CHAPTER IIIVASQUEZ
LEAVING Big John and Niltci hard at work making pemmican from the cougar and deer meat, and bags of pinole or parched corn meal from corn purchased at a near-by Apache encampment, Sid and Scotty rode a day’s march through the mountains to where there was a mission school—San Mateo of the Apaches. Scotty’s idea was to get the Red Mesa tablet translated by the teacher, who no doubt still remembered his Latin.
A small adobe schoolhouse of primitive Spanish architecture came in sight shortly after noon, surmounting a little knoll in the mountains. As they rode toward it Indian children, boys and girls, came running and yelling around them to beg pennies, and with them as an escort they rode up to the hitching rail before the school, dismounted and entered.
A lone Mexican teacher, poor and of uncertain temper apparently, sat reading at the school desk as they entered. With an annoyed exclamation in Spanish he put down his book and came toward them during the time that their eyes were becoming accustomed to the dim light of the interior of the building.
“And what can I do for the señores?” inquired the man suspiciously, after the usual polite Spanish greetings had been exchanged.
Sid had already sized him up with a sense of misgiving, even then, before a word of their object had been disclosed. The Mexican—his nationality oozed out all over him—was a little weazened man, dirty, old, with one eye drooping nearly shut from some violent slash gotten during his past history. His face bore a sardonic, cynical, rascally expression, even under the smooth suavity of the crooked smile that now leered upon them. Sid felt like taking Scotty’s arm and leading him away, right then and there! Surely this man was no one to trust with such a mining secret as might be written on the Red Mesa tablet.
But Scotty had already guilelessly begun explaining their visit. His simple, “We have a Latin inscriptionhere, señor, that we would like you to translate for us,” had settled it, for the man was already holding out his hand for the plaque which Scotty bore.
“You understand Latin, señor?” put in Sid, hoping that he didn’t.
“Vasquez,” supplied the Mexican, “ees my name. For the Latin,si!—indifferently,” he shrugged. “Anything that my poor efforts can do to help you, though—” Once more he held out his hand for the plaque.
Again Sid felt that queer inner warning not to let the matter go further. He disliked any man who depreciated his own worth with every other word. Due modesty was admirable, but this groveling disdain of one’s self was in truth but the inevitable expression of a fundamental lack of esteem for one’s own integrity—and that usually came from a guilty conscience.
But it was too late now. Before Sid could obey a mad impulse to snatch the tablet away—no matter what explanations might be needed—no matter how absurd and incomprehensible and rude it might seem—the Mexican had begun reading the script on the pottery.
“D.O.M.—Deo Optimo Maximo,” he rolled out in the sonorous Latin tongue. That was as far as he got in reading it out aloud to the boys. For, immediately thereafter, an expression of amazed, puzzled surprise came into his eyes as the boys watched him reading over the script to himself. Then Sid noted intense concentration, and this gradually gave way to an expression of crafty cupidity, an air of envisioning something other than the words that his eyes were falling on, of planning big enterprise, great affairs in connection with this tablet. Vasquez went on to read the script entirely through in a still, tense silence. Before he had finished, those snaky black eyes of his were fairly blazing with avarice. Talk of the power of the word “gold” to excite man! This man’s primitive nature stood stripped before the boys; revealed was an elemental desire for possession before which the rights of others, the entire veneer of civilization were stricken off as phantoms. He might as well have been some Mexican greaser griping at a pile of gold on some disreputable faro table along the border!
As Sid watched, the face before him looked up. Instantly it went blank, expressionless. There was a period of reflection, while the boys waited expectantly,then a crafty, planning look came into the eyes.
He folded the plaque under his arm—gesture of possession, which we are told, is nine points of the law.
Vasquez smiled—a practical declaration of ownership—a maddening, infuriating smile; the superior smile of the older man toward youth, which seems to question the right of the young man to busy himself with anything at all but the toys of childhood. Sid found it particularly unbearable. He had been smiled at that way before, when some staid and sophisticated professor had smiled indulgently at him over some of his own theories in Indian ethnology, theories which Sid propounded with all the fire of his youthful enthusiasm and conviction.
“Caballeros,” said the Mexican craftily, “this matter can have no possible interest to you, since it happens to refer to the work of the missionary brothers among the—ah, the Papagoes—” he hesitated, referring to the script as if to refresh his memory, his thought evidently being that the boys might have recognized that word in the Latin. “Over two hundred years ago this—ah, yes, missionary matter it is, my young friends—was written concerningour poor red brothers who lived down near Pinacate,” Vasquez smiled down at them suavely.
Sid glanced at Scotty. The latter’s Scotch nature was so incensed over this bald smiling perversion of what even his limited knowledge of Latin had told him was the truth that he was utterly speechless. “Minem Argenti” indeed! That meant “silver mine” at any rate! Scotty’s faced blazed red, his eyes burned blue fire. As for Sid, he saw no use in prolonging this conversation further, for in craft the Mexican was more than his match. Boylike he preferred direct action.
“Sorry that I can’t see it that way, señor,” he replied shortly, gulping down his indignation. “I should be glad to furnish you with a copy of this tablet for your archives, if you wish,” he conceded, “but that original plaque is mine.”
He held out his hand for it with a gesture that told he was not to be trifled with further. Vasquez looked around desperately. Give him a moment more and he would think up some smooth reply that would at least gain time, perhaps argue the thing out of their very hands! But Sid made a determined lunge for him as the Mexican backed away.
At once the man raised his voice in a hoarsescream, “Ladrones! Gringoes!” he yelled, fending off Sid with a push of his hand while he turned the side with the plaque under his arm away from them. Then he ran for a door at the back of the school. Shrill yells and the shouts of Apache came in answer to his call from outside. There was not a second further to lose! Scotty sprang for the man, lunging low in the football tackle for his legs, while Sid with a fierce and accurate grip of his strong hands tore the plaque away from under his arm, the scuffle sending the three rolling together in a heap on the dirt floor of the church.
“Quick! Make for that rear door!” barked Sid as he and Scotty leaped to their feet. Vasquez squirmed on the dirt floor of the schoolhouse, cursing horribly in Spanish and rocking to and fro as he hugged a sprained ankle. If looks could kill, the malignant fire that darted from his snaky eyes would have paralyzed them both! Sid raced for the rear door while Scotty stood guard over the man with threatening fists. The patter of running feet sounded outside the ’dobe walls. Then a leggined Apache, with long, matted black hair, stood blinking in at them in the blazing square of sunlight that was the front door.
Sid had reached the back door. He looked in, then beckoned Scotty to join him. The boy raced over and, once inside the room, both boys slammed the stout panels behind them and let drop a heavy oak beam.
“There’s a small window, with a mesquite bush growing out in front of it, Scotty—give me a stirrup hold!” gasped Sid, who was breathing heavily from their tussle.
He stepped up in Scotty’s clasped hands and peered out the window, with one arm crooked over the edge. A mesquite grew just outside, and it was so heavily laden with dense clumps of mistletoe as to be in a dying state. Sid figured they might climb out into it and remain there undiscovered among the mistletoe clumps for a few moments. Outside he saw three or four Apache bucks running toward the schoolhouse from the grass huts perched upon the hillside. All over the village he heard an indescribable commotion of children and squealing squaws, but the Indians had no idea of what really was the matter. So far only Vasquez’s screech for help had come to their ears.
Sid climbed out through the window and then reached down his arms to help Scotty up to its sill.An uproar and a drumming of fists and impotent squalls in Spanish was sounding outside the oak door of the room as they both climbed out and gained the shelter of the mesquite. As the last buck outside ran into the school, Sid dropped to the ground and the boys raced for their horses. An outcry of Indian children greeted the appearance of the two fugitives, but none offered to interfere; only one little shaver had the presence of mind to run shrieking to the school door while Sid and Scotty were swinging up into their saddles.
“Now ride, Scotty, old scout—these Apache canrun!” grunted Sid, hanging low over his pinto and putting spurs to him. Scotty’s mare had no idea of letting that pinto leave her, so they galloped away from San Mateo together, leaving behind a cloud of dust and a riot of angry war whoops from the red men piling out of the schoolhouse.
Sid’s caution as to the running abilities of the Apache was entirely true. Behind them streaked out two lean and sinewy bucks, who had raced out of the school door and were coming after them like arrows. What was more surprising was the way they kept up that speed. The mare and the pinto were going like the wind, but not a yard did thoseIndians on foot behind them seem to lose! There was not a horse save their own in sight. But three men and a swarm of children were already running down the hill to where the ragged poles of a horse corral and the glint of a watering pond near by shimmered in the broiling sun. Even barebacked it would be some time yet before these could join in the chase, but when it was once begun it would be tireless.
Not a word passed between the boys. Both were watching sharp ahead for prairie dog holes and urging on their ponies at top gallop. If they could outrun those two bucks behind them for half a mile they would have passed the limits of even Apache endurance. Indeed, before half the distance between them and the friendly hills had passed, they saw first one, then the other, give up, with arms tossed up in weary abandon, as both bucks threw themselves panting on the bare plain. Sid and Scotty then let their ponies ride on at their own stride. It was well to have an extra spurt left in them to call on, even yet!
“Mucho bad, Sid; look back!” said Scotty, a short time after the menace of the foot-racers had disappeared and the two bucks had risen and begun slowlyto retrace their steps back to the school. Sid turned half around in his saddle. Out from the high ’dobe façade of San Mateo were riding four horsemen and their leader was swathed in a gaudy striped Mexican serapé. Surely he was that rascally Vasquez. And he would follow them until doomsday for the Red Mesa tablet!
“The whole thing’s bad, Scotty,” replied Sid. “This fellow knows now what’s written on the tablet. Nothing can take that knowledge away from him, either. We’ve got the plaque; buthehas the knowledge it contains—and I’ll bet it’s indelible in his mind! They’ll never catch us with those Indian ponies, but what’s to prevent his reporting this Red Mesa mine to friends of his down in Mexico? What then?—you can have my shirt if a squad of their guerrillas doesn’t cross the border, pronto, and get to Red Mesa first! See it? That’s where we get off. I doubt if this fellow will follow us very hard. He knows all he needs to know right now.”
Scotty rode on in silence. Indeed this businesshadbeen bungled! Far better would it have been for them to have ridden into Tucson and gotten some scientist whom Sid knew and could trust to read the Latin for them. The very word “Gold” is badmedicine to let get abroad among the sons of men! Many a miner’s stampede has been started on less.
As the trail reached the foothills they drew rein and looked back. Far across the plain that little knot of horsemen was still coming on in the tireless lope of the Indian pony. Give them twenty miles of it and their own horses would be run off their feet!
“Here’s where we’ve got to step light and easy, old-timer!” grinned Sid. “The Indians will be in their own country in these hills, and they know every short cut to head us off. I wish Big John and Niltci were here.”
Scotty growled assent abstractedly as they rode up a bare and rocky arroyo. He was thinking of all that this Red Mesa mine meant to him. If it really existed, its nearness to the sea made the engineering problems of it so simple that it would be easy to get capital invested in it. Las Pintas mines, only thirty miles south of Pinacate, had already established a successful precedent for that, for it now had a little railroad of its own and a ship base, just as the young engineer had dreamed for Red Mesa. But now that Red Mesa’s location was known to outsiders—and after being buried two hundred years, too!—the whole thing was a mess, and of his own naïve making.The curse of trustful youth! There was just one point of hope. According to government regulations, whoever got there first and staked out a claim owned Red Mesa, now matter how discovered.
Scotty raged inwardly over it, driving his mare hard under that maddening goad of chagrin. Sid, who was less interested, followed phlegmatically behind. As the trail reached up high on the flanks of the mountains and headed up over a “saddle” into the next valley, Scotty rode ahead, dismounted and began climbing rapidly up toward the saw-teeth ridges that hung low in the sky above him. A persistent suspicion had haunted him ever since this ride had begun, and now he wanted that suspicion verified or dispelled.
As Sid passed below him then halted his pinto and waited, Scotty climbed on up and soon was peering through a ragged granite gap in the ridge. Below him fell away the bare, sage-strewn slopes and the low ridges of the foothills. Beyond that the great sun-baked plain of San Mateo lay like a floor. Up on its lonely hill, dim, in the blue distance, rose the school, yellow, and as Spanish as old Mexico. A mass of green around it told of water and of its permanent Apache colony.
Scotty then searched the plain for signs of their pursuers. At first he thought they had followed them into the mountains, for the plain below was bare as a table. Then he drew back, with a shock of intense discouragement and misgiving, for his eyes had at last found them—riding along under the foothills, toward thesouth!There were two of the Indians following Vasquez who was quirting his pony mercilessly. The third Apache had disappeared.
“Gee!” groaned the boy anxiously. “He’s riding south! Toward the railroad! That means a telegram as soon as he can send one. And the third Indian is followingus!”
He scrambled down and told Sid his news.
“Kick me for a rank tenderfoot, Sid!” he groaned. “Kick me from here back to camp, and then kick me clear on down to Pinacate! Gorry, but I let the cat out that time!”
Sid grinned. “Buck up, old settler!” he cheered him. “I knew we were in wrong as soon as I saw that greaser schoolmaster. To give the Red Mesa plaque to some benign old priest to read, yes; but this bird was just a sinful man like the rest of us. The temptation proved too strong for him. Gee,but you handed him our dope, as innocent as innocent! Whee! Big John’ll think up something to do about it, though, and if he don’t we will. Remember, too, that Mexico is the land ofmañana. I doubt if they even get any one started up from Sonora before we can make a fast push and get there first, old scout, so don’t worry. Besides, they can’t cross the border, unless a party of guerrillas does it. And—they’d have a lot of explaining to do to get the grant of a claim from the government unless regularly entered as immigrants through Nogales—which is further from Red Mesa than we are. Our job, now, is to keep an eye on this third Indian. He was sent after us as a spy, to keep track of us and report, you can depend on that. We’ll send Niltci afterhim.”
Scotty rode on, more hopeful. Sid’s rugged cheerfulness was what he always needed to brace him up. The one strong note in his character was his indomitable Scotch persistence. He never let go a thing once his mind was set on it, but he was easily disheartened and set back, for he had yet to learn that nine-tenths of our troubles exist solely in our imaginations.
It was nightfall when they reached camp. Nota sign had they seen of the third Indian, lurking in the hills somewhere behind them. That he had seenthemwas quite to be believed; he was probably watching their entry into camp at that very moment!
Big John hee-hawed when the boys told their story; then he jumped up, cackling hideously, grabbed Scotty and booted him all around the camp. “Thar!—Ye pisen li’l, ornery, horned toad!—Gol-darn ye—anyhow!” he guffawed, administering that kicking that Scotty had begged for but Sid had overlooked. “You boys ain’t satisfied with draggin’ me down to a country glowerin’ with petrified lava, but ye got to add to my troubles by ringin’ in a bunch of greasers on me! I tell ye what, Scotty, Pinacate means, ‘Bug-that-stands-on-his-haid,’ in Papago talk, an’ durned ef I don’t stand ye onyorehaid, ef we don’t find no mine—an’ we won’t! Up you goes by the heels, I’ll be plumb hornswoggled ef I don’t do it!”
“Yeeow—attaboy!” yelled Sid, enthusiastically. “Well, how come? We’ve got to shake off this Apache, first, or he’ll follow us clear down to Pinacate. What’s the word, John?”
“My idee’s to do a leetle night ridin’, son—andsorter leave Niltci behind,” grinned Big John enigmatically. “Might’s well be rollin’ yore blankets right now, boys. The jerky’s all done and Niltci’s got it pickled away in a bunch of parfléche skins.”
That night the four horses, with Ruler and Blaze on rawhide leaders, pulled out of camp in the silence and gloom after dusk. One horse, Niltci’s flea-bitten mustang, was led riderless, his halter tied to the tail of Sid’s pinto. The white mustang that bore Big John’s long frame started ahead up the trail, a guide barely distinguishable in the faint light of the big Arizona stars. Black and inky buttes, jagged peaks and swelling ridges passed them in a slow procession around the horizon while Big John led on, stopping occasionally on the trail to reassure himself by some blazed stake set up in a cairn of stones or a rude corner of weathered granite rocks marking a turning point in the route.
The sun rose over the range of mountains left behind them next morning as the pack train wound down through the last pass in the hills and crossed the railroad track above Tucson. The horses were watered at a little river near the tracks, a river that was bravely hurrying on to its fate, to disappear forever in the thirsty sands of the desert to thenorth. Bare and rocky hills confronted them across the valley. As they headed into them Sid turned and looked back. A lone rider came galloping after them like a black speck hurrying out of the ranges across the valley. The whole party halted waiting for the rider, whether friend or foe.
It was Niltci, the Navaho, flinging along Indian fashion on a pony, his elbows flopping jerkily, his whole body swaying with the loose abandon of a rag tied somehow to the saddle.
“Well?” said Sid, as the Navaho boy overtook them, “what’s become of Vasquez’s Apache scout?”
Niltci’s bronze face cracked once in a saturnine grin. “Quien sabe?” (Who knows!) he shrugged his dusty shoulders. “Me got hees pony!” That was all they ever had out of him about it.
“Them thar rails says we gotta lope along pronto, boys!” said Big John as he pushed the white mustang to the head of the column. “Yore schoolmarm friend has gone by hyar, in the cyars, shore’s yore a foot high. ’Cause why? I didn’t see no pony tracks headin’ down fer Tucson, nohow, comin’ down this valley.”
“Think he’s gone to Nogales, by train, John?” asked Scotty anxiously.
“Shore has! Or else he’s takin’ the jerkwater local out of Tucson to San Xavier, so he can reach the Papago Reservation ahead of us. We’ll be crossin’ thet Injun ole folks’ home soon as we git out’n these hills an’ we’ll shore hev trouble!”
Big John shook his head ominously and urged on the white mustang. For him the race for Red Mesa had already begun.
“Yes, but the Papagoes are harmless,” objected Scotty.
“Not this time of year!” put in Sid. “This is corn time with them, and every other buck is drunk on a ferment that they make of it. That Vasquez could arouse them to almost anything, now.—Hey, John?”
“Shore, them Injuns is bad medicine for all white men in November!” quoth Big John sententiously.
They rode on in silence. A row ahead was tolerably certain, Sid thought. If Vasquez had reached them first by the railroad they would probably get a hot reception!
Two hours later their cavalcade filed out of the mountains and headed across a wide and hot plain. It was like riding into an entirely new world. Odd twisted and contorted cactus vegetation nowcovered the desert. Every plant and tree was different from anything the boys had ever seen before. Even the mountains were different, for instead of having the usual foothills they rose, gray and jagged and bare in the blue sky, abruptly from a flat and sandy floor. A faint tinge of green on their sides showed that the queer vegetation of this arboreal desert climbed up for a considerable distance even on that dry and inhospitable soil.
In front of them stretched a wide and flat plain, clear to the bases of the distant gray mountains. Sparse galleta grass and patches of gray sand dotted with creosote bushes covered it. There were clumps of mesquite, looking like dwarfed and twisted locust trees; here and there a bright green patch which, on riding closer, developed on to apalo verde, its bright green branches and twigs a dense lacery of glistening green. Sid rose close to one, looking for its leaves for apparently it had none. They were infinitesimal, spiky little things, adding nothing to its beauty, which he saw came entirely from thepalo verde’smasses of sap-green branches.
As they rode further to the southwest, multitudes of what looked like tall green fence posts appeared. They covered the ridges, each as straight as a lanceand as thick as a tree. They were small saguarro or giant cactus, ribbed and pleated in green, and covered with thorns. Further west they grew larger and put forth branches like huge candelabra.
To Sid’s naturalist soul all this arboreal desert was weird and beautiful and interesting. The tree choya, a clubby specimen with stiff branches of thorn bristles at the ends of crooked branches, began to appear; then the ocatilla, the “Devil’s Chair,” as Big John called it, a tree with no trunk but with more arms than an octopus and each branch covered with thorns and small green leaves bunched along a green stem as hard as iron.
Towards evening, across the gray-green miles, a small brownvisitaor mission outpost came to view. It was merely a large hut of adobe, but the bell in its upper tower told its purpose instantly. The boys thrilled as they looked at it, for they were now nearing the Papago Reservation and it was quite possible that Vasquez had forestalled them by train from Tucson.
Big John reined in the white mustang. “Nobody to home, thar, these days,” quoth he. “The Injuns is all away at the cornfields. We gotto ride in tharthough, an’ help ourselves to water afore these hosses kin go further.”
Sid would have preferred to keep away, but there was no choice. Water was king in this country! Theyhadto get it, if it meant encountering a thousand malignant school-teachers. Vasquez’s subtle Spanish mind had no doubt led him to reason that theymustcome here. But what redskin reinforcements he might have picked up in that lonely mission station imagination could not conjecture.
Slowly the miles lessened; the building loomed up brown and enigmatical in the setting sun before them. ’Dobe houses, each with a mesquite pole veranda in front, appeared like magic among the green stakes of saguarros on the hillsides; then a round stone oven out in the valley near the schoolhouse became plain to sight.
They were perhaps yet a mile away when around the corner of the building appeared a man on horseback. A cape or serapé of some sort hung over his shoulders, but it was too far away to get any sense of color from it. Niltci squinted his keen eyes and gazed at him long and fixedly while the others reined up.
“Mexicano!” he ejaculated.
“Sho’ is!” agreed Big John. “I’ll bet my hoss it’s that bird who tried to steal your tablet, boys!”
Sid and Scotty fumbled for their hunting binoculars. A moment later they had trained them on the man.
“It’shim, John, all right!” cried Sid. “Nowwhat do we do?”
The rider in the serapé answered that question himself, for, wheeling his horse, he galloped off at full speed.
“Ride, fellers! Burn it up!” roared Big John. “We got aboutnotime to git in thar an’ water our hosses. He’ll be back, right sudden, with the hull b’ilin’ of drunken Injuns!”