fear of the leagues upon leagues of blank space about him—land unchanged by time since the waters of a great sea were withdrawn into a shallow cup now called the Gulf. Fear of latent forces which lurked in the naked mountains all about, inthe ghostly mirage which stretched vain beauties before his eyes. Over-mastering all was a corroding fear of his own body.
The Doc’s trained intelligence was functioning with deadly precision. It separated his mind from the rest of his being, counting the mind as a rider and the body the beast it rode. The rider willed that the beast carry it to a certain destination; did that beast stumble and fall the rider could cry out never so furiously but it would be lost. And that burden-bearer of the mind was capable of just so much. Its tissues and sinews were kept functioning by water and food. So much water and so much food gave so many foot-pounds of energy; no more. Inexorable mathematics!
When sweat began to trickle down into his eyes Stooder could not repress a shudder. Lost! Water lost from his body. The desert greasewood is wise enough to coat all its leaves and little stems with creosote to trick evaporation; the bigsahuaroshows only the edges of its accordion flutings to the sun and greases them with paraffin; man yields water like a stranded jellyfish.
Better take another chew on that water-root dingus to make up for sweat lost. Better give the old pulse a feel to see how it’s runnin’.
The sun swam dizzily at meridian so that the footprints the Doc followed were hard to see—mere shallow spoon marks. On and on towards the south!
What was that thing moving over yonder in that bunch of saltbush? Yes, sir, moving!—A coyote, by th’ eternal!—Naw, coyotes weren’t white like this animal; coyotes were a mangy yellow.—But, by criminy! this thing had the looks of a coyote—sharp nose and baggy tail half way ’tween its hind legs, skulkin’ like.—An albino coyote! Lookit! Eyes pinky like a white rabbit.—Whoever heard of an albino coyote?
No phantom of the imagination that slinking, dirty-white creature which matched its pace to the Doc’s on parallel course through the low lying scrub. The desert Ishmael trotted along with a foolish air of being strictly about its own business, as if no other creature were in sight. When Stooder stopped to bawl curses at it the albino thing halted and made a great pretence of snouting at a flea bite, utterly oblivious to his presence. A fragment of dead bush-stock was hurled at it; the coyote lifted a corner of his lip in a deprecatory smile but did not abate his casual trot.
“Huh, you mangy bag o’ bones! Thinkyou’re goin’ have a feed off’n me, do you? Well, I’m tellin’ you, you got a mighty long tromp ahead!”
On through the desert slogged the man and on trotted the freaky animal whose colour made him outcast even from his own kind. These twain alone under the hot sky: two mites of life in a land of death, each blindly following the call of every life cell in him to live—live!
What had been a piled-up cloud of blue and faint rose to the south when the Doc started his hike had unfolded hour by hour into definite form. Little by little pinnacles sharp as ice splinters lifted from a mountain mass and detached mountains with their tops blown off stood against the horizon like truncated columns of an acropolis. Here were the mazes of the Pinacate, raw shards of volcanoes and wilderness of lava flows down by the Gulf sandhills; country so fire-scarred and forbidding that even the Indian nomads give it wide berth. Only the big-horn sheep possess it, living no man knows how.
The undeviating trend of the trail southward towards this ragged mass had perplexed Stooder when first he became conscious of it. The auto should be lying somewhere off to eastward if he didn’t miss his guess; thosemountains ahead were strange to him. But he could not know how far nor where he had wandered the day before; even though he thought long since he should have come upon a second line of footprints—his own—running along with those of the Papago, yet there was no denying he was following the right trail back to the auto and the cached tomatoes. There sure could not be two lines of footprints here in this least-travelled part of Altar.
So ran the mind of him whom the mocking Gog and Magog of the desert’s diarchy had put on a false trail to desolation. Deeper and deeper into a waterless scrap-heap of forgotten ages his steps took him. And the albino coyote was his aloof companion.