“’Nicia, my strong one, your father has great need of you.”
[CHAPTER VI]
JUSTICE
The Mexican theory of the treatment of prisoners, their status before the law and the responsibilities of government toward them has few complexities and knows no interference on the part of prisoners’ welfare leagues or humanitarian congresses. When a man is arrested south of the Line he straightway ceases to be enumerated among the living; if, haply, he reappears in the course of weeks or years his family looks upon the prodigy in the light of a resurrection. Such resurrections do not occur often enough to dull the edge of the popular interest attending them. There are several dim roads, peculiarly Mexican, down which a prisoner may march to oblivion, with no record of his expunction left behind. Officials with easy consciences find these extralegal methods of clearing the docket handy and expeditious.
Grant Hickman, new to the Border and utterly ignorant of customs and manners in the republic of poco tiempo, necessarily could not possess a background of sinister knowledge against which to build doubts of his immediate future when he found himself locked in a cell. He was in darkness deep as Jonah’s. He ached from his scalp to his toes. A gingerly groping hand applied to various parts of his body took stock of the exterior costs of that healthy fight in the gambling palace. The heat of battle was still on him. He recalled how nobly the big Arizonan swung his chair from the vantage of the crap table; what a virile call to battle was the stranger’s “Ride ’em, Noo Yawker!”
As for Colonel Urgo’s clumsy frame-up—the handful of lead dollars in his pocket to prompt arrest for counterfeiting—Grant dismissed the trick as childish spite. When he appeared before a judge in the morning he could easily prove that the only Mexican money he possessed was that given him in change by the fat Chinaman and what he had taken in across the baize. Some tool of the vengeful little wooer of Benicia had “salted” him during the progress of the game.
But when morning light through a four-inch slit in the wall roused him from a restless sleep long hours of doubt were ushered in. Came a jailer with dry tortillas and water but no summons to appear before a magistrate. Three tortillas—clammy rolled cakes of meal tasting strongly of a cook’s carelessness in matters of excluding the unessential—were the sum of his receipts from the outside world that day. The jailer, who had the features of a bandit, merely grunted a “no sabe” at the volley of questions the prisoner launched at him during the minute he was in the cell.
Those hours of solitude in the six-by-ten box of stone gave opportunity for much thinking. Little by little it was borne in on Grant how completely he was a victim of whatever spite Colonel Urgo might care to devise; and recollection of his smiling face seen in the prison office the night before—thin lips parted over teeth in a ferret’s grin—confirmed the assumption that at devising mischief Colonel Urgo would be hampered by no lack of ingenuity.
Grant weighed the hope of aid from the other end of the town across the Border fence. Bim Bagley, the only friend he had in all the Southwest, was still out of town and would not be back until the morrow. Doc Stooder—small chance! The worthy doctor was velvet drunk when he received Grant in his office; for reasons which only his satiric humour could explain he had elected to consider his visitor an impostor. Little chance that Doc Stooder would pay him a thought until Bagley returned and inquired of his whereabouts. Remained just the cobweb contingency that the Arizonan who had fought beside him had escaped the clutches of the rurales; Grant was certain the big fellow’s simple loyalty to a fellow countryman would prompt him to set going some kind of inquiry from across the Line.