Miles unreeled behind him. Dim shapes of mountains dissolved to new contours and were left behind. The Doc came to a sharp eastward turning of the road but kept straight ahead out over the untracked flats to southward. He knew his way; the packed sand gave him as good traction as the road. Down and down into the unpeopled wilderness of sandhills and buttes bored the twin sparks of the little car.
Another shift of direction and the Doc was teetering up a narrow cañon between high mountain walls. His course was a dry wash, boulder strewn. Only instinct of a desert driver saved him from piling up on some rough block of detritus. Sand traps forced him to shove the engine into low, and the snarling of the exhaust was multiplied from the cañon walls.
A light flickered far ahead. A dog barked. The car wallowed and snuffled out of the wash to come to a halt before several silhouettes of huts. People, roused from sleep by the car’s clamour, stood ringed about in curiosity; one held a torch of reeds.
“Ho, Guadalupe!” Doc Stooder bellowed. A solid looking Indian with a mat of tousled iron-grey hair stood out under the torch light, grinning a welcome to “El Doctor.”
“Show me a place to sleep,” commanded the visitor, and the one called Guadalupe carried the doctor’s bed-roll to his own hut, of which squaw and children were speedily dispossessed. So the good doctor from Arizora slept the rest of the night in the rancheria of the Sand People, last remnant of that Papago family for which the Mission of the Four Evangelists was reared to save souls. In five hours the Doc had covered by gasoline what it would have cost Guadalupe of the Sand People as many days in painful plodding.
Morning saw the rancheria in a ferment of excitement and Doc Stooder viciously tyrannical in reaction from his accustomed alcoholic night. Guadalupe found himself in a difficult position. Once in a moment of gratitude when the white doctor had snatched his squaw from the tortures of asthma—the miracle had occurred in Guadalupe’s summer camp near Arizora—the Indian had babbled his knowledge of the buried mission, its treasure. But he had not counted upon this unexpected appearance of the white doctor, demanding to be led to the place of wealth. It is common with all the Southwestern Indians to believe naught but ill luck can follow any revelation to a white man of the desert’s hidden gold; some say the early padres, themselves consistent hoarders, inculcated this lesson. With the eyes of his fellow villagers disapprovingly upon him, Guadalupe first attempted evasion.
Stooder in an ominous quiet heard him through. Then without a word he opened a small medicine chest he carried in his bed-roll and took therefrom two tightly folded pieces of paper—blue and white. While Guadalupe and the rest watched, round-eyed, the doctor made quick passes with each bit of paper over the mouth of a small water olla. The surface of the water sizzed and boiled.
Guadalupe, two shades whiter, babbled his willingness to go at once to the place where the mission lay hidden.
“Prime cathartic for the mind,” grunted the Doc, and he tuned his engine for the trip.