“Well, son, Jed Hawkins’ specifications of the gringo he fought with atop the crap table in the Palacio tallies pretty closely with the young man as I saw him in my office earlier in the day. But here’s the funny thing: the rurales let Hawkins go even though he laid out two of ’em with a chair. Let that fightin’ wildcat go and trotted this fellah Hickman off to the carcel. That’s what gets me.” Doc Stooder gave his decision with a wave of the hand. He jack-knifed his bony knees up to his chin and waited the younger man’s comment.
“But what did Hawkins say started the big row?” Bim’s long face, all criss-crossed with the wind wrinkles that make desert men look older than their years, gave a vivid picture of his distress, of his eagerness to seize upon any detail that might point a solution of the mystery. Doc Stooder recited with picturesque detail Jed Hawkins’ story of the battle in the gambling palace as the redoubtable Jed himself had narrated it in the Border Delight pool hall before returning to his ranch at Dos Cabezas.
“That give me a clue,” he concluded, “so I laid my pipe lines an’ I’m looking for to tap a well any time now.”
Doc Stooder’s pipe lines—of information, if not of wealth—were the most productive of any along the Border. He was one of those rare white men in the Southwestern country who enjoyed the unreserved respect if not the love of the Mexican population, among whom nine-tenths of his practice extended. Though he bawled at his patients, stricken dumb with terror of their ailments, though he cursed the women and manhandled the men, no poor Mexican’s hovel of ’dobe was too far out in the desert to discourage Doc Stooder’s night prowling gas-wagon. Through dust storm and withering heat this blasted jack-pine of a man flitted on wings of gasoline, with his nostrums for dysentery and asthma, his splints for broken bones and needles for knife thrusts.
Drunk he might be half the time, an indifferent physician all the time—for the Doc had not been away from the Border for twenty-five years and never read a medical magazine. But under his hard rind of brutalities and cynicisms the Mexicans and Indians had come to discover a deep sympathy with their homely tragedies, their patient sufferings. Sometimes they paid him in coin; more often they paid him in slavish fealty the coin of which was information. Of gold strikes in the far hills; of shrewd business deals to be wrought through connivance of knavish officials across the Line; even of stolen jewels to be picked up from a pawnbroker:—these the flow of Doc Stooder’s pipe lines. No man on the Border for a hundred miles each way knew so much of the scrapple of life as A. Stooder, M.D.
“I’m lookin’ to hear of a woman,” the Doc drawlingly resumed, a wry smile greeting Bim’s gesture of negation. “Yep, son, when any likely lookin’ young fellah along the Border drops outa sight—and this Hickman fellah’s got an eye with him for all his Noo Yawk bridle trimmin’s—they’s a swish of skirts comes to my ears. Or”—he sat up suddenly and threw a bony finger at Bim—“or he knows somethin’ about why he’s come out here an’ went an’ babbled.”
“Rot!” Bim’s grey eyes were clouded with anger. “I told you he doesn’t know why we got him out here—and he’s not the babbling kind if he did.”
“Well, it sizes up thisaway,” the Doc continued, ignoring the other’s flash of temper. “They’s one man down in Sonora who knows all we know about the Lost Mission and like’s not a dam’ sight more. That’s this proud old don who lives down in the Garden of Solitude with his red-headed daughter—name’s Padraic O’Donoju, if I haven’t told you that before. If he ever got a line on the fact we’ve asked a Noo Yawk engineer to come out here to Arizora he’d put two an’ two together an’ figure we’re after that Four Evangelists church his ancestors built. You know he’s sorta king of all the Papagoes in Altar and—”
“How about your Papago who’s going to lead us to the Mission?” Bim interrupted. “If there’s any leak likely as not it’s through him.”
Stooder’s great head wagged slowly; a grin tilted the rabbit’s tail tuft under his lip until it stood out a quizzical interrogation point.