Dust of the Desert

by Robert Welles Ritchie

The chirp of the wren from her hole in the sahuaro carries not even so far as the watching hawk on nearby skeleton ocatilla stalk. The meat cry of the prowling cat in the mountains where the wild sheep range is swallowed in the muffling depths of the canyon under her feet. Thin air seems too tenuous to conduct sound waves. Creatures of the wild lands move mute under the oppression of unbounded space.

Yet nowhere does rumour fly swifter than here in this vacant land. Comes a strange prowler to the waterholes of Tinajas Altas, and the antelope fifty miles away know the news and seek the hidden springs at Bates’ Wells. A Papago three days’ journey from the nearest rancheria stumbles onto hoofprints of six horses away over where tidewater climbs into the delta of the Colorado, and he turns back to carry report of revolution in Baja California. Strange signs tell their tales from the sands; the arrangement of little sticks conveys whole chapters of information to the wayfarer. When man meets man, be he white, brown or copper coloured, news is a torch to be passed on to a new hand. Nothing can be long a secret. The latent must out.

Even as the worthy Doc Stooder in his shabby office at Arizora had a never-ending messenger service from all the Border and the lands beyond, carrying scraps of oblique news, another far distant in the Garden of Solitude enjoyed the same intelligence. This was Don Padraic O’Donoju, last of the line of masters over the once-great principality of El Rancho del Refugio. Though a hundred years of revolution, of uproar and the teetering of political balances in the more populous Mexico to south and east of him had left to the last don of the O’Donojus little more territory than that comprised in the oasis of the Garden, still he had cattle enough to be counted a rich man and six generations of custom gave him unbroken sway over the Papagoes. From the Sand People of the Gulf away up to the San Xavier rancheria at Tucson extended the secret kingdom of Don Padraic’s influence. His only tithes were those of loyalty and the bringing of report. What the Papagoes thought Don Padraic should know, that he knew as speedily as word could be passed.

So, a week after Benicia had returned to the Casa O’Donoju, came a runner from the eastward—one sent by El Doctor Coyote Belly, whose winter house was at Babinioqui near the railroad. The runner had big news. El Doctor, known all over the Desert of Altar because of his reputed skill at curing hydrophobia and the bite of the sidewinder, had a sick white man—a seriously wounded white man who might be an American—in his house at Babinioqui and he asked Don Padraic what he should do with this man.

El Doctor was returning from the Medicine Cave of Pinacate—this was the runner’s tale—when on the road that runs from Sonizona to Hermosillo he found seven dead men; dead men with the marks of fetters on their left wrists. A little beyond he found still another; this one, lying in an arroyo, had been shot through the shoulder from behind and he still lived. El Doctor had tied the living man to his burro and taken him to his winter house at Babinioqui, where he had treated him with the most powerful herbs and had massaged the wound with the lizard image. The wounded white man would live. Coyote Belly did not wish to turn him over to the Mexicans, for he was a victim of ley de fuga and the Mexicans undoubtedly would shoot him again.

Don Padraic, whose charity was wider than his acres, made his decision instantly. He ordered Quelele to go, with the runner to guide him to El Doctor’s house, in the little desert car and to fetch the white man to the Garden of Solitude as soon as he was able to be moved. It was best, the master instructed, that Quelele travel in the night, returning with the wounded man, and tell no one of the object of his mission.

The big Indian stocked the car with gasoline from the tank behind the master’s house—a reservoir filled monthly from drums brought by ox cart from the distant railroad point—strapped canteens and oil containers on his running boards and was off. Don Padraic said nothing of the incident to his daughter.

That night Don Padraic and Benicia sat in the candlelight of the big salon or living room which filled the space of one quadrangle off the patio. In all Sonora there was no counterpart of this chamber of mellowed antiquities, the collection of generations of the O’Donoju. Low ceiled and with crossing beams of oak, whereon the marks of the hewer’s adze showed like waves; walls hung with tapestries between the heavy frames of portraits of grandees and their ladies of forgotten days; a great fireplace wherein a man could stand upright, with its hand-wrought andirons and heavy crane shank; floor almost black from a hundred years of polishing and with the skins of animals floating there like so many islands:—here was a magic bit of old Spain lifted overseas to find root in the heart of the desert.

Benicia, in a gown of rippling lines which left her strong young arms bare to the shoulder, was seated behind the great golden span of her harp. Candlelight falling across her shoulders made ivory the flesh of her bare arms as they moved rhythmically back and forth over the wilderness of strings. She was playing the Volga Boatsong, a peasant melody whose minors rose and fell to the sweep of oars. As the girl gave her heart to the music, the thrumming strings wove a picture of some barbaric steppe coming down to a sluggish river; boatmen chanting at the sweeps. The ancient room was a-thrill with resonance.

She finished with just a breath of melody, the song of the boatmen dying in the distance. Her eyes fell on the face of her father; it was deeply etched by the play of flames from the mesquite logs in the fireplace. Always he sat this way, moveless before the fire, when she played on the great harp o’ nights, freeing his soul to drink in the melodies; but to Benicia’s understanding eyes appeared now the semblance of a deeper shadow not of the firelight. She softly left the instrument and stole over to nestle herself on the broad chair wing, with her coppery head laid against the snow white one.