Grant turned back to the town, revolving over and over in his mind the first steps he would have to take to learn where Benicia O’Donoju lived; and, haply discovering the place of her abode, how to get there.
By the time night fell the restless visitor to Arizora had exhausted the town’s opportunities for amusement. He crossed the Line into the companion Mexican community, Sonizona. Here was beguilement enough. The rabbit-proof fence which converted Main Street into a Calle Benito Juarez also marked a frontier no less obvious. North of the fence was aridity to rejoice the conscience of the most enthusiastic prohibitionist; south of it the frail goddess Virtue tottered in her step. In Arizona a man sought traps and deadfalls consciously and with a secret thrill of bravado; in Sonora he avoided them only by the most circumspect watching of his step. Dark streets winding along the contours of the crowding mountains were raucous with the bray of phonographs and the tin-panning of pianos. Lattices over darkened windows trembled as one passed and the ghosts of whispers fluttered through them. Where an occasional arc lamp threw a spot of radiance across the ’dobe road lurked shadowy creatures who whined in an American dialect for money to buy drugs.
Grant did not realize that when he passed through the rabbit-proof fence he left behind him everything for which he paid income tax and other doles—protection, due processes of law, all the checks and balances on society and the individual painstakingly built up under the Anglo-Saxon scheme of things. He did not conceive himself in the light of an alien—of a not-too-popular nation—gratuitously placing himself under the protection of laws quite the opposite in terms of interpretation. Nor did he appreciate that, save for his suitcase and a signature on a hotel register, he had left behind him nothing to bear testimony to the fact that a man named Grant Hickman had come to Arizora and had left the United States to enter Mexico. All these inattentions he recalled later when opportunity for correction had passed.
Grant was circling the plaza, where the municipal band was giving a concert, when amid the strollers he thought he saw a familiar face. He looked again and was sure. Little Colonel Urgo, in a snappy uniform of dark blue with back-turned cape, was walking with a woman whose beauty was that of the blown peony. Chance brought Urgo’s eyes Grant’s way. They lighted with sudden surprise, then the colonel brought up his hand in a salute. A flash of teeth was cut by the travelling hand; it was like a too quick shutter on the villain’s smile in Way Down East.
Grant doffed his hat and passed on. Half an hour later a particularly glittering sheaf of lights he had noted in earlier saunterings pricked his curiosity and he turned into a low building just off the plaza. A bare front room easily visible from the street was a too obvious blind for complacent police inspection; through an open arch in its rear wall a crowded gambling room was given false length by wall mirrors in dingy frames. Fifty or more men and women were clustered about roulette, faro and crap tables. A fat Chinaman with a face expressionless as a bowl of jelly sat on a dais behind a little desk stacked high with silver and with deft movement of his fingers achieved nice problems in international exchange. Pursuit of the goddess Luck was being engaged in with a frankness and business-like absorption quite different from furtive evasions of hidden attic and camouflaged club across the Line.
Grant exchanged a ten-dollar note for a heavy stack of Mexican silver and moved over to a table where two ivory cubes were dancing to the droning incantations of a big negro game keeper. He was curious to see whether Big Dick and Lady Natural were as temperamental a couple in Mexico as he had discovered them to be in many a front-line dugout in France.
“Come to papa!” A raw-boned Arizonan across the table was singing to the dice held in his cupped palms, huge as waffle irons; a humorous imp of strong liquor danced in his eyes. “Cap’n come down the gangplank and says, ‘Good mawnin’, Seven!’”
The ring of dark faces about the green cloth stirred and white teeth flashed unlovely smiles when a six and a one winked up from the dice. A chinking of silver dollars as a red paw gathered them in.
“Baby! Now meet you’ grandpaw, Ole Man E-oleven. Wham! Lookit! Five an’ a six makes e’oleven! How’s that for nussin’ ’em along, white man?” The crap wizard looked across to Grant and grinned in amity. Mexican scowls accompanied the covering of the winner’s pile left temptingly untouched. Grant felt an undefined tugging of race bonds here in this ring of alien faces, and he backed the Arizonan against the field. On his third throw the big fellow made his point.
“That’s harvestin’! That’s bringin’ in the sheaves! Now here’s my stack of ’dobe dollars for any Mex to cop if he thinks the copping’s good.”