“No, son; no. I got that Papago brother where he thinks all I got to do is crook my little finger an’ his wife passes away with asthma overnight. We can rely—”
A timid knock on the office door giving onto the hall. The Doc bellowed a command to enter. A wizened Mexican peon whose left arm was a stump sidled quickly through the doorway and stood bowing, shaggy head uncovered. He cast a quick glance at Bagley, then to the doctor for reassurance.
“Go ahead, Angel—shoot!” commanded Stooder.
“Señor, I hear from Jesus Ruiz, ’e’s cousin to me an’ rurale at the carcel; Jesus Ruiz ’e says the gringo arrest’ at Palacio goes last night in chain gang for Hermosillo—”
Bim leaped to his feet with an oath. The peon’s eyes were on Doc Stooder in an hypnotic stare.
“The gringo goes in chain gang for Hermosillo, but my cousin Jesus Ruiz ’e says that gringo mos’ like never arrive.”
That hour when Doc Stooder’s pipe line began spouting information Grant Hickman was discovering deep down within him an unguessed hardiness of spirit. A trial was on him, a test of his moral fibre no less than of his physical powers. At the end of twelve hours’ steady plodding across the desert he was coming into his second wind. Every effort a devilish ingenuity could contrive had been tried out by the four rurales, his guards, in their common endeavour to break down this gringo’s fighting morale. The single result was a fixed grin on features smeared with dried blood and sweat—a challenge provoking the Mexicans to fresh barbarities.
During the first dark hours of the march Grant had nursed the hope that at some point outside of town he and his fellow prisoners would be brought to a railroad station to await the coming of a train. He could not conceive a reason for transferring prisoners afoot when a railroad would serve. But with the coming of the dawn and the lifting of the dark from an empty land not even a telegraph pole raised above the scrub to point fulfilment of his hope. Just the dry ribbon of road stretching ahead and empty speculation as to the number of days or hours which must intervene between present misery and journey’s end. Grant never had heard the name Hermosillo until it was spoken by the examining judge the night before; he did not know whether the town was just over the horizon or half way to Panama.