CHAPTER VRED MESA
ACROSS a bare and sandy divide wallowed and crunched a weary party of horses, men, and dogs. Bare and desolate mountains surrounded them, and one rose in sheer gray granite, capped by a black stratum of lava, apparently two hundred feet thick. Of even desert vegetation there was not a trace here. The sand buried everything, even the mountain sides. One could hear the faint lisp-lisp of it, moving stealthily along, grain by grain, under the flow of the southwesterly winds rolling up from the Gulf of California.
“Shore this is the country that Gawd jest didn’t knowwhatto do with!” ejaculated Big John, mopping his sweating forehead and getting a new bite on the corner of his bandanna with his teeth. “Whar’s yore desert gyarden, hyarabouts, Sid?”
“We’ll come to it, just over the ridge—according to the map made by the Hornaday expedition,” replied Sid cheerily. For perhaps the twentieth timesince they had left Represa Tank early that morning, that little book-page map was taken out and scanned by the whole party. Big John always liked to convince himself, by standing on the map as it were, that they were really following it. In these endless dunes it would be easy to take the wrong gap and miss MacDougal Pass altogether.
“See?” said Sid, pointing out the landmarks, “that range ahead of us they named the Hornaday mountains. They abut on the Pass in a right angle. I’d give a lot to know what’s in that angle behind them!Noone knows. There’s a little piece of the earth for you, Scotty, as unexplored as the North Pole!”
Scotty said nothing. He had not yet recovered from the disappointment of finding Red Mesa apparently a myth. The whole business looked worse than ever now. Even assuming that the Papagoes might have been confused in translating east and west and so have given Fra Pedro the wrong compass bearing, twenty-one miles northwestof Pinacate would beright here, where they were now riding—and there was no such thing as a mesa in sight anywhere! The mountains here were all of rugged gray granite, tumbled and saw-toothed, with faint tinges of green showing where some hardy desertvegetation had got a roothold. Mesa! This was volcanic country, all cones or jagged outcroppings of granite! thought Scotty, disconsolately.
He rode on dejectedly after Niltci and the dogs, who were scouring the sand for game tracks. A short way from here the first tracks of sheep had been seen by the Hornaday party, and further south antelope had been shot by John Phillips in the craters of the extinct volcanoes which dotted this country.
“There she is—there’s the Pass!” cried Sid triumphantly, as they topped the last of the awful sand ridges. His pointing finger showed them a river of desert vegetation below, a broad and rolling green river that flowed through the flat sandy plain of the Pass in masses of rich, living color. Tall green saguarros, like telegraph poles, rose in monumental spikes along the granite bases of the mountains on both sides. White fields of Bigelow’s choya barred their way, in big patches of them flung broadcast across the sands. Here and there the bright green puffball of a palo verde made a note of vivid color against the prevailing dark shiny green of the creosotes. At sight of all that verdure the horses broke into a run, twisting and threadingthrough the flat bare sand lanes. The dogs, now desert-wise, galloped along beside them, barking excitedly and hardly noticing the choyas, avoiding them instinctively.
And then Ruler gave tongue.Ow-ow-ow!he sang, the first blessed musical notes of the chase that had come from his throat since they had left the Catalinas! Niltci whooped a shrill challenge and lashed his mustang to full speed. After him put out Big John, and then Scotty, glad of any excitement to take his mind off his troubles. Sid rode leisurely after them, merely glancing down at the tracks the dog had discovered in the sand.
“Buck mule deer—a small one. Here, Blaze!—Heel!” he called sternly to the Airedale, who had started bounding after Ruler. Sid halted his horse and watched the three riders racing down the Pass. The frantic bellows of Ruler now told him that the deer had been sighted, and presently Sid got a distant glimpse of him, a tiny gray shape bouncing stiff-legged as he dodged through the desert cactus garden.
“Mule deer all right! Guess we’ll stay out, Blazie,” he told the dog. “There are enough afterhim now to catch him with their bare hands! Let us try for mountain sheep, meanwhile.”
He turned the pinto toward the base of the Hornaday Mountains which rose in rugged gray-green masses abruptly from the sand floor of the Pass. Their summits were ridged with rough pinnacles of gray granite. What might be on the other side of those ridges at once intrigued the exploring instincts in the boy. He was rather glad of this chance for a lone investigating hike—with good old Blaze his sole companion!
At the base of the mountain, where rock sloped up steeply from sand, he checked his horse and a joyful exclamation burst from him. An eager whine came from Blaze, as he, too, snuffed in the sand. Here they had discovered a regular mountain sheep runway! The big cloven tracks, like pairs of roll biscuit prints, were plentiful and deeply graven in the sand. They ran both ways, but a vague impulse, coupled with a decided penchant for climbing up and exploring these mountains, led Sid to halt at the first lone track that led off upward from the main game trail. It was now nearly noon, and he knew that the sheep would be high in the mountains at this time of day.
He picketed Pinto out on a patch of grass andstarted up on foot. Helped by Blaze’s nose it would not be very hard to follow that track. Where a print lacked in the rocky soil, eager barks from the Airedale now led Sid on. They were climbing fast and furiously before they knew it, the impetuous dog leading Sid up and up the immense craggy slopes. Below him the garden of the Pass rolled out in a great gray plain. A mile down it the faint belling of Ruler told him that the mule deer was still leading them a busy chase. His own sheep tracks were rising toward the ridge in a series of steep bounds, climbing with ease where Sid had to haul himself up or make toilsome detours to avoid formidable white choya bushes. Sid hoped it was a ram. Since the Montana hunt for the Ring-Necked Grizzly he had not shot a single specimen of that king of American game animals, the Big-Horn. A Pinacate head, to match his Montana one, would look mightly well in the Colvin trophy den now located at their new ranch up in the Gila Cañon.
Presently Blaze let out a volleying bray and raced on up the rocks toward the ridge. There came a clatter of rolling stones, and Sid looked up to see a huge ram, followed by two ewes, silhouetted foran instant against the blue skyline. Immense curled horns encircled the big sheep’s head. For a moment he stopped and looked back, his superb head poised grandly, his horns branching out in regular symmetrical spirals, his white ears standing out like thumbs in front of the horns and his white nose, cleft with the black mouth and nostril lines, a circle of white against his brown neck.
Sid shouted to the dog sharply and raised his rifle, but before he could steady the sights the ram wheeled and was gone like a silent shadow. Blaze yelped and roared out his ferocious challenge, then at Sid’s repeated yells he turned and came back whining with impatience. The youth began to feel that Blaze would be a mere nuisance in this sheep hunting because of his lack of experience. Ruler would have circled craftily to head off the Big-Horn and drive him back on the hunter, but Blaze was always for the stern chase and the pitched battle!
Sternly ordering the dog to heel, Sid climbed on up cautiously and reconnoitered through the rocks over the ridge. A shallow arroyo lay between him and the next ridge, and beyond that he saw over the mountain back, beyond a void of purple distance, aflat red table of rock, etched sharply by the ragged saw-tooth of the ridge between him and it. Sid glanced curiously at that odd rock formation for an instant, then his eyes swept the hollow below for sight of that band of sheep. Blaze whined and tugged frantically at his collar. He had seen them already, long before Sid’s slower eyes could pick them out in that mass of rocks and sparse vegetation below.
“Gorry!—There they go! Steady, Blaze!” he gritted through his clenched teeth and then raised the rifle. The army carbine’s sights sought out the game swiftly. Sid had filed a forty-five degree cut on the front sight, so that it showed up as a little white mirror over the flat bar of his rear sight. Cutting the mirror square in two with the rear bar, he found the galloping ram and raised it up to just under the distant shoulder of the Big-Horn.
Sid was just on the point of pressing the trigger—indeed had already felt the first movement of the creep of its bolt action—when a bright, shiny, horizontal flash,—the flash of an arrow—shot across the gray slopes of the ridge opposite! The ram staggered, stumbled, and struggled up a ledge, pawing convulsively with his hoofs. A second and athird arrow flash swept across the hillside and stopped in the ram’s flank. Sid gasped with astonishment. Those flashes werearrows! Then he grabbed Blaze’s collar instinctively, put down the rifle hurriedly, and closed his fingers around the dog’s muzzle so that he could not bark.
Sid was too nonplussed for a moment to speak. Arrows! Itcouldnot be Niltci, for the Navaho boy had long since abandoned his bow, now that his white friends kept him in unlimited cartridges. Sid watched the ram in his death struggles, not daring to move so much as his head. Those arrows had been shot by some unknown Indian. These mountains wereinhabitedthen. He could see the two ewes tearing wildly down the arroyo toward a grim and scowling lava field that lay far below. They disappeared around a corner of granite, some distance down, but still the Indian who had fired the arrows did not come out of his hiding place.
Who could he be? Sid knew that the Papagoes had long since abandoned this hunting ground. Their tank still remained, filled eternally from season to season with rainfall, the sole reminder of that time when the tribe used to gather here to drive the sheep and antelope into the craters andslaughter them wholesale in the trap thus set. Now the Papagoes had become a pastoral people, raising corn, selling baskets, receiving their beef rations from a beneficent government, which, however, kept them virtually prisoners on two small reservations. This Indian arrow-shootermightbe a wandering Yaqui from Mexico, but that was hardly possible. It would go hard with him if caught on this side of the border by any of our rangers!
Why did he not come out? Sid was sure that it was because he had heard Blaze’s bark coming up the mountain, followed by the appearance of those hunted sheep. He was lying low.
For what? To shoot down the hunter the same way that he had laid low the ram? Well, if he had to wait all day, he would not bethatvictim, Sid decided, then and there!
And meanwhile the ram lay a silent, pathetic heap of horns and hoofs, lonely under the hot sun, surrounded by the gray crags and green acacias that had been his home—while the enigma of his death remained still inscrutable. A stunted green saguarro rose near where he had fallen, a marking-post of the desert; the approach below him was guarded by a sturdy choya, to stumble into which would be agony.
For a long time Sid stood watching the place where the arrows had seemed to come from, undecided what to do next. There was a craggy boulder over there, jutting out from the hillside, and behind it strung out cover in the shape of creosote bushes and rocky fastnesses of jumbled granite. But nothing moved. The unknown Indian still lay hidden, watching that ram carcass, too, like a trap set ready to spring. Sid lowered his head slowly, inch by inch, determined to play this waiting game to a finish himself. His muscles were trembling from holding his fixed poise so long and the under tendon of his right knee ached.
It had never occurred to him that he was in any danger himself—when suddenly a savage growl rumbling in Blaze’s throat caused him to turn halfway to the right. Instantly came the twang of a bow and the sharp hiss of an arrow. Blaze bawled out in pain, then sprawled out flat, with all four of his furry paws spread out like woolly broom handles, while his pained eyes looked up piteously to Sid. An arrow transfixed him above his shoulders. The dog seemed paralyzed as Sid dropped beside him, hot anger welling up in his heart. A hurt to one’s own person does not cause a whiter rage than onedone to a dumb pet! Sid peered about him, seeking with glittering eye for something to fire at. Beside him Blaze moaned, sighed deeply, and then fell over stiffly, the arrow sticking in the rock and partly supporting him. Sid hesitated to pull it out. To start the blood spurting free now would kill whatever chance he had yet for life—if he were not already gone.
It seemed a most cruel shot, to Sid.Whyhad the Indian spared him and shot his dumb and faithful companion instead? Then he began to glimpse signs of wily red strategy in all this. The unknown enemy intended to capture himaliveif possible! With Blaze at his side it could not be done by any creeping attack, for the dog’s keen nose would immediately detect the near presence of any person whatever.
Sid looked cautiously all about him, finger on trigger and rifle ready. To the south the saw-tooth ridge rose high above him to yet loftier levels. All about him were jagged pinnacles, rough and craggy and full of hollows and rocky points which could not be seen around. To creep back down the mountains, somehow, and then fire three shots for help as soon as possible seemed to him the best plan. He hated toabandon Blaze while there was a spark of life left, but would it not be better for them to be separated anyhow, now? The dog might get away if he recovered even if Sid should be captured.
That arrow that had pierced Blaze had come from a rocky lair to the north of their position, just how far away he could not tell. The hiss of it had really been Sid’s first warning. Never again could he forget that sharp, ghostlywhew! Making for a sheltering hollow which would be out of sight of the rocky lair, yet be open enough for him to see around him a short distance, Sid began to crawl down from the ridge. As yet he had hardly moved, but his heart was beating wildly. It seemed to him absolutely hopeless to get away from this mountain with he knew not how many hostile Indians all around him. The very idea that this desolate land was inhabited by even a small tribe seemed weird, uncanny. Not a track save their own had they seen so far. Even the old wagon ruts of the Hornaday expedition had long since been buried in the sands or washed out by the rains. It had been all new country, all virgin. If an Indian band lived here they could not be Papagoes, for the first one missing from the reservation would call out a troop of soldiersafter him. Had Vasquez, then, already gotten up from Mexico with some Yaquis?
Sid thought of all possible solutions as he crept warily downhill, pausing before each craggy outcropping in his path before daring to pass it. Then a glimpse of something red which moved behind a bush below to the left caused him to stop and raise his rifle, and, while poised in the tense set of the aim, a sudden, almost noiseless, rush of feet behind him sent electric shocks all through him! There was no time to even lower the rifle and turn around. Subconsciously his leg muscles leapt out wildly. He had an expectant sensation of a knife entering his back—and then a thin band like a strap swept down and across his eyes and something tight gripped around his throat. Knees, and the heavy weight of a man on his back, bore him to earth. His arms sprawled out, dropping the rifle; his tongue shot out and out, gagging fiercely against that awful halter grip around his throat. Sid thought of the Thug strangling cloth in that last instant before an enormous drumming in his head gave way to blackness clouding over his eyes. Then came the heavy thump of the ground striking him, and unconsciousness....
It seemed but a very few minutes, the continuationof some terrible dream, when his eyes opened again. He was lying face downward where he had fallen, and his lungs were pumping and sucking air in great draughts, as if recovering from some endless and vague period of suffocation. Blood was trickling down his face and making a little pool on the rock, while a cut or a bruise, he could not say which, over his eyebrows smarted sharply.
Sid made a slight sound and attempted to turn over. Two grunts answered him. Immediately a strange Indian was at his side helping him turn over roughly, and he learned for the first time that his arms were pinioned behind. Sid looked up into the buck’s face. It was round, hawklike and stern, with narrow black eyes that had no pity. He recognized the type as Apache instantly. There was none of the stolidity of the Pima and the Papago in that face, nor of the regular-featured, straight-nosed Navaho, like Niltci, who resembled a copper-colored Englishman. This man looked more like some bird of prey, in the Roman hook of his nose and the craggy sternness of his mouth. The first word he uttered as he turned to his young companion confirmed Sid’s thought, for it was in the harsh Athapascan dialect of the Apache.
Between them they yanked the boy to his feet and started up the hill. Nothing further was said. They passed Blaze’s niche, the dog still lying on his side, a pathetic furry heap dominated by the arrow, and one of the Apaches pointed and let out a grunt. The other nodded. Evidently they considered him dead. They pushed Sid on down into the arroyo and crossed to where lay the ram. The older man then grunted a few words and at once set about paunching the game. The younger led on with Sid.
As they topped the rise of the next ridge, that same flat red rampart that Sid had noticed while stalking the ram burst on his view. But now it proved to be a really wonderful natural phenomenon. Fire, lava, a tremendous outpouring of the bowels of the earth had been at work here, no doubt during that period when the craters were formed and it had cast up that mighty red wall. Sid wished that Scotty, with his knowledge of geology, were with him now to study out the wonder of this vast red rampart before his eyes. The whole interior angle made by the bend of the mountains had been blown out here by lava explosion, the huge granite strata having been forced up on end like a pair of trap doors, making two enormous red ramparts, vertical-sidedand running out from the rocky angle of the hills until their outer ends rose like towers. These terminated the red walls, a thousand feet from the ridge to the end of the lower gap where the lava had burst out. At that lower end the ramparts rose at least four hundred feet sheer from the granite slopes, and a great apron of black and scowling lava ran down from there at a steep slope, to lose itself under the sands far below. But the walls were of sheer granite, colored red by the fierce heat of that molten lava of ages ago.
Red Mesa! Red Mesa! Red Mesa!—The certainty of its being the lost mesa kept singing in Sid’s ears as they descended. No such geologic formation as this could exist anywhere around Pinacate and not have been discovered before. Those ancient Papagoes who had reported it to Fra Pedro of 1680 no doubt had called it a mesa by reason of its resemblance to the true mesa formation. But, unlike the mesas of the north which are formed by water scouring and erosion, the walls of this one had been cast up bodily by the explosive force of pent-up lava. Still, there was resemblance enough to have given the place its name, Red Mesa, Sid was certain.
The young Apache kept behind Sid as he prodded him on downward. There was no trail. His savage guide avoided choyas and chose the best possible routes for descent, that was all, while steadily the giant wall of Red Mesa frowned higher and nearer above them. Sid looked up as they approached the base of the west wall. Flat slabs of bare, smooth granite went up at a steep slope for perhaps a hundred feet. Above that the red wall rose sheer to fissured and turreted pinnacles three hundred feet above the top of that awful slope. Inaccessible from anywhere below was Red Mesa!
After more rocky descent they came around the great tower at the lower end. Mighty and majestic, like the belfry of some huge cathedral, it rose out of the depths of the valley. A great smooth slope of black lava, shiny and slippery as glass, formed a slanting apron here, spanning the gap from tower to tower. But what an apron! Like the face of a dam, it spread across from one wall to the other, closing a gap three hundred feet wide and itself at least four hundred feet up to its edge, the towers of the two walls rising for half their height above it still. Geologically it was an imposing instance of the unlimited power of Nature. When that mountain sidehad burst, the whole round world must have shaken like a leaf and all the marine creatures in the great seas to the north have been swept over by a tidal wave of unexampled proportions! The lava had flowed out and downward, cooling slowly until this dam—for a cataract of fire—had formed and remained as a grim witness to the stupendous natural event that had once taken place here.
Sid, the educated white boy, had become so interested in reconstructing the geological aspects of this formation that he almost forgot the irksome tightness of the thongs that still bound his arms and the almost certain death to which he was being led. He knew only too well from border history the ways of the wild Apache! But the Indian guard behind him had no other thought but his duty as jailer. While Sid’s wondering eyes were scanning that giant apron of lava that flowed down out of Red Mesa, the Apache suddenly spun him violently around. Sid had one whirling glimpse of a small black opening in the lava above, looking like a ragged mouth, and his curiosity about it had just begun to leap up overthrowing the greater marvel of the whole cataclysm of Red Mesa, when his head was forcibly held from turning and his bandanna was whipped deftly acrosshis eyes. The sandy plain below disappeared from view, and in its place was now an impenetrable blackness.
Presently he felt the grip of two firm hands on his elbows. A vigorous push set his feet in motion to hold his balance. By the shortness of his step and the upward lift of it Sid knew they were climbing again. Often the Indian stooped down and took hold of his ankles to guide his footsteps to some secure place. Sid could tell by the opprobrious epithets in Apache with which the young fellow belabored him that he scorned Sid’s blind clumsiness and was angry and intolerant, but Sid made no sign that he understood the language. Once, though, he nearly gave himself away, when the buck shouted “Right!” sharply in Apache and Sid instinctively moved his foot over that way, searching for a crevice in the lava.
After a long and slow climb they stopped, and Sid felt the Indian’s fingers gripping him strongly around the back of the neck. It was useless to resist. His head was being forced silently down, and the boy submitted wonderingly. Then they went forward, bent over again, and twice he felt the top of his head striking bare and jagged rock abovewhich cut painfully. Instantly he thought of that little black mouth in the lava apron that he had caught a mere glimpse of when the Indian was turning him around. They were in that cave now, whatever it was. It was hot and suffocating in here. Sid choked for breath and sneezed as faint sulphur fumes pringled in his nostrils. He had a sense of being urged slowly upward. Now and again the fingers on his neck would press him to earth and he would go forward on hands and knees, where the least attempt to raise his head would result in a painful scratch from the tunnel roof that was evidently above them.
In time a draught of pure air began coming down from somewhere above. Sid could see nothing, yet with the buoyancy of youth he was strangely happy and also consumed with curiosity. They would probably stake him out and build a slow fire on his stomach when he got up out of this tunnel, but while it lasted it was all as exciting as exploring it on his own would have been! More air and purer came to him now. The sulphur fumes disappeared. Something wooden like an upright log ladder struck him on his forehead and the Indian raised him up and called out loudly. Muffled voices answered him from somewhere up above. Then he felt his guardstoop and lift him by the legs while invisible hands above reached down and seized him under the armpits. He was hauled up the ladder and then he sensed being in some sort of a room—being guided across it.
The indescribable sweetish odor of Indian was strong in here. Sid had been so often in tepees and hogans as to be able to recognize that smell instantly. All the races of man have a distinctive smell of their own, and the aboriginal ones, Malay, black boy, yellow man and red Indian are all agreed that the white man has a smell, too.
“White man smell like sheep!” as a Piute chief had once truthfully put it! The odor of corn meal, burnt feathers, paints and greases told Sid, too, that he was in some sort of medicine lodge. It could not have been a kiva, for the dank smell of damp stone was wanting.
Then a sudden lightening of all the cracks around that bandanna told him that he was in bright sunlight once more. There was the perfume of growing squash and melon and pepper, the faint odor of green beans, the smell of grass—and of water! Red Mesa was really a valley then, inclosed by two giant wallsand shut off from below by that ancient lava apron! And it was inhabited by a band of Apache!
That much Sid’s sense of reasoning had told him before the squeals of children and the cries of squaws and shouts of men came to his ears. People were all around him now, exclaiming in Apache, every word of which he understood. Then the deep voice of some one in authority came toward them and a guttural command to untie him was given. The bandanna was at once whisked from Sid’s eyes. He stood for a time blinking in the glare of the sun. High red walls rose up to right and left of him. A large tank of water, almost a pond, filled much of the basin between them, but there were strips of cultivated plants along its borders, too, and here and there he noted a grass Apache hut.
Sid fixed his eyes finally on a tall chief who confronted him. The man’s features were round, heavy and forceful, such as we are accustomed to associate with the faces of the captains of industry among our own people. His long, coarse hair fell around his ears, tied about the brows with home-woven red bayeta cloth. A single eagle’s feather sticking up from the back told Sid that this man was a rigid disciplinarian of the old school and a formalist inthe customs of his tribe, for it signified only one coup, such as a far younger man than he would have made in the old days. He wore a white buckskin shirt, with the tails outside coming down nearly to his knees. Long white buckskin leggins that disappeared under the apron of his breech clout told Sid, further, that this chief was a primitive red man, or else had not seen white men for many years.
As Sid’s eyes still blinked, getting accustomed to the strong light, a coppery grin cracked the chief’s features.
“Well! I’ll be—! What have we here!” he exclaimed in excellent English.
Then he turned angrily to the young buck at Sid’s side and burst into a storm of guttural Apache invective.