On a March evening of sunset splendour the worthy doctor descended from the single combination coach and baggage car which a suffering locomotive drags once daily from a junction point on the transcontinental line south through naked battalions of mountains to the ghost town of Cuprico. Once Cuprico was famous; once when primitive steam shovels nibbled at solid mountains of copper up back of Main Street Cuprico roared with a life that was dizzy and vaunted itself the rip-roarin’est copper camp in all the Southwest. But the glory that was Cuprico passed, even as that of Rome; to-day they tell of the town that when its mayor fell dead on the post office steps his body remained undiscovered for three days.
No romantic craving for revisiting scenes of his youth had prompted the Doc to his journey Cupricoward—he had been its premier stud player in a day of glory fifteen years before. No, a far more material urge had ended a period of fretting in Arizora by shunting him on a westward-wending train. For a week Bim Bagley, his partner in a secret enterprise, had been absent on his quest of El Doctor Coyote Belly and the New York engineer, Bim’s friend, who was reported to be wounded and under the care of the Papago medicine man. Ten days prior to Bagley’s excursion into Sonora had been frittered away in groping for information concerning this vanished engineer. All precious time wasted!
It has, perhaps, become apparent that Doc Stooder was not enthusiastic over the inclusion of Grant Hickman, the Easterner, in his golden scheme of treasure trove in desert sands. The stubborn refusal of Bim Bagley to move without this fellow Hickman’s being party to the enterprise had prevented a start on the expedition for the Mission of the Four Evangelists six weeks before. The canny physician—whose share in the joint endeavour was to be his exclusive information concerning the whereabouts of the Lost Mission—possessed in large degree that sense of divination bestowed upon folk of the desert which gives their imagination wings over the horizon of time. Each day of delay he read a day to the advantage of Don Padraic O’Donoju, certain sure as he was that the master of the desert oasis had come by knowledge of his own treasure hunt intent through mysterious desert channels.
The vision of gold and pearls Doc Stooder had seen in the depths of raw alcohol on a night of dreaming in his office had become a goad. So he came to Cuprico, the ghost town not seventy miles away from the supposed site of the buried mission; his intent was to pick up his Papago informant, who lived midway between Cuprico and the Border, and, as Stooder happily phrased his purpose, “give things a look-see.” If his luck was with him and he should stumble onto the mission during this solo game so much the better. Conscience nor maxims of fair play were any part of the doctor’s moral anatomy.
The Doc upon his arrival did not pervade Cuprico’s centres of evening society—the Golden Star pool hall and soft drinks emporium and the back room of Garcia’s drug store—for reasons sufficiently potent to merit a paragraph of explanation.
Years before, when he was a resident of the mining camp and had money, Doc Stooder took unto himself a Mexican wife who had a passion for diamonds. Mrs. Apolinaria Stooder had a way with her which seemed to win deep into the atrophied heart of her spouse, and he showered her with the stones of her choice. No woman from Yuma to Tucson—so legend still recites—“packed so much ice” as Doc Stooder’s. Then in an epidemic of typhoid, which the Doc combated with the heroism of a saint, Apolinaria died.
Alone and with his own hands her sorrowing widower gave her sepulchre somewhere amid the gaunt hills surrounding the town. He let it become known after the interment that since Apolinaria loved her diamonds so he had buried them with her, adding for good measure of gossip that he figured their total value at round $5000. Immediately and for several years thereafter all the prospectors for fifty miles about gave up their search for dip and strike and prospected for Mrs. Apolinaria Stooder. Failing to find so much as a “colour” of her diamonds, the profession drew the conclusion that Doc Stooder was a monumental liar. His popularity waned accordingly.
Shadows were lengthening when Stooder tooled a rented desert skimmer out of Cuprico’s single garage and brought it to a stop before the general store. Into the wagon box behind the seat went his bed roll, brought from Arizora and containing certain glassware whose contents were more precious to their owner than life itself; boxes of grocery staples; extra cans of oil and gasoline. Two big canteens on the running board were filled. Plugs of chewing tobacco heavy and broad as slate shingles were stowed in the tool box. In all this preparation the doctor’s long legs calipered themselves from counter to car with remarkable efficiency.
“Goin’ on a little prospecting trip?” the storekeeper had volunteered when the Doc first commenced his stowing. No answer.
“Figgerin’ on a little pasear down ’crost the Line?” hopefully from that worthy as he helped noose the tarpaulin over the dunnage. The Doc’s head was buried above the ears among the engine’s naked cylinders and he professed not to hear. When Stooder was seated at the wheel and the storekeeper had the edge of the final pail of water over the radiator vent he feebly flung out his last grappling hook: