Meanwhile from another direction adventurers were moving through the night upon the slag mountains of Pinacate. Empty space of Altar’s ultimate sweep was become almost populous. A strange company this, which passed ghostily under the great lights of the near stars with only the clink of bridle metal and pack mule’s canteens to give tempo to the march; Benicia O’Donoju, the desert girl, moved to this risky hazard by compulsion of an incubus of fate visited upon her through inheritance down the generations of her people; Grant Hickman, man of cities and crowds, whom destiny had whirled out into a country of the world’s dawn; Bagley the Arizonan, taker of chances, seeker after rainbow ends; and the two Papagoes, Quelele and El Doctor Coyote Belly, on whom was spread thin the veneer of so-called civilization.
It had been Benicia’s mastering purposethat had moved the cavalcade away from the Casa O’Donoju and out onto the desert immediately upon the return of Bim and Quelele reporting the leisurely approach of Colonel Urgo and his rurales. This was not flight, she told Bim; they would go in search of the treasure of the Lost Mission whose hiding place the old medicine man was willing to reveal, and if Urgo followed—well, eventualities could be met as they arose. In this resolve Grant had strongly seconded her. The girl’s slavery under the obsession of the bane of El Rojo, especially following the slaying of her father, had laid an impenetrable barrier between her and him; he had seized upon this possibility promising her emancipation from this horror. This chance failing, he had but the last desperate recourse.
The first hour of their pilgrimage away from the desert oasis Grant rode by Benicia’s side. He essayed to distract her thoughts from the tragedy that lay behind by questioning her on the revelations El Doctor had made: how had the old Indian come by knowledge of the buried gold and pearls; what impulse had led him to promise their restoration? But the girl was not to be drawn. She answered his queries by evasions or meaningless monosyllables.It was as if Grant were a stranger, impudently prying.
At first the man was stung by this treatment. His self-pride rebelled against so arbitrary a closing of the door of confidence against him. Why should he be treated thus cavalierly when the girl had surely read the great love he bore her and his single desire to place himself between her and the menace of one who had prompted murder? But these hurts did not continue long. Riding by Benicia’s side in the starshine, the man began to feel the emanations of a mastering will which poured from her as the pungent prickles of ozone surround a high-power dynamo. Her consciousness was frozen into a mould of purpose, locked against any distractions. Benicia was alive only to the single resolve to free herself from the curse of the Red One. Man nor spirit could invade that preoccupation.
There under the steady-burning desert lamps the man of the cities began to feel again that spell of the infinite which had chained him the night of Don Padraic’s passing. Here was he, lately denizen of a hive of stone and steel, tiny integer in that man-made machine called a metropolis, moving through the darkness over a land unsullied by hand of man since the floodsof melting glaciers drove a shadowy race of stone-axe people back to the highlands. The loves and hates, the battles and deaths of these stone-axe folk occurred but yesterday in the time-sheet of the waste places. The to-morrow of ten thousand years would find the desert still untouched, supine under the stars. What then of hidden baubles of gold; what then of the love of a Grant Hickman for a Benicia O’Donoju? A fossil snail shell by the shore of the gulf left a more enduring record.
“The thing that’s sorta got me fussed is how I’m goin’ explain all this to the old Doc.” Bim’s voice broke through Grant’s contemplation of shadowy frontiers; he noted with a start that his horse had dropped behind Benicia’s and was ambling head-and-head with his friend’s. Bim drawled on:
“It sure will look like a double-cross to Stooder—my sailin’ off down into Sonora on the search for you an’ then hooking up with an outfit to go get all the plunder the old Doc thinks he’s as good as got his hands on. Me, I guess I’m queered all right,” was the man’s whimsical finish to his lament. Grant, who had been too preoccupied with the sweep of affairs to give any thought to his pal’s perplexities, could not now offer much consolation.A point of honour involving the grotesque creature who had elected to receive him as a book agent did not greatly move Grant.
“A’ course,” Bim continued his monologue, “the way things lie with the girl, her bein’ hipped on gettin’ back this swag somebody in her family lifted from the mission, I’m more’n willing to see her get it. But the old Doc hasn’t got a large store of what you might call sentiment, an’ I sure got my work cut out for me when I try to show him the light.”
“Too bad I got you into a tangle, old man,” Grant heartily commiserated; then with a hopeless little laugh, “My own affairs aren’t set on any straight and beautiful road to happiness either.”
Bim chuckled deep in his throat. “Me, I was all for your first idea to rope the señorita right outa the home corral an’ put your brand on her, fighting. But like’s not we’ll getmuchoplenty excitement along this trail before we’re through.” He gave a short laugh. “Say, Cap’n Hickman, I brought you out from the East on a whale of a proposition. You’re sure getting it. A girl who assays higher’n any pearls an’ old gold junk you could find in a church cellar—the feel and savvy of a man’s country—a larrupin’ fight with old Urgo andhis rurales bunch. That last you can back right down to your last white chip.”
“But how can Urgo follow us from the O’Donoju house?” incredulously from Grant. “Not one of the servants or other Indians there knows what our destination is—we don’t ourselves except in a general way.”
The man of the big country chuckled at metropolitan innocence. “Horses don’t leave tracks on your Fifth Avenoo because they’s no horses left there for one thing, I reckon. But in this country they do. Five horses make a trail a blind man could follow. I or anybody else could track this outfit of ours in the dark. I look to see our li’l friend Urgo drop in on us some time to-morrow. He’ll travel fast with fresh horses his men round up at the O’Donoju corrals.”
They rode some time in silence, Grant turning over in his mind this unthought-of possibility. Tenderfoot that he was—so he accused himself—he had noted the carbines slung in scabbards at each saddlehorn; noted with an unreading eye. So Benicia and all the others had provided against a contingency he had not even suspected.
“Only thing I’m figgerin’ in this proposition,” he heard Bim saying, “is, will the Papagoesstick under fire? Papagoes are not strong for the knock-down-an’-drag-out stuff. An’, besides, you’re not a whole man yet.”
“Whole enough to keep my end up,” Grant said shortly, knowing not why he resented any imputation of disability against him.
“Oh, sure—sure!” the other hurriedly amended, and the subject died.
Dawn spread a ghostly panorama before them. In the greeny-white light that heralds the sun’s first ruddiness the whole western horizon bulked with black masses of slag heaped in fantastic shapes. High above the lesser masses towered the two peaks of Pinacate, their summits yawning in wide craters. The horses’ hoofs struck sparks from lava aprons; the beasts had to pick their way carefully over traps and crevices. Ever and again grey arms of cactus struck out to rake the riders’ legs with claws of thorns.
Waxing light filled in details of a phantom land, terrific in stark brutalities of scarp and battlement—a world just set aside from the baking-oven of the Potter and unadorned by a single brush stroke. The little company of horsemen threaded single file up a narrow gorge between the main peaks of the range. Walls of porphyry and slag the colour of furnaceclinkers leaped to heights on either side which dwarfed the riders to the stature of weevils. The trail they followed was the path cut by the rushing waters of summer cloudbursts, which pack into the downpour of minutes’ duration all the water denied during months of drought; great blocks of fused glass and conglomerate wrenched from the canyon’s eaves by the fingers of these storms choked the way. Where capfuls of soil had been caught and held in some pocket the gaunt sticks of theocatillasplayed out against raw rock like cat’s whiskers. Low-lyingcholla, that spined and vicious vegetable tarantula of the desert, seemed to grow from the very rock; all its nodules were frosty with close-set thorns. Over all dropped the veil of mystical morning radiance.
The horses groaned as they had to choose, minute by minute, between barking their hocks on the knife-like corners of obsidian or taking the barbs of thecholla. The higher the ascent the savager grew the way. Grant, awed by this penetration into the very laboratory of earth, almost leaped from his saddle when a sharp clatter of small pebbles to his right broke the silence. His eyes jumped up the canyon wall to follow three dots of bounding dun-whiteagainst its sheer side—bighorn sheep skipping surely along no visible foothold.
When the sun was well in the sky—though naught but its reflected radiance penetrated the gorge—El Doctor, in the lead, signalled a halt. The place was a constricted apron or shelf in the cleft between rock walls whereon sparse galetta grass was growing. Reason for this tiny oasis of vegetation lay just beyond in the fact of a water-worn cistern in the lava—such a natural reservoir as the desert folk called a “tank,” a godsend when it still contains the wash from a last cloudburst. This one was bone-dry.
The party breakfasted meagrely, wood for their coffee fire being grubbed by the Indians painfully and after long search. There was little speech between them for they were tired; the night’s ride had been wearing. Moreover, even the Indians appeared to feel a malign presence bearing down upon them and forbidding desecration of the silence. For them, in especial for Coyote Belly, there was a very real and fear-compelling presence abroad. These mountains of Tjuktoak housed Iitoi, Elder Brother himself; the god of all things who, with a coyote and a black beetle, drifted four times round the earth in the time of theFlood and came to anchorage in this place. El Doctor Coyote Belly, driven by a great love to commit sacrilege, might well have heard the voice of Iitoi in the wind and felt his heart turn to water.
In truth, the aged Papago was having a battle with himself. Before he had gulped his coffee and tortillas the medicine man’s eyes were roaming fearsomely and he whimpered snatches of sacerdotal songs as he rummaged in the pack for a wicker basket. From it he took a wand stained red and with an eagle’s feather bound to one end, an arrow very handsomely feathered from the same bird, a string of glass beads and a bundle of cigarettes—presents for Elder Brother, who must be beguiled before being robbed.
The old man’s hands wavered to return the presents to the basket when Benicia hurried to him, sat down by his side and earnestly pleaded with him in his own tongue. Finally his resolution seemed to be brought to the sticking point. He started up the gorge alone and with his basket of trifles.
“Coyote Belly says he must go and sing to the god Iitoi before we are permitted to visit his house,” Benicia gravely explained to her white companions. “The poor man is desperatelyscared because we have come to rob Elder Brother.”
Seeing the look of puzzlement on the men’s faces she continued with that same grave respect as if speaking of a real presence. “This old man through the love he bore my father has consented to betray a secret the medicine men of his people have handed down for more than a hundred years. The treasure of the Lost Mission, he tells me, was dug up by Papago medicine men not long after the Mission was destroyed by the Apaches and brought to these mountains—to the cave of Elder Brother—”
“And it’s all here now?” Bim put in excitedly. The girl nodded.
“It has been as well hidden from those who sought it as if it were under the buried ruins of the mission,” she said; then simply: “While El Doctor is gone it is best that we get some sleep.”
Benicia stretched herself under the shade of a rock with a saddle blanket for pillow and slept. But neither of the white men could follow her precept; both were too sensible of the prickling of some unnameable essence of the strange and the unworldly—perhaps that very savagery of atmosphere which had promptedprimitive Indians to designate Pinacate as the residence of their god. They were alone; big Quelele had quietly slipped away shortly after El Doctor without saying where he was going.
The men sat smoking while their eyes roved the prospect of burnt cliff and ragged parapet. The heat had whips; it drove them to burrow for lessening shade wherever angles of the rocks offered. A curious cast to the slice of sky visible above the cañon walls first caught Bagley’s attention. He squinted up at it for a long moment of speculation.
“If it wasn’t so early in the summer I’d say a thunderhead was fixin’ up to give us a big razoo,” he ventured. Grant looked up and noted that the blue had turned to a heavy saffron tint as if the sun were shining through a stratum of light sand; such a tint he’d seen before the great windstorm on the day of Don Padraic’s burial.
“If I could only look over the top of the wall yonder to west’ard,” Bim grumbled uneasily. “These cloudbursts always come from direction of the Gulf. We’re not very well put right here in the channel of all the wash down from up top-side. Those horses now—”
He walked uneasily about the narrow confines of the shelf, scanning the upshoots ofrock for possible ways out. Then he seemed to dismiss possibility of trouble from his mind and returned to where Grant was sitting.
An hour passed. Perhaps they were dozing when the rattle of a shower of rock down the cañon side galvanized both. Up there they saw the figure of big Quelele. Like a wild goat he was leaping from foothold to foothold downward; he was in mad haste.
The big Indian risked his neck a dozen times before he came panting up to the watchers. He waved to the brink of the cliff.
“I been on top—watching—I see long way off—Urgo—rurales. They come—fast!”
Bim translated Quelele’s intelligence for Grant. “Our li’l friend Urgo’s been burnin’ the wind,” was his dry comment. Grant sent a quick glance around the cul-de-sac of rock which encompassed them.
“Not the best place in the world to stand off ten men,” he gave his opinion. “We ought to get our backs up against something that can’t be surrounded.”
Quelele read the white man’s thoughts, for he pointed farther up the cañon beyond the lava cistern. There the gorge narrowed to a veritable doorway and the steps thereto were so precipitous that one ascending would have to scramble and claw a way on hands and knees; no possible chance for a rush en masse. Bim surveyed the natural citadel with the eye of a trained Border man who occasionally has to reckon with such elementals as the killing power of a rifle bullet and the protective quality of a ’dobe wall. Finally he screwed oneeye at the crack of sky showing between the escarpments and shook his head dubiously at what he saw there. Quelele, who had had the superior advantage of a wider view from his aerie on the cliff top, bowed his arms in the shape of a ball and waved a hand to the west.
“Papago says it’s a big storm brewing over yonder,” Bim explained. “When these thunderheads finally get all boiled into one and come a-runnin’ it’s a case of take to cover. If this thing is the regulation rim-fire sock-dollager they’s goin’ be a sight of water pass over where we’re standin’ before long. Me, I’d rather be somewhere else than in this dry channel.”
Grant did not linger to discuss strategy longer. He went to where Benicia was sleeping in the shade of a boulder and gently touched her on the shoulder. The girl sat up, startled.
“We have to be moving,” Grant told her. “Quelele has just reported Urgo and his rurales out on the desert and coming our way.”
“And El Doctor?” she quickly interposed. “He has returned from the cave?”
Grant shook his head. Bitter disappointment flashed into her eyes at the realization of how fate had played to interpose the grim businessof a fight just on the minute of realization of her great hopes. Grant, stooping beside her and watching the play of emotions on her features, saw quick remorse chase away the frown. Impulsively a brown hand reached out to play upon the back of his.
“Grant, beloved”—how like the overtones from her own golden harp the contralto richness of her voice!—“I am desperately selfish and you will not understand.—Thinking only of my own purpose—bringing you with your wound still unhealed out to this place to face—death perhaps.—And you do this for me—”
“’Nicia, little girl—” He could go no farther than those words, for the song in his heart was overwhelming. At last—at last the trammels of the girl’s heart were shaken off and the call he’d waited for so long had come! Call of the heart of her to his.
She was on her feet, vibrant with energy, alive to the exigencies of impending action. Bim was saddling the horses and Quelele had the pack on the mule when they joined them. Bim briefly explained to the girl his survey of the gorge for strategical strength; at any cost they must move up until they could find some sheep trail or other practicable ledge givingescape from the flood water channel. “If that doddering old medicine man would only quit his sing-song business and come back for a rifle we’d be that much better off,” the big fellow grumbled.
When all was in readiness Quelele led the way up the tortuous watercourse and through the mighty gates of porphyry nearly blocking the farther reaches. They were forced to lead the animals, whose sure-footedness was put to the test every yard of the advance. Beyond the great pillars the gorge opened to a rough amphitheatre with less steeply sloping sides. A narrow upward-springing ledge of rock led away from the dry watercourse to a rock pulpit some seventy-five or a hundred feet above. This they followed, to discover there was space for their horses to stand behind the horn of malapais and still be screened from observation from below. Quelele made some mysterious passes with a tether rope which yoked all the animals to a single line that was anchored at both ends.
“Look,” Benicia cried as Bim was taking the carbines from the saddle scabbards. They followed her pointing hand and saw a dark spot against the opposite wall of the gorge and higher than their level. A midget figure wasoutlined against the opening of a cave. It was El Doctor at his business of propitiating Elder Brother—El Doctor, much needed behind the stock of a carbine. The men hallooed to him but he did not turn.
“Go over and get that crazy fool,” Bim commanded Quelele. But the big Indian, instead of obeying immediately, turned up the ledge and made for a high point on the shoulder of the rock bastion constituting one of the portals of the upper gorge. They watched him as he scaled the almost perpendicular face of black lava. From the top Quelele had a view of the cañon’s far-away exit onto the desert floor several miles from the niche where the treasure seekers had refuge. The watchers saw him lift himself cautiously over the top of his lookout and peer to westward. Then he came scrambling and sliding down.
“They come into the valley,” the Papago reported. “Too late to get El Doctor.”
It was Bim with his desert craft who made disposition of the little force of defence. Quelele he sent back to the aerie with orders not to shoot until he heard shots from the whites; the Indian’s fire from the rear, once Urgo and his men had passed the rocky portals, would throw the rurales into confusion.Grant and Benicia he disposed behind an outcrop of porphyry a little behind and above the protected animals.
“Pick ’em off as they come through the Gate,” he suggested. “An’ don’t try any fancy shooting; we haven’t got any too many cartridges.”
“But you—?” Benicia began. The Arizonan grinned broadly.
“Me, I always fancy a little solo game in this sort of rukus. I’m going on t’other side of the gulch. Cross-fire, you sabe?” He left them with a smile on his lips, and they watched him jumping lightly down from rock to rock. Almost before he had begun to clamber up the opposite wall he was lost to view amid the maze of fissure and castellated boulder. Grant and the girl were stretched out behind their primitive breastwork alone in this unfinished world of fire. They could see neither Quelele nor Bagley. Came to their ears the faint drone of barbaric song: El Doctor Coyote Belly at his traitorous devotions.
The whole gorge was filled with a saffron glare like the reflection from oil fires under a boiler, unworldly, portentous.
They waited, these two, in the immensity ofearth’s disgorged bowels. Side by side, elbows touching, they counted the slow drag of minutes as naught in the balance against the deep joy of love militant.
A stir in the bed of the dry wash below them. Up went their carbines with cheeks laid against wood and eyes sighting along the lances of light. Again the stir down there. A gaunt figure rose from hand and knees to its feet, stood swaying for an instant, then pitched forward against the support of a slab of rock.
A very leprechaun of the rocks was it: ribs creasing burned skin about the naked torso; whity-grey hair streaming down to mingle with a beard; bare arms like a spider’s legs and all cracked by the sun. The husk of Doc Stooder, plaything of the desert god, was come here, following the still living spark of instinct prompting a water search in a canyon. Come, too, to the secret hiding place of the treasure whose glitter had so mercilessly befooled him.
Grant, stupefied by the apparition of death and failing in any recognition of the skeleton thing as the bibulous doctor of Arizora, suspected a trick of Urgo. Again he laid his eye along his rifle sight, vigilant for what might ensue. The creature spread-eagled against therock slowly pushed itself upright with its hands; its shaggy head turned wearily as thirsting eyes scanned the dry chasm.
Then a shout from across the gorge. Bagley had leaped from his hiding place and was rushing precariously down to succour the ghost. Just as he reached Stooder and had thrown an arm about him to heave his wasted form onto a shoulder the crack of a rifle shivered the gorge’s silence. Rock dust spurted within a foot of the rescuer.
The sun went out that second—instantly, like a powerful incandescent switched off. A yellow penumbra tinged the darkness.
Almost as one the rifles of Grant and Benicia jetted lead. Two more shots from the dry wash. The giant figure of Bagley with Stooder limp over one shoulder never faltered in its leaping and scrambling up the declivity to the shelter he had quitted. The two who had been following his flight with stilled hearts saw him disappear behind a great rock; an instant and a jet of fire lanced down thence at the attackers by the Gate.
A blob of rain large as a Mexican dollar smacked on Benicia’s hand as she pumped the ejector—another and a third. Then the gorgewas blasted by a thunder shock amid the peaks, and a stab of lightning painted the whole pit sulphurous blue. By its flash the defenders saw scurrying figures leaping from rock to rock in the stream bed. Quelele, the quick of eye, fired his first shot by the light of storm fire; one of the rurales went down like a wet sack.
A second stunning burst of thunder which knocked out the underpinning of the sky. Then deluge.
It was not rain that fell; it was solid water in sheets and cones which hissed with the speed of its descent. Water so compacted that it was like a river on edge, engulfing. With it the almost continuous quiver and jerk of electrical flame. The gorge was become a watery hell. More than that, for Urgo and his men in the wash it threatened momentarily to be their tomb. Already a white streak of foam in the lightning flashes marked where the once bone-dry watercourse was changing character.
The rurales and their leader found the odds all of a sudden snatched from their hands by this frenzied ally of the hunted girl and her supporters. They had come eleven against five, with their quarry caught in a hole in thePinacate sierra; before the cloudburst had endured three minutes Urgo realized he had let himself and his men into a fatal trap. Their horses, confidently left behind them in the lower reaches of the gorge, must already have stampeded under the lash of the storm. Spiteful rifle flashes from both sides came with each baleful flicker of fire from the sky to deny escape from the rising waters up either wall of the chasm.
Now a dull roaring above the waterfall of the rain began to fill the gash in the sierra. Away back at the head of the gorge and where the slope from the twin volcano peaks shed water as from steep roofs into this common trough, a solid wall, capped dull white, came with the speed of a meteor down and down through the channel in the living rock. It rolled boulders the size of box-cars in its flood; a chevaux-de-frise of barbed cactus and scrub trees tumbled at its crest.
Even above the tumult of the deluge sounded the shrill alarm of the rurales as they broke position and turned to flee through the Gate. But already the flood was there, choking egress. They must scramble up the sides of the gorge like rats from a flooded hold; they must grope and cling by every illuminating flash of bluefire, waiting to see where the next handhold lay, how near the hungry yellow waters rushed.
With Grant and the girl was nothing but security. Unprotected, they had bent their heads to the pounding mallets of water. When the firing abruptly ceased at the rush of their attackers for safety Grant heard the scream of a horse near at hand and remembered their tethered animals. Should they break away in their fright the plight of all five would be a desperate one.
“Stay here!” he shouted in Benicia’s ear. “Going to the horses!”
Grant crawled and groped his way over the slippery rocks, each seeming to be alive with the film of rushing water across it. He clambered down and to the right until he came to the pulpit rock behind which the beasts had been tethered by Quelele. The mule he found down, hopelessly noosed in his hobble rope and slowly strangling; the horses were huddled, tails to the storm, dripping and dejected.
It took several minutes’ precarious work to get the pack-animal to his feet and freshly tethered. Then Grant began the retreat to the breastwork where he had left the girl. It was largely a matter of guesswork. Once he found himself against an unscalable wall and had toretrace his steps. Another time one foot slipped and he caught himself with his body halfway over the brink.
A flash of lightning showed him two rifles lying side by side on a ledge below him—his rifle and Benicia’s; but the girl was gone. The fist of fear smote him terrifically.
He screamed her name above the bellowing of the flood in the wash. No answer. He ran along the ledge that had been theirs until he came to a downward terrace; to that he leaped and along its blind way he fumbled. Came the ghost of a scream, thin above the diapason all about. His name—“Grant!”
Then merciful lightning blazed blue and he saw. Below him on a broad shelf which overhung the whiteness of the torrent two figures, glistening like seals, were locked—they swayed.
The man launched himself blindly out and down. He rolled; he slipped and wallowed against and under great boulders. At the end of seconds seeming æons he came to the rock apron where he had seen the struggling shapes. Sound of stertorous breathing guided him. He rose from his knees before Benicia and another, who was trying to drag her along the ledge. A revealing flash of fire gave him just a glimpse of a weasel face—Colonel Urgo.
Not so much rage as loathly horror of an unclean thing sped furious summons to every muscle spring in his body. With his shoulder planted against the Spaniard’s chest for a leverage Grant tore loose the man’s grip from Benicia. Before he could whirl to shift his attack Urgo had screamed an oath and was on the American’s back, legs twining to cumber Grant’s thighs, both hands clamped about his throat. It was the catamount’s attack.
The first impact of his antagonist’s weight nearly over-balanced Grant and precipitated both into the maelstrom of waters not six feet below their ledge. But, steadying himself, the American suddenly launched backward, pinning the lighter body on his back against a wall of rock. It was a terrific smash. Urgo’s breath came in a whistle from it. His hands sank deeper into the muscles about Grant’s throat, closing his windpipe. Deliberately the standing man took a few forward steps, then swiftly back against the wall again. An elbow of rock found the Spaniard’s ribs and cracked two. He shrieked.
Now Grant’s hands went up to lock behind the head that sagged over his right shoulder. Strength of desperation flooded into his arms, for the weaker man had him throttled. Urgomust release his hold on Grant’s throat or suffer a broken neck. The constricting hands slackened their grip ever so little. Grant bowed his shoulders, gave a mighty heave and swept the Colonel’s body over his shoulder in a wide arc. The man sprawled, arms wide, through the air, struck the edge of the rocky apron. He clawed—slipped—clawed again, and disappeared.
The storm ceased with the same suddenness as it began. Hardly an hour had torrential waters lashed the cinder wastes of Pinacate when the black pall over the heavens broke away and the sun came out to suck hungrily at pools in the rocks. There was a headiness of wine in the air, a smell of wet soil mingled with spicy emanations from greasewood andpalo verde. The desert’s sparse growing things exulted in the breaking of long drought.
For a long time Grant and Benicia on their side of the gorge and Bim in his retreat opposite lay hidden, awaiting possible renewal of the attack which the storm had scattered. But the torrent that still raged down the bottom of the gorge had washed clean every vestige of an enemy. Quelele on his high post saw four scattered horsemen rushing pell-mell for the gateway onto the desert—last vestige of Urgo’s rurales force, each man of which gave thanks to his patron saint that he had comeout of the hell in the mountain cul-de-sac with a whole skin.
Quelele also saw several specks dropping earthward from the clear blue; specks which rapidly grew from the size of gnats to the spread of small aeroplanes. King condors they, who had smelled a feast from afar—loathsome birds with a wing spread covering the span of thirteen feet. The coming of one of these foul creatures to his particular banquet even the sharp eye of a Papago watcher could not discern, for the scene was hidden from him by a shoulder of the cañon wall.
A stuntedpalo verdetree nearly stripped of its verdure by the whips of the rain hung half-uprooted over the rapidly diminishing stream in the wash. One branch had caught and held some flotsam from the high flood, now clear of the water. Just a shapeless bundle of clothes, lolling head, arms askew where broken bones had let inert flesh sag to the current. Just a grim caricature of something which so recently had walked in the pride of his imaginings.
The condor flopped clumsily to a branch stub six feet distant from the bundle of clothes, folded his great wings with a dry rustling of feathers, blinked the red lids of hiseyes to focus his vision for expert inspection and studied the hank of cloth and flesh suspended in the tree crotch. The thing which flood waters had brought stirred slightly; eyes opened with a flutter. They met the critical gaze of the feathered pariah on the stub. The condor acknowledged this unexpected show of life on his banquet table by disturbed bobbings of the naked yellow head—the skin on his poll was wrinkled as an old man’s—and a bringing of his off eye to bear around his sabre beak with the skew-like movement of a hen sighting a worm.
The wreck in the bundle of clothes opened his lips to scream but the ghost of a groan came instead. It tried to lift a fending arm against the abomination so near; the muscles tugged at broken bones.
The condor appraised these manifestations of life carefully, weighed them by contrast with his experiences with crippled sheep and helpless calves. His talons stirred restlessly on the branch. First one, then the other lifted from the bark, stretched and flexed. The king of the higher airs was impatient. He spread his wings to balance him and clumsily hopped a few feet nearer, craning his wattled neck anxiously.
A shadow passed swiftly over thepalo verdetree. A quick upward twist of the head gave the condor view of a putative and too-anxious fellow guest at the bounty spread there. Greediness pushed him. He spread his wings and hopped again—
Then the desert exacted with cruelty recompense for the cruelties of Colonel Hamilcar Urgo. Abomination of his passing was meted him according to the abominations of his own devising.
An hour after the last rain drop the flood waters in the gorge had dropped to permit of reunion between the erstwhile defenders of the pass. Grant waded waist deep with Benicia in his arms; Bim, all smiles, was stretching out a hand from the off-side rocks.
“Well, folks all, looks like a pleasant time was enjoyed by all and one!” The big Arizonan’s spirits would permit of no more concrete thanksgiving for a crisis passed. It was his way to find laughter the only vehicle for suppressed emotions and whimsicalities the best conveyance for thoughts which might sound “high-falutin’.” The three stood mute, their eyes telling one another things which might have come flattened and blunted in speech.
“See me welcome an old visitor just before the curtain went up on the first act?” Bim turned to Grant, his eyes shining excitement. “Who d’you think? Ole Doc Stooder!” Grant gasped in surprise. His pal’s grin faded as he added seriously:
“Just about the end of his string, too. The rain sure saved him—couldn’t have lasted another hour—one chance in a thousand brought him here where they’s folks to look out for him—a friend, even, to coddle him back to health.”
“No, not one chance in a thousand,” Benicia caught him up with deep seriousness in her voice. “It is the desert way—to play with destiny, I mean, and seem to cause miracles.—But let me go to him if he needs attention.” She started forward, but Bim put out a staying hand.
“I wouldn’t, ma’am. The Doc’s not a purty sight right now. His body’s just drinkin’ in all the water that landed on him an’ he’s sorta in a daze—doesn’t say much of anything that makes sense. A little food which I’m goin’ to brew if I can find some dry sticks of wood anywhere’s round—” Simple charity dictated that Bim say no word of conjecture as to what brought Stooder to the desert. He guessed full well.
El Doctor Coyote Belly seemed to be materialized from the rocks so noiselessly had he approached the group. The old man’s face was ashen; unguessable terrors he had fought with and hardly conquered since last the three had seen him standing in the yellow storm glare before the cave of Elder Brother.
“If my daughter will come now to the house of Iitoi,” he said to the girl in his native tongue, “she may take what Iitoi gives. The god has expressed his displeasure by the storm—but he will give.”
Benicia turned and put a wordless question to Grant. They started together to climb the precipitous rock ladder up the side of the gorge wall, El Doctor leading. Thirty minutes’ exhaustive effort brought them to the approach of a high-roofed cavern into which the westering sun laid a broad carpet of light. There in the shale before the cave mouth were El Doctor’s pitiful presents to the god—the arrow and prayer stick wedged upright, the beads and tobacco in a small basket. The whole ground about was littered with the shards of sacrificial pottery and scraps of basketry.
Benicia motioned to El Doctor to lead the way into the cave, but he shook his head in emphatic negative. Then she gave Grant astrange smile, almost that of a child who awaits revelation of a mystery. He saw in deep pools of her eyes a transcendent joy made almost pain by this moment of hope achieved. She held out her hand for him to take and they entered the cave.
When their eyes had become accustomed to the sudden transition from glaring sunlight into gloom a faint glimmering at the far end of the sunlight path guided them. Ankle-deep in the dust of ages they groped. The glimmer waxed stronger. Suddenly Benicia stopped with a catching of the breath. Grant stooped and lifted a heavy object from a niche of rock, bringing it into the filtered stream of radiance.
It was a golden monstrance, dust coated. Faint twinkles of light glowed like firefly lamps from jewels set in the radii of a glory. A great diamond above the crystal box caught fire from the sun.
As Grant hastily bent to replace the sacred vessel his hand tipped the edge of a shallow basket. From it rolled a stream of moonbeam fire out into the zone of sunshine. Liquid globules of moon-glow, round and pellucid as ice crystals, seductive as the shadowed whiteness of a woman’s throat: the green pearls of the Virgin stripped by the impiety of El Rojofrom the shrine of the Four Evangelists!
Benicia slowly sank to her knees, words of prayer whispered from her lips. Prayer of thankfulness and dedication of the lost treasure to the sanctity of the Church.
Grant felt his presence in this solemn moment was an intrusion. He tip-toed back to the mouth of the cave and stood looking out. All the wildness and the savagery of Altar’s secret fane of the desert god lay burning and glistening with wetness in the westering sun. The waning torrent, sardonic gesture of plenty in this ultimate citadel of thirst, splashed jewels against the lancing light. Here was a world of the primordial—Creation arrested in its first hour.
A hand touched his arm lightly. He turned to find Benicia standing beside him. The sun wove an aura of vivid fire about her head. Her eyes raised to his were swimming.
“Now, heart of my heart,” she whispered. And all the love fire in her flamed from her lips.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes:Title page verso: printer’s information was not supplied in the source text.A Table of Contents has been provided for the convenience of the reader.Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.The author’s em-dash and punctuation/endquote styles have been retained.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Title page verso: printer’s information was not supplied in the source text.
A Table of Contents has been provided for the convenience of the reader.
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
The author’s em-dash and punctuation/endquote styles have been retained.