DUST OF THE DESERT

Dust of the Desert

By ROBERT WELLES RITCHIE

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company
Printed in U. S. A.

Copyright, 1922,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY[Transcriber's Notes]

CONTENTS

DUST OF THE DESERT

[PROLOGUE]

Roads of men thread the world. They thunder with a life flood. They are vibrant with a pulse of affairs. By land and water and air they link to-day to to-morrow. But El Camino de los Muertos (the Road of the Dead Men) is a dim highway leading nowhere but back and back to forgotten yesterdays. Its faint sign-posts once were vivid in lettering of tears and blood. Its stages were measured by the sum of all human hardihood. Faith, valour, reckless adventuring, thirst for gold, love o’ women—these the links in the measuring chain that marked its course through a dead land. And black crosses formed of lava stones laid down in the sand; these abide over all the length of the Road of the Dead Men from Caborca to Yuma to cry to the white-hot sky of slain hopes and faith betrayed in those buried years gone.

The priest-adventurers of New Spain first blazed this trail through an unknown wilderness. Restless pioneers of the Society of Jesus and the Order of St. Francis, men with the zeal to dare, pushed out from the northernmost limits of the Spanish settlements in a new world with their soldier guards and their Indian guides. They fought death in a land of thirst northward, ever northward. The cross fell from the hands of spent zealots at some waterhole where water was not, and other hands followed to snatch up the sacred emblem and push it deeper into Papagueria. North and west through El Infiernillo to the red waters of the Colorado where the Yumas had their reed huts. Thence on to the west through a land that stank of death until at last the end of the trail was smothered in the soft green of Californian valleys—good ground for the seed of Faith.

The overland trail of the padres became the single trail from Mexico to gold when the madness of ’49 called to all peoples. Then the Road of the Dead Men took its toll by the score and doublescore. Then men fought for precious water at Tinajas Altas; many crosses of malapais mark the sands there. Bandits lurked at Tule Wells, ninety miles over blistering desert from the nearest water, to shoot men for the gold they were bringing back from California. The Pock-Marked Woman, mad with thirst—so runs the legend—walked at nights with the Virgin in the flats beyond Pitiquito and found water with celestial candles burning all about the pool.

So passed the wraiths of the gold madness. A railroad was laid down from the Pacific eastward across the desert. What once was called Papagueria had come to be known as Sonora, in Mexico, and Arizona in the Republic of the North. The Road of the Dead Men at its California end became a way through green and watered valleys where bungalows mushroom overnight; along its course in southwestern Arizona and northern Sonora it lapsed to a faint trail from waterhole to waterhole of a heat scourged desert. To-day this forgotten remnant of a high road of adventure and hot romance exists a streak in an incandescent inferno of sand and lava slag, wherein death is the omnipresent fact. Occasionally a prospector putters along its dreary stretches, chipping at ledge and rimrock. A Papago or a Cocopa creeps over caliche-stained flats with baskets of salt from the Pinacate marshes near the Gulf.

That is all. The Dead Men hold their road inviolable. It is dust of the desert.

That is all, did I say? No, the spirit of romance and the shape of illusion have not completely passed from El Camino de los Muertos. Remains that tale which carries itself over a span of a century and a half, linking lives of the present to lives of men and women whose very graves long since have passed from sight of folk. A tale strangely like the desert trail along whose course its episodes of hot passion and swift action befell; for its beginnings are laid in a mirage of an elder day which we of the present can see but dimly, and its ending is beyond the horizon of to-day. Would you know the full story of the Lost Mission de los Cuatros Evangelistas: how the baleful spell of its green pearls of the Virgin worked upon the fortunes of the House of O’Donoju and how the last of that house wrought expiation for the sin of a forbear through heroism and the fire of a great love—would you know the full story, I say, you must see with me the substance of a beginning.

No more can one plump into the middle of this the last of the romance tales of the Road of the Dead Men than could one drop onto the Road itself midway of its length.

A King in Spain once followed a practice of careless munificence. Whenever one of his generals in the great wars appeared worthy of reward His Majesty used to ink the ball of his thumb and with a grand and free gesture he would make a print somewhere on the map of Mexico, then called New Spain. Then the lucky general, taking this patent of royal favor across the seas with him, would hire surveyors to translate the print of Philip’s thumb into terms of square miles of domain. These square miles were his and his heirs’ to govern like little kings, with justice in their hands, the Church to give them countenance and Indians by the hundreds to serve them under a modified code of slavery. No man has lived since as did those magnificent possessors of Philip’s thumbprints.

The Rancho del Refugio in the little known reaches of Papagueria was one of these fiefs of the king. Michael O’Donohue, a wild man of the red Irish who had fought English kings and queens under the banner of Spain, had come by the grant originally and had taken a lady of Granada to the new world to bear him heirs worthy of their inheritance. Michael O’Donohue became Don Miguel O’Donoju, lord of a desert principality and a power at the Viceroy’s court in the City of Mexico. He established two rigid precedents to be followed by the house of O’Donoju: pride of race and jealous conservation of the family principality. It became a rule of the O’Donoju that none of the clan marry outside the pure Castilian blood—Irish excepted if Irish could be found; and a rule that, come what might, no O’Donoju pass title to so much as a foot of the Rancho del Refugio.

It was a day in April, the year 1780, that the clan O’Donoju came to the Mission of the Four Evangelists to lend the dignity of their presence to the solemn service of re-dedication. More than that, Don Padraic O’Donoju, venerable head of the house and master of the Casa O’Donoju in the oasis named the Garden of Solitude, was come to witness a personal triumph. For it had been his money that had gone to the Franciscan College to be used in the rebuilding of the frontier post of God after the Apaches had raided and burned it fifty years before. And one of his own sons, Padre Felice, had been the architect and builder of the restored mission and was to continue the priest in charge. Padre Felice was fourth in a line of O’Donojus to take orders, one from each generation since the establishment of the grant.

The O’Donojus—grandchildren, cousins and kin by marriage—had ridden five days and upwards from various sections of the Rancho del Refugio, up and out through the Altar desert to this remote sanctuary of God in the country of the Sand People. They came by the way called the Road of the Dead Men. Its asperities were softened by the quick desert spring which tipped each thorny cactus cone with candelabra tufts of golden and carmine flowers. The desert’s usual heat was tempered by the snows that lay in unnamed mountains to the north.

They came in a lengthy caravan of horses and burros, with half naked Indians to herd the goats and the yearling steers that were to be barbecued for the secular feast to follow the religious rites; with a half-company of foot soldiers from the Presidio del Refugio to guard the company against roving Apaches; Indian maids on mule back to serve the needs of their mistresses, regally mounted on ponies of the Cortez strain; baggage porters, cooks, roustabouts. Fully a hundred of the clan O’Donoju and satellites on pilgrimage over the Road of the Dead Men.

All of the O’Donoju were there but one, El Rojo—the Red One. The “Red One” was he because of the throw-back to the red Irish strain of his fighting ancestor Don Miguel. Red with the pugnacious red of Donegal was his hair; his cheeks had none of the sallow tan of the Spanish but were dyed with the stain of Irish bog winds; his eyes were blue lamps of the devil. A fatherless grandson of old Don Padraic, El Rojo had played the wild youth in the City of Mexico with only occasional visits of penance to the Casa O’Donoju in the desert country of the north until, when the tang of youth still was his, he had tainted his name with scandal. Followed his formal expulsion from the clan at the hands of the old aristocrat, his grandfather, and the closing of all doors of his kindred in Papagueria against him. El Rojo had ridden out to the wide world of sand and mountains an outcast but with a laugh on his lips; this a full year before the gathering of the family at the Mission of the Four Evangelists.

When El Rojo had turned lone wolf, a sadness that was not the sadness of shame settled upon the heart of one of the O’Donoju. Frecia Mayortorena, a cousin, one of the flowers of girlhood that caused old Hermosillo to be named the Little Garden, sat behind her barred windows on many a night with heart wild to hear once more the love song only El Rojo knew how to sing. Frecia Mayortorena, all fire under the cold ice of her schooled and decorous features, knew that the reckless devil with the flame-blue eyes had but to come and strum a love call on his guitar; she would go with him into banishment and worse. So on this pilgrimage to the shrine of the four holy men the girl, who rode with her father and brothers, allowed her imagination to frame the figure of a phantom horseman on every ragged mountain top. At each camp fire along the Road of the Dead Men, when the vast sea of desert round about was stilled under the stars, Frecia Mayortorena sat with tiny pointed chin cupped in a propping palm and seemed to hear in the clink of a mule’s hobble chain the opening chord of that song of songs,

Red as the pomegranate flower, my love,
The heart of him who sings.

The cavalcade came to the mission with the firing of guns and with shouts. The reed-and-mud huts of the Sand People beyond the cloisters disgorged their shouting savages to welcome the travellers. Padre Felice, a gaunt man with the face of an ascetic above the folds of his rough brown cowl, hurried out from the doors of the new sanctuary to meet and give embrace to his father, Don Padraic, and then in turn to all his next of kin; behind him followed his two novitiate priests who were, with Padre Felice, the only white men in all the stretch of Papagueria from the Rancho del Refugio westward to the Sea of Cortez. Five days’ travel were they from the nearest of their kind, and to west and north stretched unguessed leagues of the desert. Only the Road of the Dead Men linked them with the first of the Californian missions thirty days over the western horizon.

Missionary to the Sand People was Padre Felice—to that branch of the Papago tribe of tractable Indians who lived about the east shore of the Sea of Cortez and on eastward throughout the desert of Altar. The rebuilt mission stood in the middle of a small oasis which was fed by a stream down out of the burnt mountains not a mile behind; one of those rare and furtive desert trickles of water which hides in the sand most months of the year. The diminutive mission building, with its rounded dome of sun-burned brick, lifted in sharp outlines above the vivid and water-fed greenery of the oasis mesquite and palo verde; but the whole—oasis and house of God—was dwarfed by the bleak immensity of the flanking mountains leaping sheer from the plain to push their fire-scarred summits against the sky.

Before the choir of Indian voices intoned the opening prayer of the dedication service the packs of the O’Donoju caravan yielded precious things. There was a monstrance of heavy gold studded at its tips with precious gems; this was the personal offering of old Don Padraic to the shrine of the Four Evangelists. A chalice of gold, a great altar crucifix of gold inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a pair of candelabra wrought of chased silver and a communion service of the same metal represented the pious contributions of the rest of the clan O’Donoju.

But most precious of all the altar treasures was that double string of the pearls of the Virgin which by a miracle had been saved from plunder of the Apaches when the savages from the north had come burning and murdering fifty years before. For a half-century the lucent rope of moonbeam green had lain in the treasure vaults of the Franciscan College in the City of Mexico awaiting this hour of restoration. Green pearls fetched from the shell beads of the Sea of Cortez by Indian converts. Pearls hinting of caves of ocean by their shimmering, changeful lustre. Pearls to fire the lust of covetousness even from their hallowed place about the throat of the Virgin.

Padre Felice held the glinting rope of lights high in dedication, and as reverently he draped them upon the bosom of the sacred effigy the clan O’Donoju and all the dark-skinned children of the mission sang a gloria.

An untoward incident jarred the merriment of the feasting that followed the re-dedication of the mission. When whole beeves were being lifted from the roasting pits and the skins of wine and tequila were passing from table to table beneath the flowering mesquite trees a column of dust strode across the desert from the east and spawned two horsemen upon the oasis. One, a naked Indian of the stature of a giant, reined in his horse at the far fringe of the mesquite as befitting a servant. The second rode boldly into the circle of the tables. Silver clinked from bridle and stirrup leathers of his magnificent white thoroughbred. The rider’s silver-trimmed hat came off with a sweeping bow to include all there, and the red of his hair was like molten copper in the sun.

“El Rojo!” was the startled cry on every lip. Men scrambled to their feet as if to combat some overt move of an enemy.

“God be with you all,” came the Red One’s speech of polite greeting, made all the more ironical by the reckless upturn of his lips in a grin and the steely lights that flashed from his blue eyes.

“—And God, or his gentle vicar, Padre Felice, give me place at table with my noble kin,” El Rojo added lightly. “I have travelled far to have my cup here on this day of celebration.”

The laughing horseman let his eyes dance over the circle of faces until they came to rest for just an instant upon one. He saw cheeks flaming, eyes filled with wonder and full lips parted to give a heart its song. Frecia Mayortorena was seeing a vision in the life. Quickly El Rojo’s glance leaped on as if to shield the girl from contamination. The venerable Don Padraic, head of the clan O’Donoju, was on his feet now and trembling.

“We know you not, sir! We must ask you to begone!”

El Rojo caused his horse to rear perilously. Before hoofs touched the ground hardly two paces from the old man the rider again had made his full-armed bow. He spoke with mock respect.

“Sanctuary, my grandsire! I and my servant claim sanctuary of Holy Church. We have ridden far, and good Uncle Felice can not deny us the charity of his order.”

Don Padraic was being swiftly mastered by his rage when the friar to whom the unwelcome horseman had appealed pushed his way to the side of the older man.

“He speaks the truth, sire,” urged the man in the brown habit. “Here on God’s ground we can not be guilty of uncharity.” Then, looking up into the laughing blue eyes of his nephew, “I ask you to descend, sir, and refresh yourself and your servant until such time as you take the road.”

So all merriment in the oasis of the Four Evangelists was stilled. There in the single green spot on all the leagues of the Road of the Dead Men was wrought a comedy; a prelude it was to swift tragedy. The clan O’Donoju, its satellites and retainers ate and drank in silence, and apart from this company sat El Rojo and his naked copper giant alone. From time to time El Rojo lifted his cup as if in ceremonious health to his kin. Only Frecia Mayortorena read the glint in the blue eyes which told that the toast was to her—and to what would eventuate.

Near sundown El Rojo and his Indian rode off to the west, but not until the outlaw had spent a few minutes alone in the mission. Padre Felice saw him at prayer before the altar of the Virgin and was deeply touched that the spirit of religion had not altogether departed from the family’s scapegrace.

In the dark of midnight Frecia Mayortorena, who had cried herself to sleep, was awakened by the touch of a hand stretched under the side of the tent where she slept with the women of the party. A silver embroidered hat was slipped under the tent to rest on her arm. The girl dressed herself in a folly of love and terror and stole outside. The waiting figure of El Rojo’s giant Indian detached itself from the shadow of the mesquite, motioning her to a tethered horse. Blind infatuation for a hero lover brooked no questioning on the girl’s part. She mounted and followed her guide through the alleys of heavy shade.

A single dreadful cry sounded from out the opened door of the mission. A minute later a vague horseman spurred to her side and stopped the beating of her heart with flaming kisses. The silent desert swallowed three phantom shapes on horseback.

Dawn brought revelation and the beginning of that cycle of tragedy and dreadful pursuit of Nemesis which was to overwhelm the clan O’Donoju. Padre Felice murdered at the altar of the Virgin, where he had tried to stay the hand of impiety. The green pearls of the Virgin gone. A daughter of the house of O’Donoju flown with a thief and a murderer.

One word more and this mirage of years long dead fades. The curse that all Papagueria saw descend on the clan O’Donoju spared not even the sanctuary of the Four Evangelists. A year to the night of the Virgin’s despoliation the Apaches came again to this frontier post of the Church, and after a spiteful siege they slew the white priests, burned the mission and carried the Indian converts over the mountains into slavery. The Franciscans dared not rebuild on such accursed ground. Winds of the desert, which move sand mountains in their eternal sweep, played upon the ruined mission year on year to blot even a vestige of it from the eyes of man. God’s hand—so the Indians had it—shook the mountains behind the little oasis so that the source of the tiny life-giving stream was blocked. The green vanished like a mist, and scabrous desert cacti crept in on prickly feet.

The Mission de los Cuatros Evangelistas became legend.

[CHAPTER I]
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE LIMITED

The Golden Sunset Limited, Pacific Coast bound, snaked its way through a cleft in mountains and came sighing to a stop at the man’s town, El Paso. A patchwork crowd spilled out from the station platform to push around the ladders of the car icers to the train steps. Swarthy Mexicans under sombreros, with their black-shawled women and their little tin trunks, scrambled and clogged at the approaches to the oven-like day coaches forward. Pullman passengers sauntered over frogs and switches to plush and rosewood at the train’s end.

Among these was Grant Hickman, civil engineer, New York, lately captain in the First Division overseas. Arizona bound and west of the Ohio River for the first time in his thirty years, Hickman had broken his journey by a day’s stopover in El Paso. He had given Juarez a whirl, decided the kind of life he saw across the International Bridge was spurious and of little worth, and now was entraining again for his destination some four hundred miles to the westward. He gave the porter his bags to stow for him according to the directions scribbled on his Pullman ticket and began a lazy pacing of the platform, his eye alert for the colour and the bustle of it all. The blending of two races, of widely differing civilizations, here in this sturdy city gave Hickman’s restless imagination a smart fillip. He saw men with gaily coloured blankets worn as cloaks over their shoulders like prayer shawls in a synagogue; Indians with ornaments of beaten silver and raw turquoise hasps on their belts had their shoulders planted against solid brick walls with a grace born only of perfect indolence. All great stuff—regular musical show background.

On his first lap down the platform the New York man’s eyes rested momentarily on two figures standing in the drip of one of the car icers’ laden pushcarts. A girl and a man; she hatless as she had left the car for a stroll, the man all gesticulating hands and eloquently moving shoulders. Hickman caught a scrap of the man’s fervid speech as he strolled past; it was in a foreign tongue, liquid—almost lisping—with its softly rolled r’s and a peculiar singing intonation at the upward lift of each period. Spanish undoubtedly. Just an over-shoulder glimpse of a thin, dark face in sharp profile confirmed Grant in his guess at the speaker’s nationality. The girl’s bared head attracted his appreciative eye; it bore a glory of wondrously burning red hair, coiled in great masses, vividly alive.

Grant turned his corner at the platform’s end and began to retrace his steps, consciously bearing in the direction of the beacon hair. When he was still twenty paces off he saw that the swarthy man had gripped one of the girl’s wrists and that his hawk face was pushed close to hers in what might have been an access of fury or of pleading. Grant quickened his pace instinctively; he did not like the looks of that man’s talon grip on a girl’s wrist. He paused a decent distance from the twain and made a pretence of lighting a cigarette while his eyes glanced steadily over his cupped palms.

Then a surprising thing. The girl launched some verbal javelin at the man who gripped her wrist, at the same instant looking down at the clamping fingers as if to emphasize what must have been a command to release her. No answer but a flash of white teeth beneath a toy moustache. The girl’s free hand shot to a great coil of hair over the nape of her neck, came away with twin prongs of thin steel—anchorage of some hair ornament—showing below her clenched fingers. A lightning jab downward, and the Spanish-speaking man dropped the imprisoned hand to whip his own to his mouth. He snarled something in sharp falsetto. The girl with the red hair tilted her chin at him, and the laugh that slipped between her grudging little teeth was thin and sharp as the double dagger points she had used.

She turned, took three steps to a stool below the Pullman’s steps, mounted with a quick swirl of skirts and was gone. Grant thought he saw a half-formed determination to follow flash into the Spaniard’s eyes. Without knowing why he did it, the New Yorker hastily put one foot upon the lower Pullman step and bent his body so as to block access to it. Very painstakingly he unloosed the knot on his low shoe, straightened the tongue in place and began taking in slack on every loop of the strings.

A grunt of exasperation from behind Grant. When at last he straightened himself and looked around the Spanish gentleman was gone. He chuckled.

“Now that, señor, should teach you not to play rough with a red-head.”

He walked down to the Pullman his ticket called for and climbed aboard. Just as the conductor’s bellow, “Bo-oa-rd,” sounded, Grant, looking through the glass of the vestibule, saw the Spanish gentleman with a grip flying for the train out of the baggage room of the station.

Passing into the body of the car he found his bags piled upon a seat midway of its length. As he seated himself he was the least bit startled to see flaming coils of hair above the top of the seat across the aisle and one beyond his. Grant was not displeased. Girls with spirit always walked straight into his somewhat susceptible affections; and a girl who carried a home-made fish spear in her coiffure—

“’Scuse me, Cap’n; ef I could jes’ have a look at youah berth ticket. This gentmum says he reckons you-all’s settin’ in his seat.” Grant looked up to see the porter shifting uneasily before him and with a deprecatory grin on his face. By him stood the waspish Spanish gentleman; the latter inclined himself in a stiff bow as Grant’s gaze met his. Out of the tail of his eye Grant thought he saw a slow turning of the sunset cloud against the high seat-back ahead.

“This is my section,” Grant drawled with no show of inclination to arbitrate the matter. “I always buy a section when I travel.”

“But, pardon, sir—” The Spanish gentleman extended a pink slip. “The agent at the station has but now sold me this lower berth.”

“Indeed?” A slow ache of perversity began to travel along Grant’s spine. He had no love for a man who will manhandle women. “Indeed. The agent at El Paso sold me mine yesterday.”

“Ef I could see youah ticket,” the porter began feebly.

“You couldn’t,” Grant snapped. “Perhaps the Pullman conductor may.”

A cloud began gathering over the finely chiselled features of the Spaniard. His toy moustache went up. He spoke to the porter:

“The señor is not what we call sympatico. Have the kindness to fetch the conductor.”

The darkey disappeared. Grant turned to look out of the window, ignoring completely the standing figure in the aisle. But he did not ignore the reflection a trick of the sun cast on the double glass of the window. He saw there just the faint aura of a fiery head which refused to turn, though the compelling gaze of the standing man strove mightily to command it. Faintly in the magic of the dusty glass was carried to this bystander, whose neutrality already was considerably strained, the silent battle of wills.

The Pullman conductor bustled up to Grant’s seat. To him the Spaniard appealed, offering the evidence of the berth check. Grant vouchsafed no comment when he passed his own up for inspection. The man in blue compared them.

“Some ball-up somewhere,” he grunted. Then to Grant: “When was this ticket sold to you?”

“Yesterday morning at ten-fifteen o’clock,” came the prompt answer. The waspish Spanish person admitted he had purchased his only a minute before the train started. The conductor waved at Grant.

“Then I guess the seat belongs to this gentleman. I’ll have to find you one in another car.”

“But, señor, I have special reason for remaining in this car.” The Spaniard’s carefully restrained wrath began to bubble over. Grant looked up at him and smiled frankly.

“So have I,” he declared levelly. The other’s eyes snapped and his lips lifted over small white teeth in what was meant to be a smile.

“Señor,” he began with a shaking voice, “your courtesy deserves remembrance. I hope some day it may be my pleasure to show you equal consideration.”

“Until then—au revoir,” Grant caught him up. With the porter preceding him, the loser walked down the aisle to the far door of the car. As he passed the seat where the girl was he half turned with a sulky smile. But it was lost. She was looking out at the procession of the telegraph poles. Grant, catching this final passage in the little comedy, grinned.

“There’s going to be lots of paprika in this Western hike,” joyfully he assured himself—“or do we call it chili?”

[CHAPTER II]
A GIRL NAMED BENICIA

Grant Hickman was not one of that tribe dignified by the name of he-flirts. He abominated the whole slimy clan with the loathing of a clean man. When he had seized upon the part of studied rudeness toward the Spaniard it was not with the ulterior purpose of winning a smile or paving the way for acquaintance with a pretty woman; Grant’s vivid recollection of the sidewalk cafés of Paris in war time and their hunting women left him cold toward the type that is careless of men’s approaches. In flouting the foreigner and preventing his scheme to gain a place in the car with the girl he had bullied on the station platform the New York man had acted merely on instinct; he had protected a girl from annoyance. Yet now that he had won through by dint of crass boorishness—and the young man’s conscience gave him a twinge over the substance of his discourtesy—he suffered a not unreasonable curiosity regarding the possessor of that glorious beacon in the seat across the aisle.

Who was she? What circumstances had led to that scene on the platform which had ended with the unexpected dagger thrust of the steel hair ornament? Was this little black-and-tan whipper-snapper a lover—a brother—blackmailer? Grant’s galloping imagination built up flimsy hypotheses only to rip them apart. And his eyes dwelt upon the soft involutions of flame coloured hair, which were the only physical indices of personality granted him thus far.

Once the object of his conjectures shifted her seat so that a profile peeped out from behind the wide seat arm. Grant’s eyes hungrily conned delectable details: one broad wing of hair sweeping down in a line of studied carelessness over a forehead somewhat low and rounded; fine line of nose with the hint of a passionate spirit in the modelling; mouth that was all girlish, mobile, ready to reflect whims or laughter. The sort of mouth, Grant reflected, that could load a laugh with poison—even as he had seen it done that tense instant on the platform at El Paso—or freight it with sweetness for a favoured one. A world of fire and seduction untried lay in the full round lips, yet a chin with the thrust of will in it warned that the promise of those lips was jealously guarded.

A broad sheaf of sunlight lay across her cheek. Grant saw that hers was not the usual apple tint of the red-haired, the characteristic skin so delicate as to suggest translucence. Rather a touch of the sun had spread an impalpable film of tan, warm as the colour of old ivory, over cheek and throat. Duskiness of a southland dyed cheek and throat despite the anomaly of the burning hair, quite Celtic.

The afternoon waned with no favouring fortune throwing Grant’s way opportunity to study the girl closer. When the sunset was in the sky he walked through the train to the observation platform. As he drew near the glassed-in end of the observation car he noted with a little leap of elation that the girl was sitting under the awning beyond the screen door. He saw, too, the objectionable Spanish gentleman. His midget body was packed into a chair, one neatly booted foot under him; like some hunting cat he sat in watchful patience inside the body of the car, his eyes never leaving the figure of the girl beyond the screen door.

Grant passed through to the platform, not giving the Spaniard so much as a glance. As the door slammed behind him the girl looked up quickly. Grant saw her eyes were blue, saw, too, a fighting gleam quickly pass from them. Evidently he was not the one they expected to fall upon. A pretty confusion which tried to deny recognition swiftly replaced the strained look. Grant allowed himself to be bold to the extent of tip-tilting his cap. The girl evidently decided that to overlook a service done would be pushing decorum too far; she gave Grant a quick, shy smile which might have carried a hint of gratitude mingled with naïve humour.

“You were very kind,” she said as Grant took the camp-stool next to her, “and very amusing. The high hand—you possess the art of using it, sir.”

“I should be ashamed of my rudeness,” he answered with a quick smile. “But somehow I am not. Your way of repelling attack has its advantages, too—” His eyes strayed to the silver comb, whose concealed steel had been so efficacious on the El Paso platform. The girl reddened prettily.

“Always one must be—prepared against—persuasion,” was the answer that put a period to all reference which might be distasteful. Grant would have liked to know more of circumstances that had pushed this radiant young person into the grip of a bullying little civet cat of a Spaniard, but he dared not risk rudeness by further questioning. Reward enough was his already; he had it in the swift play of laughter across delicate features, in the sweetly resonant quality of her voice, all of a part with the engaging exotic character of the girl. For American she assuredly was not, though her trim tailoring was impeccably the mode of the moment. Her speech had a rippling musical lilt to it suggestive of a mother tongue less harsh than Anglo-Saxon; her enunciation was too perfect to be American. There was a trick of the eyes, something almost vocal, which was an inheritance from mothers whose speech is sternly hedged about by conventions but who find subtler ways of expression.

What could her nationality be? Assuredly not Irish, though eyes and hair were exactly what Grant had seen in the green island during a furlough spent in jaunting cars and peaty inns. Mexican? The flame hair denied that. Here was another mystery to be set aside with that of the encounter at the station. With two avenues of conversation closed Grant plunged blindly along one strictly innocuous.

“We seem to be getting rather deep into the desert.” He waved out at a hundred mile vista of sunset painted waste, all purple and hot gold in the glory from the west—a new picture for the eastern man. The girl made an unconscious movement of half-stretched arms as if to free her soul for wandering in limitless spaces.

“Yes, the desert,” she breathed. “How wonderful! And for me, returning to it after two years in cities—in cities where one chokes from walls all about—you see how the desert welcomes with all its glory.” Grant looked at her curiously; he saw a vision in her eyes.

“Then you like this—this dry and barren land? Why, I thought nobody lived out here unless he had to. No trees, no water—” The girl’s wondering eyes upon him checked his summary of the desert’s shortcomings.

“You do not know the desert then,” she reproved. “You have never seen the palo verde tree when every branch is heavy with gold. You do not know how the sahuaro wreathes itself a crown of blossoms—the tough old sahuaro, a giant with flowers on his head ready to play with spring fairies. Water!”—a crescendo gust of laughter—“You think water only comes from a faucet. If you dug for it with your bare hands—dug and dug in hot sands while death moved closer to you each hour, then you would come to see a real beauty in water.”

“You know something of the desert,” Grant conceded.

“Something! Señor”—the alien word slipped from her in her flurry of devotion—“señor, my home is there and my father’s home has been there more than a hundred and fifty years. I have been away from it in the slavery of the cities—two years at music in New Orleans and Baltimore. Now I return. To-morrow morning at Arizora big Quelele, my father’s Indian servant, meets me to take me a hundred miles—a hundred miles off the railroad and away from the nearest city to my home.”

“But Arizora is where I am bound,” Grant eagerly caught her up. “That’s on the Line, isn’t it? A hundred miles—why, then you must live in Mexico.” She nodded. His curiosity would not down:

“Then you are Mexican?”

An instant her blue eyes sparkled resentment. Grant sensed he had made some blunder, though he could not for the life of him guess how his innocent question could have offended. The girl, on her part, quickly regretted her show of displeasure; one new to the Southwest naturally could not know much about its social distinctions.

“Not Mexican,” she amended gently. “We are Spanish folk living in Mexico. We have always been Spanish since the time one of my ancestors got his grant from the king of Spain. Never Mexican. That sounds like silly boasting to you. When you have lived in this country for a little while you will understand why we have pride in our blood. Just as you have pride, señor, in your American blood when all the cities of your country are choked with mongrels.”

Hoping to hear her name, Grant gave her his own. She repeated it as if to fix it in memory; then she told him hers. Benicia O’Donoju it is written, but in her mouth the two words had a quality like a muted violin note, too fugitive to be imprisoned in letters. She spoke the surname without accent on any syllable—“Odonohoo.” The man grasped at something evanescent in the sound:

“Why, I’d pronounce that ‘O’Donohue.’”

“My great-great-grandfather did.” Once more Grant’s ears drank in that velvety contralto laughter which bubbled to her lips so easily. “You would pronounce his first name ‘Mike,’ and so did he.”

“Then your first name should be Peg or Molly-o,” Grant rallied. She shook her head in gay denial.

“Señorita Peg—impossible! Benicia is much better. It means ‘Blessed’ in our tongue. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ Señor Hickman; or ‘Blessed are the meek.’ I might be either if I could forget I am an O’Donoju.”

“Benicia.” Grant tried to copy the slurring softness she gave to the word.—“B’nishia: that sounds like little bells. I like it.”

“You are gracious, señor. I thought Americans were too busy with skyscrapers and wheat markets to learn the art of paying compliments gracefully.”

“Compliments are born, not paid,” he joked. Conversation limped no longer. Youth has a way of opening little windows in the souls of two brought together under its wizardry and giving each elusive peeps into secret chambers. It was Benicia who first became conscious of the lateness of the hour and the strain on strict canons of propriety her presence alone with a stranger on the observation platform had entailed. She arose with a little laugh.

“My guardian”—a roguish glance toward the tiny figure of the Spaniard still on the watch beyond the platform’s glass—“I fear he does not approve. And so—adios.” She gave Grant the tips of her fingers and was gone.

He watched her pass where the sentinel was sitting. The little man uncurled himself from his hump-shouldered crouch and scrambled to his feet as if he would speak to her. But Benicia, bowing sweetly, passed on up the aisle and into the alley of rosewood and glass beyond. After a moment’s hesitation the Spaniard came to the screen door giving onto the platform, where Grant now stood alone, and opened it. He scratched a match and put it to his cigarette. Grant saw the flare illumine a cruel hawk’s nose and thin, saturnine lips. The Spaniard inhaled deeply, then let thin streams of smoke seep from his nostrils.

“Señor”—his voice was cold as a lizard’s foot—“perhaps you do not know that Señorita O’Donoju is travelling under my protection.”

Grant took time to tap a cigarette on the heel of his palm and light it before he answered. His eyes were brimming with laughter.

“Perhaps not,” he said. “I congratulate the lady on her protector.” Again blue smoke played over the toy moustache; little eyes were snapping like a badger’s.

“I have the honour to inform you, señor, that your attentions to the lady do her no credit and that they must cease.”

“Really!” Grant’s settled good humour received a jar. He felt a tingling of fighting nerves down his back. “Really? And who constituted you judge of the value of my attentions?”

“Very naturally I have appointed that position to myself, señor, since Señorita O’Donoju is to become my wife.”

“Ah!” Grant’s interjection did not carry all the irony he would have wished. His assurance was a trifle shaken.

“And so,” the little man continued, “it is understood. You will not address the lady further.” Grant laughed.

“My understanding is very weak and not at all reliable. I promise you that unless the lady objects I shall continue to address her whenever opportunity presents.”

The little figure in the doorway straightened itself in an access of dignity. He snapped his cigarette over the car rail.

“Señor, let us have no misunderstanding. We approach the Border, where every man works justice according to the dictates of his own conscience. To-morrow we touch Mexico, where it is known that Colonel Hamilcar Urgo is a law unto himself. I am that Colonel Hamilcar Urgo. Need I go farther?”

“And I am Captain Grant Hickman, formerly of the First Division, Expeditionary Forces. Go as far as you like!”

[CHAPTER III]
DOC STOODER

With evenly divided cause and equal cheerfulness Grant could have kicked the porter and himself when he awoke tardily next morning and found his car at a standstill. He raised the berth curtain and looked out. On the eaves of a station he saw a white board with the name “Arizora” painted upon it and certain irrelevant advice as to the distance to New Orleans and to Culiacan. Out through the curtains popped his head and he whistled the porter.

“Why didn’t you give me a call?” was his angry demand.

“Yassuh, yassuh, ev’body in this kyar gets out here. Mos’ have gone an’ done it a’ready. You see, Cap’n, this kyar’s been switched off here at the Line two hours ago; train’s kep’ right on goin’ into Sonora.”

Grant, cursing his luck, boiled into his clothes and made a race for the washroom. He was hoping against luck that Benicia O’Donoju had not been an earlier riser than himself. With his face puffy with lather, he stopped from minute to minute to peep through the window giving onto the station platform. A decrepit autobus was backed up against the curb with a few passengers sitting patiently on its frayed seats; loungers were dangling their legs from baggage trucks; under wooden awnings of a business block across from the station a Mexican was languidly sweeping out a store. Arizora had not yet come to life.

Just as Grant was towelling the last remnants of shaving lather from his cheeks he made another quick survey of the platform and his heart dropped into his shoes. Benicia walked into the field of the washroom window; with her the unspeakable Spaniard, who carried her neat travelling satchel as well as his own bag. The girl was fresh as the dawn in a suit of khaki, short-skirted over high laced boots of russet leather. Rebellious hair strayed from beneath the brim of a soft-crowned Stetson, saucily noosed to her head by a fillet of leather under her chin. Soft green of a scarf lightly drew together at her throat the wings of her khaki collar. Nothing of the theatrical or self-consciousness of tailoring in the picture the desert girl made; she was the spirit of the Southwest, unsophisticated and without pretence. By her side the little Spaniard with his knife-edged trousers and thin-waisted coat appeared comic.

As Grant, towel in hand, lingered by the window feeding his soul with vain regrets, a crazy thing on wheels swung around the station and came to a stop by the girl’s side. It might have been called an automobile by courtesy, though there was little to identify it as a member of the gas family save that it went of its own traction. Engine naked, dash gone, two high-backed seats of unpainted tin like the wing of an old-fashioned sitz-bath and unprotected by a top; behind these a home-built box body wherein a trunk and a suitcase were lashed. Grant was seeing his first desert speeder, rebuilt for service of a highly specialized kind. The man at the wheel was no less in character—an Indian in overalls and high peaked sombrero; a giant of a man with shoulders of a wrestler and dull bronze features of a Roman bust.

What ensued upon the arrival of the auto nearly drove the watcher, shirtless as he was, out to two-fisted intervention. Urgo, the salamander, evidently was of a mind to make a third in the car. Grant saw his humped shoulders and expostulating hands, saw Benicia tilt her chin as she gave him some cold refusal. But the colonel calmly stowed his suitcase by the side of the trunk in the box body, evidently planning to use it as a seat. Again Benicia, now in her place by the side of the Indian giant, turned to give him peremptory refusal. The Indian at the wheel had his engine going and was sitting statue-like, utterly detached from the quarrel.

Urgo stepped on the rear wheel’s hub and had one hand on the floor of the box body when one of the Indian’s hands flashed up the spark even as his foot went down on the gear pedal. The crazy little car leaped like a singed cat. Colonel Urgo cut a neat arc, hit the road on his back and rolled over just in time to escape receiving amidships his suitcase, which the Indian driver had dropped from the car without turning his head.

In the Pullman washroom Grant collapsed to the seat and smeared soap into his eyes while he tried to check tears of laughter. The fall of the peppery little Spaniard had been colossal, and he guessed it had been wrought at the quick prompting of the spirited girl in khaki. What a wonder she was! All laughter and bubbling spirits one minute; quick as a leopard to strike the next.

“Man”—Grant addressed a beaming face in the glass—“man, always lay your bets on a red-headed girl!”

That minute of communion with a smiling confidant was an important one in the life of Grant Hickman, cautious bachelor. For it came to him with the force of a hammer blow that he wanted and must have this vivid creature of the desert named Benicia O’Donoju. Girl of fire and sparkle—of a spirit free and piquant as the winds that blow across the wastes—unspoiled of cities and the stale conventions of drawing rooms. Oh, he would have her! Gone she might be, out into a land beyond his ken. Unguessed barriers of circumstance, of others’ intervention, might have to be scaled; but somehow, somewhere, Grant Hickman was going to find and win Benicia O’Donoju.

Love at first sight—old-fashioned, mid-Victorian stuff, says the cynical débutante over her cigarette and outlaw cocktail. In New York tearooms and Washington ballrooms, quite so. Where girls of twenty must know the sum that stands in bank to Clarence’s credit, before Clarence is marked down as eligible, love at first sight is, in truth, dead as the dodo bird. Even so, spirit still calls to spirit and like leaps to like most all the world over. It is only where fungus spots stain the garden that love will not bloom.

When Grant quit the Pullman Colonel Urgo was nowhere to be seen. Grant idly wondered as he walked to the hotel, directly across a plaza from the station, how long it would be before he encountered this half-portion rival of his and what would be the Spaniard’s first move in his frank threat of reprisals of the night before. But when he was shown to his room—and the New York man whimsically reflected he had seen better ones at the Admiral on Madison Avenue—events of recent hours were pushed back from his attention by the more immediate demands of his presence in Arizora. He took from his suitcase the letter that had brought him sky-hooting across the continent to this back-water of life on the Mexican Line and skimmed it through:

“... I know just how hard it is for you to settle down to office routine after the Big Show. All of us are in the same fix, Old-timer, but I have the edge on you because out here in this man’s country there’s something breaking every minute. That’s the reason I’m writing you this mysterious letter.... Old Doc Stooder is counted the prime nut of Southern Arizona, but I believe he’s got a whale of a proposition and that’s why I’m counting myself—and you—in on the deal.

“I’ve sewed myself up with him—promised not to peep a word of the real dope to you in this letter. The old Doc says, ‘We’ll need a good engineer and if your buddy in France has a head on him and knows how to keep his mouth shut tell him to come out here.’ ... So if you still have that old take-a-chance spirit that hopped you through the Big Mill from Cantigny to Sedan I’ll see you in Arizora. If I’m not in town when you arrive dig up Doc Stooder—everybody knows him.

“Yours for the big chance,

“Bim.”

Grant folded the letter with a smile. Good old Bim with his “whale of a proposition.” Running true to form was Bim in this characteristic letter. Just as Grant had come to know and love him in training area and dugout: Bim Bagley, six-feet-one of tough Arizona bone and muscle and brimful of wild optimism. Always ready to take a chance, whether at the enemy on all fours through midnight mud or at fortune in the wild lands of the Border: that was Bim Bagley of Arizona, “the finest country in the Southwest.”

And Bim had shot truer than he could know when he sent this hint of big things in the offing back to a man two years out of uniform and moping for excitement on the sixteenth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Two years of civilian’s life had been just that span of slow moral suffocation for Grant. For all his thirty years, for all his better than moderate success in a profession of sharp competition, Grant Hickman still could hear the call to the swimmin’ hole of adventure. How he had yearned to hear it these past two years when the springs of his soul still tingled with the high tension of battle lines! Then this letter from a pal, promising all the substance of his dreams. It had not been a week in the engineer’s pocket before he was on the train for Arizora.

Grant went out to find Bagley. He located his office—“Insurance, Bonds, Investments” was the sign on the glass of the door; but the lock was turned and no one opened at his knock. His eye caught a corner of white paper projecting through the letter slot.

“Grant:—Called out of town—back Friday. B. B.” was the scrawl across the face of it. A stab of disappointment was his; he had builded heavily on that moment of meeting when Bim’s big hand would have his own in a vise. Nothing to do now but see the town and amuse himself as he might, or call on that mysterious Doc Stooder and discover why Grant Hickman had come racing out to this Arizora. He decided to do both.

The Arizora Grant saw in an hour’s swinging round the circle was something different from the “hick town” his New York smugness had pictured in anticipation. It was a condensed El Paso, jammed in the narrow compass of a mountain gorge, with railroad yards monopolizing the whole of the flat space between crowding hills. A man could go from his home to business by the simple trick of leaping off the front porch of his bungalow with an opened umbrella. Arizora’s streets were jammed with cars—fantastic desert coursers stripped to the nines and with canteens strapped to the running board. Sidewalks swarmed with men—big men with steady eyes looking out from beneath sombreros the size of a woman’s garden hat; men with high-heeled boots and the pins of many lodges stuck on their unbuttoned vests; lantern-jawed, hollow-templed men of the sun, whose bodies were indurated by the desert law of struggle and whose souls were simple as a fairy book.

Across Main Street stretched a fence of rabbit-proof wire with three strands of barbed wire topping that; a fence with something like a pasture gate swung back for traffic. This was the Line. On the hither side of that rabbit-proof wire web the authority of a President and his Congress stopped; on the far side the authority of quite a different president and his peculiar congress began. Over yonder, where stood a man under a straw sombrero and with a rifle hung on one shoulder, lay Sonora and the beginning of a thousand mile stretch of fantastic land called Mexico. A cart with solid wooden wheels and drawn by oxen under a ponderous yoke blocked the way of a twelve-cylinder auto seeking clearance at the international gate.

When he had tired of sight seeing Grant inquired at a cigar counter where Dr. Stooder could be found. The breezy man in shirtsleeves grinned and glanced at the clock on the wall behind him.

“Well, sir, usually mornings he’s over across the Line getting organized for the day on tequila. Mostly he comes back to his office round noon time, steppin’ wide and handsome. Office’s over yonder, top-side of the Bon Ton barber shop. You might give it a look.”

Grant acted on the cigar clerk’s advice. He located a dingy door at the end of a dark upper hallway with the lettering, “A. Stooder, M.D.,” on a tin sign over the transom. Entering, he found himself in a sad company. Three Mexican women and a man of the same race sat like mourners on chairs about the wall; a big-eyed child squatted in the middle of the floor and listlessly pulled a magazine to bits. The stamp of woe and of infinite patience was set on all the dark faces. Mephitic smell of iodoform was in the air. Grant hastily withdrew. After an hour’s walking and when the whistles were blowing noon he returned. A different collection of patient waiters occupied the chairs; evidently the doctor was in and at work.

He took a chair by the window where he could look down into the street and so keep the set masks of misery out of his eyes. After fifteen minutes the door to the inner office was violently opened and a Mexican woman shot out of it as if propelled by a kick. Thundering Spanish pursued her. Grant saw a scarecrow figure framed in the doorway.

Tall beyond the average and gaunt almost to the point of emaciation; frock coated like a senator of the Eighties; thin shoulders seeming bowed by the weight of the garments hung thereon; enormous, heavily veined hands carried as if hooked onto invisible hinges behind the stained white cuffs:—this the superficial aspect of Dr. Stooder. Vital character of the man was all summed up in his face: skin like wrinkled vellum stretched on a rack; eyes glinting from deep caves on either side of a veritable crag of a nose which had been broken and skewed off the true. A great mane of grey hair reared up and back from his high forehead; tufts of the same colour on lip and chin in the ancient mode of the “Imperial” added the last daguerreotype touch to his features.

Black eyes roved the room and fell on Grant, who had risen. The doctor crooked a bony finger at him and he passed through into the private office, taking the seat indicated. Without paying his visitor the least heed, Dr. Stooder went to a closet, poured two fingers of some white liquid into a graduating glass and drank it. His lips smacked like a pistol shot. Then he returned and took a swivel chair before a very shabby and littered desk.

“I never seen you before, sah”—the man’s accent reeked of Texas, the old Texas before the oil invasions. “So I’ll answer the question every stranger’s just mortal dying to ask and don’t dare. How’d I come to get this scar?” The surprising doctor tilted his great head back and traced with his fore-finger an angry weal which encircled his throat like a collar gall. “Well, sah, I was informally hanged once—and cut down. Now we can get down to business. What’s your symptoms?”

Grant, caught off balance by so unconventional a reception, stammered that he had no symptoms.

“My friend, Bim Bagley, who is out of town for a few days, told me to look you up. My name is Grant Hickman. I’m from New York.” The black eyes, never deviating from their disconcerting stare, showed no flicker of recognition at the name.

“What you want of me if you have no symptoms?” abruptly in the doctor’s nasal bray. “I’m not in the market for the World’s Library of Wit and Humour. I’ll cut you for a tumour or dose you for dyspepsia; but I won’t buy a book.”

“I have no books to sell.” Grant found his temperature rising. “I have come out from New York because you told my friend Bagley to send for me.”

Doc Stooder suddenly snapped out of his chair like a yard rule unfolding and strode to the closet. With bottle and graduating glass poised he bent a severe eye upon his visitor.

“You say you don’t drink. Highly commendable. I do.” Again the pistol shot from satisfied lips. He replaced the bottle and tucked his hands under the tails of his coat where they flapped the sleazy garment restlessly.

“You call yourself an engineer. How do I know you are?”

Grant had said nothing about being an engineer. Doc Stooder had identified him right enough. What reason for his bluff, then?

“My dear sir, graduates of Boston Tech. do not carry their diplomas round with them on their key rings. You’ll have to take Bagley’s word for it that I’m an engineer if my own is not convincing.”

The gangling doctor took two turns of the office with enormous strides; one hand tugged at his straggling goatee. Abruptly he stopped by Grant’s chair.

“Young man, what need do you figure a doctor in Arizora would have of an engineer—more especial an engineer from New York? Why should I tell this Bagley, who’s as crazy as a June-bug, to fetch a graduate engineer out to Arizora? Engineers are a drug on the market here—and every one of ’em a crook.”

Grant’s patience snapped. He rose and strode to the door.

“Dr. Stooder, I didn’t come away out here to your town to have somebody play horse with me. When you are sober you can find me at the International Hotel.”

A grin started under Doc Stooder’s moustache and travelled swiftly to his ears.

“God bless my soul, boy! When I’m sober, you say. I’m never sober and I hope I never will be—”

Grant slammed the door behind him.

[CHAPTER IV]
COLONEL URGO REPAYS

Before he had descended to the street Grant began to regret his flash of anger which had launched him out of Doc Stooder’s office. To be sure, the unconventional doctor had been insulting; his was hardly the orthodox reception to be expected by one who had crossed the continent to become his partner in some hidden enterprise. Equally certain it was that, to apply the cigar clerk’s pat phrase, Stooder was “organized for the day”; the finishing touches to that organization had been made in two trips to the closet in Grant’s presence. Need one have been so touchy under these alcoholic circumstances?

Strive as he would to put the best face on the matter, the man from New York could not escape a lowering of the spiritual barometer. Here he was, a stranger in an outlandish desert town with none to give him so much as a friendly glance. Glances enough came his way, but they were inspired by his clothes, the cut of which seemed to put them beyond the pale. Grant pleasured himself by reviewing his case in the most pessimistic light. He had been but a fortnight ago a sober and industrious citizen. Came to him a wild letter hinting darkly of some shadowy enterprise in a bleak land. Instantly he had quit his work and galloped across two thousand miles to encounter a scarecrow cynic who greeted him as a book agent.

He wandered aimlessly beyond the town and out onto a road which wound up to the edge of one of the mesas which were the eaves of Arizora. Well might drivers of passing cars stare at the figure of a broad-shouldered young man in a black derby and double-breasted coat, who was afoot in a country where no man walks unless he carries a blanket on his shoulders—unless he is a “stiff,” in the phrase of the Southwest. Even though February was but on the wane, already the sun was guarantor of a promise to pay with heat interest in sixty days.

He came to the top of the rise and halted under the psychic compulsion of boundless space. For space, crystalline and ethereal as the gulf between stars, flowed from him as an ocean. The air that filled this space was so thin, so impalpable as to seem no air at all, and it was tinted faint gold by reflection from the desert below. Mountains near and far were so many detached reefs taking the silent surf of the ocean of space; they were tawny where shadows did not smear purple-black down their sides. Near at hand showed the grim desert growths: prickly clumps of cholla, whose new daggers sparkled like frosted glass; fluted columns of sahuaro, or giant cactus, lifting their fat arms twenty and thirty feet above the ground; vivid green of cottonwoods laid in a streak to mark a secret watercourse.

To the man just come from the softness and languor of Eastern landscapes, where lakes lie in the laps of green hillocks, this first intimate view of the desert carried some subtle terror prick. The iron savagery of it! What right had man or beast to venture here?

Then flashed to his mind the picture of Benicia O’Donoju, the girl who loved the desert, who felt she was prisoner only when hedged about by the walls of cities in the East. Somewhere to the south where a higher raft of peaks marked Sonora’s mystery land—somewhere in country like this she was speeding to her home. What kind of a home might that be? How could a girl with the bounding vitality that was hers find life worth living in a land enslaved by thirst? A hundred miles from town or railroad, she had said:—a hundred miles deep in such a wilderness her home! Heavens, how he pitied her!

Grant turned back to the town, revolving over and over in his mind the first steps he would have to take to learn where Benicia O’Donoju lived; and, haply discovering the place of her abode, how to get there.

By the time night fell the restless visitor to Arizora had exhausted the town’s opportunities for amusement. He crossed the Line into the companion Mexican community, Sonizona. Here was beguilement enough. The rabbit-proof fence which converted Main Street into a Calle Benito Juarez also marked a frontier no less obvious. North of the fence was aridity to rejoice the conscience of the most enthusiastic prohibitionist; south of it the frail goddess Virtue tottered in her step. In Arizona a man sought traps and deadfalls consciously and with a secret thrill of bravado; in Sonora he avoided them only by the most circumspect watching of his step. Dark streets winding along the contours of the crowding mountains were raucous with the bray of phonographs and the tin-panning of pianos. Lattices over darkened windows trembled as one passed and the ghosts of whispers fluttered through them. Where an occasional arc lamp threw a spot of radiance across the ’dobe road lurked shadowy creatures who whined in an American dialect for money to buy drugs.

Grant did not realize that when he passed through the rabbit-proof fence he left behind him everything for which he paid income tax and other doles—protection, due processes of law, all the checks and balances on society and the individual painstakingly built up under the Anglo-Saxon scheme of things. He did not conceive himself in the light of an alien—of a not-too-popular nation—gratuitously placing himself under the protection of laws quite the opposite in terms of interpretation. Nor did he appreciate that, save for his suitcase and a signature on a hotel register, he had left behind him nothing to bear testimony to the fact that a man named Grant Hickman had come to Arizora and had left the United States to enter Mexico. All these inattentions he recalled later when opportunity for correction had passed.

Grant was circling the plaza, where the municipal band was giving a concert, when amid the strollers he thought he saw a familiar face. He looked again and was sure. Little Colonel Urgo, in a snappy uniform of dark blue with back-turned cape, was walking with a woman whose beauty was that of the blown peony. Chance brought Urgo’s eyes Grant’s way. They lighted with sudden surprise, then the colonel brought up his hand in a salute. A flash of teeth was cut by the travelling hand; it was like a too quick shutter on the villain’s smile in Way Down East.

Grant doffed his hat and passed on. Half an hour later a particularly glittering sheaf of lights he had noted in earlier saunterings pricked his curiosity and he turned into a low building just off the plaza. A bare front room easily visible from the street was a too obvious blind for complacent police inspection; through an open arch in its rear wall a crowded gambling room was given false length by wall mirrors in dingy frames. Fifty or more men and women were clustered about roulette, faro and crap tables. A fat Chinaman with a face expressionless as a bowl of jelly sat on a dais behind a little desk stacked high with silver and with deft movement of his fingers achieved nice problems in international exchange. Pursuit of the goddess Luck was being engaged in with a frankness and business-like absorption quite different from furtive evasions of hidden attic and camouflaged club across the Line.

Grant exchanged a ten-dollar note for a heavy stack of Mexican silver and moved over to a table where two ivory cubes were dancing to the droning incantations of a big negro game keeper. He was curious to see whether Big Dick and Lady Natural were as temperamental a couple in Mexico as he had discovered them to be in many a front-line dugout in France.

“Come to papa!” A raw-boned Arizonan across the table was singing to the dice held in his cupped palms, huge as waffle irons; a humorous imp of strong liquor danced in his eyes. “Cap’n come down the gangplank and says, ‘Good mawnin’, Seven!’”

The ring of dark faces about the green cloth stirred and white teeth flashed unlovely smiles when a six and a one winked up from the dice. A chinking of silver dollars as a red paw gathered them in.

“Baby! Now meet you’ grandpaw, Ole Man E-oleven. Wham! Lookit! Five an’ a six makes e’oleven! How’s that for nussin’ ’em along, white man?” The crap wizard looked across to Grant and grinned in amity. Mexican scowls accompanied the covering of the winner’s pile left temptingly untouched. Grant felt an undefined tugging of race bonds here in this ring of alien faces, and he backed the Arizonan against the field. On his third throw the big fellow made his point.

“That’s harvestin’! That’s bringin’ in the sheaves! Now here’s my stack of ’dobe dollars for any Mex to cop if he thinks the copping’s good.”

When it came Grant’s turn to throw his new-found friend played him vociferously against the Mexican field, calling upon all present to witness that a white man sure could skin anything under a sombrero, from craps to parchesi. For the first time since he had left the train that morning the New Yorker felt the warming tingle of fellowship; the gaunt, sunburned face of the desert man with the dancing imps of humour in the eyes was a jovial hailing sign of fraternity.

“Shoot ’em, Mister Man! You’re rigged for Broadway, Noo Yawk, but I can see from here that you has the lovin’ touch.”

Grant rolled and won, rolled and won again. Carelessly he dropped the heavy fistfuls of dollars into the side pocket of his coat. Even when he lost his point, he had a bulging weight of silver there. Grant was enjoying the game itself not nearly so keenly as he did the Arizonan across the table, his Homeric humour and the bewildering wonder of his vocabulary. So intent was he that he did not see Colonel Urgo enter, nor did he catch the almost imperceptible nod toward him that the little officer passed to a furtive-eyed tatterdemalion who accompanied him. The latter by a devious course of idling finally came to a stand behind Grant and appeared to be a keen spectator of the game.

“Ole Man Jed Hawkins’ son is a-goin’ splatter out a natch’ral. Ole Man Hawkins’ son is a-goin’ turn loose the hay cutter an’ mow him a mess of greens. Comes Little Joe! Dip in, Mexes, an’ takes yo’ fodder! Now the man from Dos Cabezas starts a-runnin’—”

A hand was busy at Grant’s pocket—a slick, suave hand which replaced weight for weight what it subtracted. Just three quick passes and the tatterdemalion who had been so intent on the prancing dice lost interest and moved away.

It came Grant’s turn to roll the dice. He dipped into his pocket and carelessly dropped a stack of eight silver dollars on the table. One of them rolled a little way and flopped in front of a Mexican player. The latter started to pass the dollar back to Grant when he hesitated, gave the coin a sharp scrutiny, then balanced it on a finger tip and struck its edge with one from his own pile.

“Señor!” An ugly droop to his smiling lips. “Ah, no, señor!”

He passed the dollar over to Grant with exaggerated courtesy. Eyes all about the table, which had followed the pantomime with avid interest, now centred on the American’s face. As if on a signal the fat Chinaman at the exchange desk waddled over to shoulder his way officiously to Grant’s side. He growled something in Spanish and held out his hand. Dazedly Grant laid the suspected dollar in a creasy palm. The Chinaman flung it on the green felt with a contemptuous “Faugh!” and he pointed imperiously at Grant’s bulging pocket.

“It’s a frame, pardner,” called the Arizonan. “If your money’s bogus it’s what the Chink himself handed you.”

“I came in here with American money and changed it at your desk,” Grant quietly addressed the Chinaman. “See here; this is the money I either got from you or won at this table.” He brought from his pocket a brimming handful of Mexican dollars and dumped them on the cloth. Two or three of the heavy discs shone true silver; the others were clumsy counterfeits, dull and leaden.

A cry, half snarling laughter, from the crowd about the table, now grown to a score: “Aha—gr-ringo!”

A movement of the crowd forward to rush Grant against the wall. Then with a cougar’s spring the big Arizonan was on the solid table, feet spread wide apart, head towering above the tin light shade. He balanced a chair in one hand as the conductor of an orchestra might lift his baton. His gaunt features were split in a wide grin. Before Grant could gather his senses a big paw had him by the shoulder and was dragging him up onto the green island of refuge.

“They don’t saw no whizzer off on a white man wiles ole Jed Hawkins’ boy got his health,” Grant’s companion bellowed a welcome. “I got these greasers’ number, brother!”

Grant’s gaze as he rose to his feet over the heads all about encountered two interesting objects. One was Colonel Urgo, who stood alone in a far corner of the room; the colonel was smiling with rare good humour. A second was a man wrapped about with a blanket, over whose shoulder appeared the tip of a rifle; he was just coming through from the front room on a run and there were three like him following. Rurales, the somewhat informal bandit-policemen of Mexico.

Just what ensued Grant never could quite piece together. He remembered seeing Hawkins wrench off a leg from his chair and send it whizzing at a central cluster of light globes in mid-ceiling. They snuffed out with a thin tinkling of glass. Then the rush.

Out of the dark swirl of figures about the table’s edge a vivid spit of flame—roar of a pistol shot. Hands grappling for braced legs on the table top. “Huh” of breath expelled as Hawkins swung his chair in a wide sweep downward. A cry, “Hesus!” Oaths chirped in the voice of songbirds. A knife missing its objective and trembling rigid in the midst of the baize.

The table collapsed with dull creakings, and then the affair of mauling and writhing became a bear pit. Grant fought with steady, measured short-arm jabs delivered at whatever object lay nearest. When one arm was pinioned he swung the other against the restraining body until it was freed. Some one sank teeth in his shoulder.

“Ride ’em, Noo Yawker!” came the shrill cry of battle from somewhere in the mill. Then a blow at the base of the brain which meant lights out for Grant.

When consciousness came halting back he found himself standing half-supported by two of the rurales in a dark street and before a high gate in unbroken masonry. The gate swung inward. He was propelled violently through the dark arch and into a small room, where sat a man in uniform under a dusty electric globe. He did not look up from the scratching of his pen on the desk before him.

A door behind the writing man opened and Colonel Urgo entered. His start at seeing the bloodied and half-clothed figure which the rurales supported was well acted. A hand came to the vizor of his cap in mocking salute. Then he turned to the man at the desk and exchanged low words with him.

“Ah, Señor ’Ickman”—Colonel Urgo’s voice was tender as the dove’s—“I regret to learn you are here in the carcel on serious charges. The one, counterfeiting the coin of Mexico; the other, resisting officers of the law. Very regrettable, Señor ’Ickman. But, remembering your courtesies toward me on the train yesterday, let me assure you of my willingness to serve you in any way. You will command me, señor.”

A sudden lightning flash of comprehension shot through the clouds that pressed down on the prisoner’s mind. He saw the whole trick of the counterfeit dollars in his pocket and remembered the little Spaniard’s threat on the observation platform of the train the night before: “To-morrow we touch Mexico, where it is known that Colonel Hamilcar Urgo is a law unto himself.” Grant strained forward and his mouth opened to incoherent speech.

“And now, señor,” Colonel Urgo continued blandly, “unfortunately you will be locked up incommunicado.”

Five minutes later Grant Hickman, behind a steel-studded door in a Mexican jail, was as wholly out of the world as a man in a sunken submarine.

[CHAPTER V]
THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE

Benicia O’Donoju by the side of the big Papago Quelele and with the twin towns on the Line behind her—ahead the unlimned immensity of the wilderness—gave herself to the exhilaration of flight. For the skimming and dipping of the little car over the wave crests of the desert was like the flight of the desert quail, who rarely lifts himself above the height of the mesquite in his unerring dartings from bush to bush. On its partially deflated tires, provision against sand traps and the expansion of imprisoned air under heat, the skeleton thing reeled off its twenty miles an hour with snortings.

The final incident at the Arizora station—little Colonel Urgo and his unceremonious jettisoning—left no abiding impression with the spirited desert girl. His struttings and posings, his humorously impetuous wooing, resumed at the El Paso station after the two years’ interruption of her stay in the States, were for her no more than the high stepping of some barnyard Lothario. Benicia, little given to the morbid business of self-analysis, was not sensible of how exactly the dual strain of blood in her had reacted to Urgo’s advances; how it had been the swift thrust of Spanish temper which had prompted her to resort to the pronged weapon from her hair at El Paso even as the persistent Irish humour tang inherent in the O’Donoju name had flashed out in the dumping of the suitor at Arizora.

No, Hamilcar Urgo’s dapper figure was as evanescent as the mirage, but there was another which appeared to replace it. A man with the figure of an athlete and a forthright way of looking at one—perhaps the least bit too self-assured, perhaps inviting rebuke did one but feel in the humour of rebuking. One of those quick-witted Americans, ever ready on a hair trigger of resourcefulness yet seeming to carry a situation as if no situation existed. Nice eyes, yes. A pleasant laugh, rich in humour. But so New Yorkish! He thought the desert a place where no one lived willingly. Amusing conceit! And his name was—? Ah, yes, Hickman—Grant Hickman. One would try to remember that name.

Retrospect could not long hold Benicia’s mind against the joy of the homing journey. For the desert she loved spoke to her a welcome long dreamed in the stifling precincts of cities. There was the sky she had yearned for, something of infinite depths which did not shut down over the earth like an inverted cup; rather an impalpable sea wherein the earth swam free. Morning gold still tinted it. And the mountains that rose sheer from the desert floor with no lesser foothill heights: under the sun they were blue in the east and where slant rays fell upon western barriers a tawny strength of naked rock clothed them. Between the feet of the mountain stretched the level desert plain far and far beyond the power of eye to compass; grey with the grey of saltbush and greasewood, overtones of green where the first leaves of the mesquite and ironwood answered the call of the spring sun.

Quelele had turned the machine onto a westward wending road once the Line was crossed at Sonizona. A few straggling ranches near the border town, then the unsullied desert. Westward and southward sped the machine, deep into the greatest stretch of unpeopled wilderness between the Barren Grounds of the Dominion and Panama.

The Desert of Altar lies there. From the Line south to the Yaqui River and from the Gulf of California, once called the Sea of Cortez, eastward to the Sierra Madre:—here is the terra incognita of Sonora; here is the dominion of thirst. A territory large as New England and with a population smaller than the average New England mill town. A vast graveyard of vanished peoples, who left behind them mountains terraced with fortifications laid in unbroken breastworks of porphyry and rocks pictured with their annals of life and death. Rain comes only with occasional summer thunder storms up from the Gulf, storms which wake dead rivers into furious flood. So precious is this water from the sky that the primitive peoples weave mystic rain symbols into their basketry for a fetish, and their songs are all of thunderheads and croaking frogs.

Here in the Desert of Altar the impossible becomes commonplace. A man caught in a river bed by the spearhead of a freshet drowns in sand made mud and irresistibly rushing. Cattle drink no water for months on end but are sustained by munching cactus whose spines can penetrate sole leather. In the furnace heat of summer furious rain storms occur in the higher air but the moisture is sucked up by the sun before it touches earth. Gold lies scattered on the surface of the desert and water must be mined. The desert kind slay after the manner of the ages but declare a truce at the waterhole. Death of all life is ever-present, yet grant so much as a permanent trickle of the life-giving fluid and the dust is covered with a glory of green.

For its devotees the desert holds mysteries potent beyond comprehension of folk in a softer land. The venturing padres of an elder day called it the Hand of God; they walked in the hand of God and were not afraid. Divinity, force, original cause—whatever may be your term for that power which jewels the grass with dew and swings the suns in their courses—this is very close in the desert. In great cities man has driven the Presence far from him by his silly rackets of steam and electricity, by his farcical reproductions of cliffs and pinnacles. In the Desert of Altar he walks in silence and with God. The very air is kinetic with the energy that brought forth life on a cooled planet.

The desert had been Benicia’s teacher; had moulded her spirit to its own pattern of elemental strength. Born the last of the O’Donojus in the desert oasis that was the ultimate remnant of the once kingly Rancho del Refugio—grant of a Spanish Philip to her ancestor—she had been reared in the asperities of the land, had absorbed into her bone and tissue the rigours and simple verities of a wilderness. Because there was no son in the Casa O’Donoju and because, too, this only daughter came into the world with the inheritance of a spirit impetuous and errant as a desert bird, Don Padraic, her father, gave over all attempts at imposing on her the straight decorum that shackles the Spanish maiden of gentle blood. With the death of her mother when Benicia was still in short skirts came this loosening of the bonds. Instead of growing to maturity a shy creature who must never quit the sight of a duenna and whose eyes shall tell no secrets, the girl warmed to a wonderful companionship with her father, lived the life of a boy.

Her flaming red hair bobbed about the fringe of milling cores of wild cattle at the round-up. At Sahuaro feasts of the Papagoes, Mo Vopoki (Lightning Hair) added her shrill soprano to the chorus of the Frog Doctor Song. She learned where gold lay in shallow pockets and winnowed it from the sands in the Indian fashion. She brought home a mewing, spitting kitten she had taken from a bobcat’s litter. Her doll was discarded for a rifle before her strength could shoulder it.

Schooling came in her father’s library, filled with books in three languages. English and music, the music of the great harp, became her passions. The harp had been her great-grandmother’s; Don Padraic could make the mesh of strings sing with the sound of rain on flowers. He was her first teacher. Then, when twenty years were hers and Don Padraic realized something besides the wild desert life was needed to round out the full beauty of his daughter’s soul, he had urged further studies on the harp as the excuse for Benicia’s two years in the cities of the States. Those two years had served well to overlay upon the rugged handiwork of the wild the softness and subtleties of culture.

Benicia believed she possessed all her father’s confidences. So she did—all but one. She did not know that when she came into the world with tiny head furry in burning red Donna Francisca, her mother, had cried herself into hysteria and Don Padraic’s heart had gone cold. Nor was she ever told that her flaming hair marked her with the finger of Nemesis.

This day of the return from exile no premonition of the inheritance of fate arose to disturb the singing heart of the girl. She rattled on to the stoical Papago at the wheel unending questions concerning her father and the most humble of the Indian retainers living on the rancherias about the oasis, Don Padraic’s fief in the waste lands. She told the credulous Quelele stories of the cities she had seen; of white men’s wickiups climbing as high as the hill of La Nariz; of water so plentiful that it was launched at a burning house out of a long serpent’s mouth; how men lifted themselves above the earth in machines like the king condor and flew hundreds of miles between sun and sun. To all of which big Quelele, never lifting his eyes from the thin rut lines in the sand, answered with a single monosyllable “Hi,” wherein was compounded all his capacity for wonder.

South and west about the skirts of the Pajarito they went, and then into the old road up from Caborca, the ancient highway called the Road of the Dead Men which swings north parallel with the Line, cutting the tails of numerous ranges that are great in Arizona. And so, when the day was hardly more than half spent, the little car crawled to the height called the Nose of the Devil, and Benicia saw below her land of desire.

Fists of the mountains grudgingly opened out to permit a broad basin running from east to west, and there against the savage baldness of sentinel ranges showed a ribbon of green. Green of precious gems it was. So vivid in the setting of the drought land. So cyclonic its assault of colour against the eye inured to the duns and greys of a hundred miles of parched terrain. And in the midst of the oasis the shining white dot, which was the house of the O’Donoju; of Benicia’s father and his fathers before him back to the day of a royal favourite baptized Michael O’Donohue. The Casa O’Donoju in El Jardin de Soledad—the Garden of Solitude.

Indian women, in skirts of orange and cerise and with gay mantles over their sleek hair, lined the way to the avenue of royal date palms which led from the bridge over the Rio Dulce straight to the white single-story house of ’dobe, heavy walled and loopholed like a fort. They waved and sent shouts of welcome to the mistress of the casa as she passed.

Benicia knew her father would not be outside the house to greet her; their love was not for the servants to see. Rather he would be waiting in their own trysting place, the place where he had given her farewell two years before. The girl leaped from the car before the heavy studded oak door breaking the solid white front of the house at its centre. It was opened to her by old ’Cepcion, feminine major domo of the household servants. Benicia paused to give the parchment cheeks a kiss, then she danced down a flagged hall to the flare of green marking the patio garden in the centre of the house.

Here was a place of beauty and a fragrant cave of coolness—the very secret heart of the Garden of Solitude. Open to the sky and with cloistered dimness of the four sides of the house all about, the patio was a tiny jungle of climbing things, all green and riotous blossoms. A stately date palm reigned in the centre behind the little basin of the fountain; curtains of purple bougainvillea draped themselves down its shaggy ribs; lavender water-hyacinths sailed their little barques in the pool; geraniums flamed in living fire against the pillars of the arcades.

There in the garden waited a man all in white. Snow white his heavy hair and beard, though the life in his deep-set eyes and the vigorous set of his shoulders belied age; white were his thin garments of silk and flannel.

He caught the flash of a red head through the greenery, saw an eager, breathless face turned questioningly.

“’Nicia, heart of my heart—!”

Then she ran to him, paused just an instant to lift swift fingers under his chin and tilt his head. Their eyes measured each the love that welled brimming in the soul’s windows. Then the father drew his daughter close to his heart and his lips brushed her forehead.

“’Nicia, my strong one, your father has great need of you.”

[CHAPTER VI]
JUSTICE

The Mexican theory of the treatment of prisoners, their status before the law and the responsibilities of government toward them has few complexities and knows no interference on the part of prisoners’ welfare leagues or humanitarian congresses. When a man is arrested south of the Line he straightway ceases to be enumerated among the living; if, haply, he reappears in the course of weeks or years his family looks upon the prodigy in the light of a resurrection. Such resurrections do not occur often enough to dull the edge of the popular interest attending them. There are several dim roads, peculiarly Mexican, down which a prisoner may march to oblivion, with no record of his expunction left behind. Officials with easy consciences find these extralegal methods of clearing the docket handy and expeditious.

Grant Hickman, new to the Border and utterly ignorant of customs and manners in the republic of poco tiempo, necessarily could not possess a background of sinister knowledge against which to build doubts of his immediate future when he found himself locked in a cell. He was in darkness deep as Jonah’s. He ached from his scalp to his toes. A gingerly groping hand applied to various parts of his body took stock of the exterior costs of that healthy fight in the gambling palace. The heat of battle was still on him. He recalled how nobly the big Arizonan swung his chair from the vantage of the crap table; what a virile call to battle was the stranger’s “Ride ’em, Noo Yawker!”

As for Colonel Urgo’s clumsy frame-up—the handful of lead dollars in his pocket to prompt arrest for counterfeiting—Grant dismissed the trick as childish spite. When he appeared before a judge in the morning he could easily prove that the only Mexican money he possessed was that given him in change by the fat Chinaman and what he had taken in across the baize. Some tool of the vengeful little wooer of Benicia had “salted” him during the progress of the game.

But when morning light through a four-inch slit in the wall roused him from a restless sleep long hours of doubt were ushered in. Came a jailer with dry tortillas and water but no summons to appear before a magistrate. Three tortillas—clammy rolled cakes of meal tasting strongly of a cook’s carelessness in matters of excluding the unessential—were the sum of his receipts from the outside world that day. The jailer, who had the features of a bandit, merely grunted a “no sabe” at the volley of questions the prisoner launched at him during the minute he was in the cell.

Those hours of solitude in the six-by-ten box of stone gave opportunity for much thinking. Little by little it was borne in on Grant how completely he was a victim of whatever spite Colonel Urgo might care to devise; and recollection of his smiling face seen in the prison office the night before—thin lips parted over teeth in a ferret’s grin—confirmed the assumption that at devising mischief Colonel Urgo would be hampered by no lack of ingenuity.

Grant weighed the hope of aid from the other end of the town across the Border fence. Bim Bagley, the only friend he had in all the Southwest, was still out of town and would not be back until the morrow. Doc Stooder—small chance! The worthy doctor was velvet drunk when he received Grant in his office; for reasons which only his satiric humour could explain he had elected to consider his visitor an impostor. Little chance that Doc Stooder would pay him a thought until Bagley returned and inquired of his whereabouts. Remained just the cobweb contingency that the Arizonan who had fought beside him had escaped the clutches of the rurales; Grant was certain the big fellow’s simple loyalty to a fellow countryman would prompt him to set going some kind of inquiry from across the Line.

Night came, with it three more tortillas and a bowl of carne seasoned with chili sufficient to burn the gullet of a bronze image. Then, several hours after the scant meal had been shoved in to him, the bandit jailer opened his cell door and motioned him to step into the corridor. Two men with rifles were waiting there; they stepped to his side and marched him off between them.

Down a flight of steps, through a courtyard heavy with shadows, then up tortuous stairs to a door beneath a dim electric globe. The door opened from within, and Grant found himself in a chamber which might have passed as a courtroom. At its far end on a raised dais was a long desk lighted from above, three men sitting behind it. A sort of wooden cage stood apart on a platform by itself. Six men with serapes over their shoulders and rifles hanging by straps across the blanket stripes were slouching before the judges’ dais. A black headed peon crouched timorously on a seat to the left and behind the guards.

Grant’s escort halted him before the judges. He kept silence, studying the faces of the three. Not pleasant faces. A hardness of eye and cat-like bristle of moustachios over thin line of lips was common to the trio.

“Grant ’Ickman?” challenged the man in the middle.

Grant nodded. His interrogator gave a sign to one of the rurales. The latter turned to the peon on the bench, dragged him to his feet and hustled him to the cage-like affair to the left of the dais, evidently a witness box. The little fellow’s head hardly showed above the top rail that fenced him in; his eyes were all whites.

The examining judge jerked a thumb toward Grant as he shaped a question in Spanish for the witness. The peon bobbed his head emphatically. Another question and, “Si,” chirped the witness. Then a lengthy flow of interrogation prompted by reference to some dossier in hand.

“Si! Si!” The witness hurried to oblige. Cat whiskers lifted in a smile as the judge turned back to Grant.

“You unnerstan’?”

“I don’t,” bluntly. More twitching of the spiked moustachios.

“Zeese man, ’oo’s make confession of counterfeiting and ’oo ees to be shot to-day, says ’e sells you thirty pesos made with bad metal—counterfeit. An’—”

“He lies!” Grant interrupted.

“Quieto!” The judge banged his fist on the desk and fixed the prisoner with a savage glare. “’E says, zeese man, ’e meets with you las’ night on Calle San Lazar outside Crystal Palacio gambling ’ouse an’ for ten veritable pesos ’e gives to you thirty pesos of bad metal. Then zeese man ’e says ’e sees you enter Crystal Palacio. What remark you make for zeese?”

The monstrous farce of this accusation numbed Grant. Judicial subornation fabricated to give colour to what was already determined in the minds of these three puppets. As clearly as if they were bearing on him he could see the cold, mocking eyes of Colonel Urgo behind the shoulders of his pawns on the bench. Perception of his peril steadied him.

“I demand a lawyer if I am to be tried on this outrageous charge. And I demand that the American consul in this town be told of the accusation against me.”

The interrogating judge turned to his confreres with a bland outspreading of the palms. Then to Grant:

“American consul ’as no business with crime against state of Mehico. You will ’ave lawyer when you are tried before court at Hermosillo. Zeese court ees not court of condemnation. Court of condemnation ees at Hermosillo. W’en you arrive there, w’ere you make for a start to-night, Señor ’Ickman, you ask for American consul if you desire.”

“But you cannot send me to this Hermosillo place without trial.” Grant took a step toward the bench in his vehemence. He was roughly jerked back by his guards. The interrogating judge beamed on him.

“In Mehico, Señor ’Ickman, it ees folly to say ‘you cannot.’ Much ees possible in Mehico. To-night prisoners make start for Hermosillo. You go weeth them.”

He nodded to Grant’s guards and they closed in on him. He heard a farewell, “Adios, Señor ’Ickman,” from the bench as he was rudely hustled out of the courtroom.

An hour later he stood with seven other shadows in the carcel courtyard. About them were the rurales with their rifles; four were mounted on horseback and a pack mule, lightly laden, slept on three legs behind the horsemen. Men came with lanterns and heavy loops of something which chinked metallically when it was dropped. They fixed a broad steel shackle on the left wrist of each prisoner and linked them all to a bull chain. Then the door of a courtyard swung inward, the mounted rurales closed in and the eight chained men went clinking out to the dark street.

A few midnight dawdlers paused to watch the shadowy procession stumbling over the cobbles. No word was spoken. The clink of the horses’ hoofs, the patter-patter of the short-legged pack mule and the metallic whisperings of the chain fitted into a measured cadence. Despite the presence of the pack mule, Grant first had thought the journey would be a short one, ending at the railroad station. But after fifteen minutes’ marching no railroad line was in sight and the houses began to be scattered. Suddenly houses ceased; nothing but the hump-shouldered shapes of mountains about; clear burning stars and ahead a dim ribbon of road leading out into the desert.

To Hermosillo, a town unheard of and at a distance unknown—across the desert to Hermosillo afoot and chained in line with seven men. In the slim rifle barrels so carelessly slung under shadows of sombreros was the sullen emblem of that unwritten law of Mexico which stills so many accusing mouths: ley de fuga—law of flight.

Out into the desert of Altar marched the American, whose name appeared only upon a secret cachet in the hands of the puppet judges—a man gone, as a German once put it, “without trace.”

[CHAPTER VII]
THE CHAIN GANG

“But, Doc, I tell you you’re crazy! How could a tenderfoot like Hickman just in town from the East breeze across the Line and get into a jam the first night he’s in town—drop out of sight completely?”

Bim Bagley, back in Arizora and distracted by the unexplained mystery of his pal’s name on the hotel register, his pal’s suitcase in a hotel room but no more material trace of Grant Hickman, was knee to knee with Dr. Stooder in the latter’s office. The Doc made judicious answer: