And Bim had shot truer than he could know when he sent this hint of big things in the offing back to a man two years out of uniform and moping for excitement on the sixteenth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Two years of civilian’s life had been just that span of slow moral suffocation for Grant. For all his thirty years, for all his better than moderate success in a profession of sharp competition, Grant Hickman still could hear the call to the swimmin’ hole of adventure. How he had yearned to hear it these past two years when the springs of his soul still tingled with the high tension of battle lines! Then this letter from a pal, promising all the substance of his dreams. It had not been a week in the engineer’s pocket before he was on the train for Arizora.
Grant went out to find Bagley. He located his office—“Insurance, Bonds, Investments” was the sign on the glass of the door; but the lock was turned and no one opened at his knock. His eye caught a corner of white paper projecting through the letter slot.
“Grant:—Called out of town—back Friday. B. B.” was the scrawl across the face of it. A stab of disappointment was his; he had builded heavily on that moment of meeting when Bim’s big hand would have his own in a vise. Nothing to do now but see the town and amuse himself as he might, or call on that mysterious Doc Stooder and discover why Grant Hickman had come racing out to this Arizora. He decided to do both.
The Arizora Grant saw in an hour’s swinging round the circle was something different from the “hick town” his New York smugness had pictured in anticipation. It was a condensed El Paso, jammed in the narrow compass of a mountain gorge, with railroad yards monopolizing the whole of the flat space between crowding hills. A man could go from his home to business by the simple trick of leaping off the front porch of his bungalow with an opened umbrella. Arizora’s streets were jammed with cars—fantastic desert coursers stripped to the nines and with canteens strapped to the running board. Sidewalks swarmed with men—big men with steady eyes looking out from beneath sombreros the size of a woman’s garden hat; men with high-heeled boots and the pins of many lodges stuck on their unbuttoned vests; lantern-jawed, hollow-templed men of the sun, whose bodies were indurated by the desert law of struggle and whose souls were simple as a fairy book.
Across Main Street stretched a fence of rabbit-proof wire with three strands of barbed wire topping that; a fence with something like a pasture gate swung back for traffic. This was the Line. On the hither side of that rabbit-proof wire web the authority of a President and his Congress stopped; on the far side the authority of quite a different president and his peculiar congress began. Over yonder, where stood a man under a straw sombrero and with a rifle hung on one shoulder, lay Sonora and the beginning of a thousand mile stretch of fantastic land called Mexico. A cart with solid wooden wheels and drawn by oxen under a ponderous yoke blocked the way of a twelve-cylinder auto seeking clearance at the international gate.
When he had tired of sight seeing Grant inquired at a cigar counter where Dr. Stooder could be found. The breezy man in shirtsleeves grinned and glanced at the clock on the wall behind him.
“Well, sir, usually mornings he’s over across the Line getting organized for the day on tequila. Mostly he comes back to his office round noon time, steppin’ wide and handsome. Office’s over yonder, top-side of the Bon Ton barber shop. You might give it a look.”
Grant acted on the cigar clerk’s advice. He located a dingy door at the end of a dark upper hallway with the lettering, “A. Stooder, M.D.,” on a tin sign over the transom. Entering, he found himself in a sad company. Three Mexican women and a man of the same race sat like mourners on chairs about the wall; a big-eyed child squatted in the middle of the floor and listlessly pulled a magazine to bits. The stamp of woe and of infinite patience was set on all the dark faces. Mephitic smell of iodoform was in the air. Grant hastily withdrew. After an hour’s walking and when the whistles were blowing noon he returned. A different collection of patient waiters occupied the chairs; evidently the doctor was in and at work.
He took a chair by the window where he could look down into the street and so keep the set masks of misery out of his eyes. After fifteen minutes the door to the inner office was violently opened and a Mexican woman shot out of it as if propelled by a kick. Thundering Spanish pursued her. Grant saw a scarecrow figure framed in the doorway.