“I heard it! A bell! No illusion. Mind’s still clear—still clear!” On he went, his gaunt legs weaving in wide circles. He came to a dark patch on the hardpan and strided over it, unheeding. It was his missing coat, in the pocket the precious map of the treasure site. The Doc did not see the coat because again his ears were drinking in the maddening tolling of the bell; this time a little clearer down the wind in his face. An animal cry, half articulate, burst from his swollen lips:
“The mission bell! Bell of the Four Evangelists which I found t’other day! Callin’ me back!”
Right over yonder where the mountains cracked apart to let that arroyo down onto the plain: that’s where the bell sounded. Yes, sir, no mistake about it. ’Bout four-five mile, judgin’ from the sound. Hear what that bell’s a-callin’? “Gol-l-ld! Gol-l-ld!”
Doc Stooder, coatless, hatless, the high roach of his streaked hair fanning in the hot winds, was stumbling and falling—stumbling and falling ever forward toward the crack in the mountains. Light of madness flamed in his eyes; his great arms clawed forward as if to catch invisible supports to pull him the faster. Gol-l-ld—Gol-l-ld!
“Old mind’s still clear, else couldn’t hear that mission bell so plain— Gotta keep old mind clear—”
The way of the desert god, always beyond man’s comprehending, nevertheless sometimes approaches so close to the human scheme of thought and motive as to permit of analogy with it. When the director of destinies in the dry wastes seems to make a travesty of such a sacrosanct quality as human justice we may be moved to call the impulse satiric for want of a better name. Satiric, then, that reversal of the decree of death passed upon the Papago youth who confessed to murder before the overturned kettle at the Casa O’Donoju; more than satiric the moving finger now directing his path through the dead lands up to a union with the crazed doctor’s.
According to ancient custom the Indian retainers of the O’Donoju had taken the youth—his baptismal name was Ygnacio—down to the crater land of the Pinacate and there turned him loose without water to wander for a while and finally to die miserably. Other murderers had been so treated and never had been seen of men again. But the desert god who slays so peremptorily knew that Ygnacio had done the bidding to murder to save his brother from death—had killed without malice and only as the price of redemption for one of his blood. Wherefore the arbiter of life and death flung life at Ygnacio.
When he was athirst almost to the point of exhaustion he found a knob-like growth a scant two inches above the surface of the ground, recognized it for a promise of succour and with the last ounce of his strength dug the deep sand all about it. The end of his effort gave to him a strange and rare vegetable reservoir like an elongated radish, which miraculously holds scant moisture of summer rains the year round. “Root-of-the-sands” the Sonorans have named it. In the desolation between the Pinacate and the Gulf even the coyotes have the wisdom to dig for this precious sustainer of life.
Ygnacio devoured the whole of the root and was revived. He found others, which he tied into a bundle to carry over his shoulders. Food and drink had come to him from the hand of Elder Brother himself when it was decreed by man he should have neither. Wherefore love o’ life once more burned strong in the man. He set his course northward, travelling only by night when the heat had given place to the biting desert chill, keeping his precious roots buried in the sand while he slept by day so that evaporation would not rob him of the promise of escape from inferno. Straight as an arrow northward where, beyond the Line, lay tribes of Papagoes who never had heard of Don Padraic O’Donoju nor of a murderer named Ygnacio.