“Ah, Señor ’Ickman”—Colonel Urgo’s voice was tender as the dove’s—“I regret to learn you are here in the carcel on serious charges. The one, counterfeiting the coin of Mexico; the other, resisting officers of the law. Very regrettable, Señor ’Ickman. But, remembering your courtesies toward me on the train yesterday, let me assure you of my willingness to serve you in any way. You will command me, señor.”
A sudden lightning flash of comprehension shot through the clouds that pressed down on the prisoner’s mind. He saw the whole trick of the counterfeit dollars in his pocket and remembered the little Spaniard’s threat on the observation platform of the train the night before: “To-morrow we touch Mexico, where it is known that Colonel Hamilcar Urgo is a law unto himself.” Grant strained forward and his mouth opened to incoherent speech.
“And now, señor,” Colonel Urgo continued blandly, “unfortunately you will be locked up incommunicado.”
Five minutes later Grant Hickman, behind a steel-studded door in a Mexican jail, was as wholly out of the world as a man in a sunken submarine.
[CHAPTER V]
THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE
Benicia O’Donoju by the side of the big Papago Quelele and with the twin towns on the Line behind her—ahead the unlimned immensity of the wilderness—gave herself to the exhilaration of flight. For the skimming and dipping of the little car over the wave crests of the desert was like the flight of the desert quail, who rarely lifts himself above the height of the mesquite in his unerring dartings from bush to bush. On its partially deflated tires, provision against sand traps and the expansion of imprisoned air under heat, the skeleton thing reeled off its twenty miles an hour with snortings.
The final incident at the Arizora station—little Colonel Urgo and his unceremonious jettisoning—left no abiding impression with the spirited desert girl. His struttings and posings, his humorously impetuous wooing, resumed at the El Paso station after the two years’ interruption of her stay in the States, were for her no more than the high stepping of some barnyard Lothario. Benicia, little given to the morbid business of self-analysis, was not sensible of how exactly the dual strain of blood in her had reacted to Urgo’s advances; how it had been the swift thrust of Spanish temper which had prompted her to resort to the pronged weapon from her hair at El Paso even as the persistent Irish humour tang inherent in the O’Donoju name had flashed out in the dumping of the suitor at Arizora.
No, Hamilcar Urgo’s dapper figure was as evanescent as the mirage, but there was another which appeared to replace it. A man with the figure of an athlete and a forthright way of looking at one—perhaps the least bit too self-assured, perhaps inviting rebuke did one but feel in the humour of rebuking. One of those quick-witted Americans, ever ready on a hair trigger of resourcefulness yet seeming to carry a situation as if no situation existed. Nice eyes, yes. A pleasant laugh, rich in humour. But so New Yorkish! He thought the desert a place where no one lived willingly. Amusing conceit! And his name was—? Ah, yes, Hickman—Grant Hickman. One would try to remember that name.