“Reckon you might be selling Bibles to the Papagoes.”
“Come here, friend,” sternly from the doctor. “Now I give you the way inside if you’ll promise to keep it mum.” The storekeeper hopped around to lean his ear over the wheel in gleeful anticipation.
“I’m a-goin’ south from here to give a Chinese lady a lesson on the ocarina. So long!”
When the Doc skittered down the brief Main Street and out onto the thread of grey caliche that was the road to the mysterious south all of the west was a-roil with the final palette scrapings of the sunset—umber, pale lemon and, high above the mountains standing black as obsidian, cirrus clouds dyed a fugitive cherry. Ahead showed the ragged gate into the valley of El Infiernillo—the Little Hell—place of bleak distances between mountain ranges bare as sheet iron; place of unimaginable thirst when summer sun hurls reflected heat back from burning walls. Beyond El Infiernillo just a hint of peaks like fretwork spires marked destination for the doctor; there at the foot of the Growler range and where the Desert of Altar washes across the imaginary line between two nations, lay the land of his desire. Somewhere on the Road of the Dead Men passing through that savage waste perchance a nubbin of weathered ’dobe wall lifted a few inches above the sand to mark treasure of gold and pearls below; maybe naught but a charred timber end concealed by a patch of greasewood and crying a secret to the ears of the searcher.
Gold and pearls—pearls and gold! The Doc’s rapt eye caught the colours of sacred treasure in the dyes of the sunset and read them for a portent of success.
“Me, I’m a-goin’ just slosh around in wealth! Doc Stooder, the man with the dinero—that’s me!” The gaunt head behind the wheel of the desert skimmer was tilted back and A. Stooder, M.D., carolled his expectations at the new stars. Then he reined in his gas snorter long enough to fumble with his bed roll in the wagon box. Out came a square bottle of fluid fire, such as passes currency with the international bootleggers in the Southwest. The Doc drank heartily to the promise spread across the western heavens. The bottle was tucked in a handy coat pocket for future reference.
Nights in the desert along the Line are psychic. They are not of the world of arc lights, elevated trains and the winking jewels of white ways. In that world man has so completely surrounded himself with the tinsels of his own making, the noise of his own multiplied squeakings and chatterings, that he comes to accept the vault above him as under the care of the city parks department. His little tent of night is no higher than the towers of his skyscrapers. But in the desert it is different.
Emptiness of day is increased an hundred fold at dark because it leaps up to lose its frontiers behind the stars. Silence of the day is intensified to such a degree that the inner ear catches a humming of supernal machinery in the heavens. The eye measures perspectives between the near and far planets. And the soul of man hearkens to strange voices; sighings from the pale mouths of the desert scrubs, born to a servitude of thirst; whisperings passed from mountain top to mountain top; faint stirrings of the earth relaxed from the torsion of the sun.
Doc Stooder, desert familiar as he was, never could blunt his senses to this emptiness of night in the wastes. It awed him, left him itching under half-perceived conceptions of the infinite. Hence the bottle carried handily in his pocket. From time to time as he careered over the road faintly marked by the feeble sparks of his headlights he braked down to have a swig. The more he felt lifted above sombre unrealities about him the greater his impulse to break into song. The iron gate of El Infiernillo heard his roundelay.