[CHAPTER XXIII]
INTO THE FURNACE
Meanwhile from another direction adventurers were moving through the night upon the slag mountains of Pinacate. Empty space of Altar’s ultimate sweep was become almost populous. A strange company this, which passed ghostily under the great lights of the near stars with only the clink of bridle metal and pack mule’s canteens to give tempo to the march; Benicia O’Donoju, the desert girl, moved to this risky hazard by compulsion of an incubus of fate visited upon her through inheritance down the generations of her people; Grant Hickman, man of cities and crowds, whom destiny had whirled out into a country of the world’s dawn; Bagley the Arizonan, taker of chances, seeker after rainbow ends; and the two Papagoes, Quelele and El Doctor Coyote Belly, on whom was spread thin the veneer of so-called civilization.
It had been Benicia’s mastering purpose that had moved the cavalcade away from the Casa O’Donoju and out onto the desert immediately upon the return of Bim and Quelele reporting the leisurely approach of Colonel Urgo and his rurales. This was not flight, she told Bim; they would go in search of the treasure of the Lost Mission whose hiding place the old medicine man was willing to reveal, and if Urgo followed—well, eventualities could be met as they arose. In this resolve Grant had strongly seconded her. The girl’s slavery under the obsession of the bane of El Rojo, especially following the slaying of her father, had laid an impenetrable barrier between her and him; he had seized upon this possibility promising her emancipation from this horror. This chance failing, he had but the last desperate recourse.
The first hour of their pilgrimage away from the desert oasis Grant rode by Benicia’s side. He essayed to distract her thoughts from the tragedy that lay behind by questioning her on the revelations El Doctor had made: how had the old Indian come by knowledge of the buried gold and pearls; what impulse had led him to promise their restoration? But the girl was not to be drawn. She answered his queries by evasions or meaningless monosyllables. It was as if Grant were a stranger, impudently prying.
At first the man was stung by this treatment. His self-pride rebelled against so arbitrary a closing of the door of confidence against him. Why should he be treated thus cavalierly when the girl had surely read the great love he bore her and his single desire to place himself between her and the menace of one who had prompted murder? But these hurts did not continue long. Riding by Benicia’s side in the starshine, the man began to feel the emanations of a mastering will which poured from her as the pungent prickles of ozone surround a high-power dynamo. Her consciousness was frozen into a mould of purpose, locked against any distractions. Benicia was alive only to the single resolve to free herself from the curse of the Red One. Man nor spirit could invade that preoccupation.
There under the steady-burning desert lamps the man of the cities began to feel again that spell of the infinite which had chained him the night of Don Padraic’s passing. Here was he, lately denizen of a hive of stone and steel, tiny integer in that man-made machine called a metropolis, moving through the darkness over a land unsullied by hand of man since the floods of melting glaciers drove a shadowy race of stone-axe people back to the highlands. The loves and hates, the battles and deaths of these stone-axe folk occurred but yesterday in the time-sheet of the waste places. The to-morrow of ten thousand years would find the desert still untouched, supine under the stars. What then of hidden baubles of gold; what then of the love of a Grant Hickman for a Benicia O’Donoju? A fossil snail shell by the shore of the gulf left a more enduring record.
“The thing that’s sorta got me fussed is how I’m goin’ explain all this to the old Doc.” Bim’s voice broke through Grant’s contemplation of shadowy frontiers; he noted with a start that his horse had dropped behind Benicia’s and was ambling head-and-head with his friend’s. Bim drawled on:
“It sure will look like a double-cross to Stooder—my sailin’ off down into Sonora on the search for you an’ then hooking up with an outfit to go get all the plunder the old Doc thinks he’s as good as got his hands on. Me, I guess I’m queered all right,” was the man’s whimsical finish to his lament. Grant, who had been too preoccupied with the sweep of affairs to give any thought to his pal’s perplexities, could not now offer much consolation. A point of honour involving the grotesque creature who had elected to receive him as a book agent did not greatly move Grant.
“A’ course,” Bim continued his monologue, “the way things lie with the girl, her bein’ hipped on gettin’ back this swag somebody in her family lifted from the mission, I’m more’n willing to see her get it. But the old Doc hasn’t got a large store of what you might call sentiment, an’ I sure got my work cut out for me when I try to show him the light.”
“Too bad I got you into a tangle, old man,” Grant heartily commiserated; then with a hopeless little laugh, “My own affairs aren’t set on any straight and beautiful road to happiness either.”