SANDSTORMS, BANDITS AND DEAD SOLDIERS
Along a macadam road fringed with bright painted little Mexican taverns
and shops, toward mid-afternoon we threaded our way, still defenseless
“ladies,” tempting fate. I mention what might seem an obvious fact,
because the continuance of our unprotected state required strong
powers of resistance against the offers of itinerant chauffeurs,
anxious to get from somewhere to anywhere, filled like ourselves with
spring stirrings toward Vagabondia, and seeing in our Red Duchess
inconsequence an opportunity to get their itching hands on the wheel
of a car which made of driving not a chore but an art. Even garage
helpers, who now humbly washed wheels and handed tools to mechanics,
hoping to end their apprenticeship by a bold stroke, besieged us with
offers to chauffeur us for their expenses.
As we were leaving El Paso, I returned to the car to find Toby
conversing with a likely looking lad. This did not surprise me, for
whenever I came back to Toby after five minutes’ absence, I found her
incurable friendliness had collected from one to half a dozen strangers
with whom she seemed on intimate terms. But I was surprised to hear
this lad urging us to take him as chauffeur as far as Tucson. His frank
face and pleasant manner and an army wound seemed as good references as
his offer of a bank president’s guarantee. He wanted to go so badly!
I have a failing,--one, at least,--of wanting to live up to what is
expected of me. If a stranger with an expensive gold brick shows any
real determination to bestow it on me for a consideration, he always
finds me eager to cooperate, not because I do not know I am being
gulled, but that I hate to cross him when his heart is set on it. Even
in dour Boston it is congenitally hard for me to say “No,” but in Texas
where people smile painlessly and the skies are molten turquoise,
it is next to impossible. Of course, we might take him as far as
Tucson. We would have to give up driving, which we both loved. And pay
his expenses. One of us would have to sit in the back seat, and be
pulverized by jolting baggage. Still, it didn’t seem right to leave our
new friend at El Paso, which of all places bored him most. Would Toby
be fair, and sit among the baggage half the time?
Toby, I saw, was wondering the same of me. That decided it. Toby
loves her comfort. I started to say, “I suppose we might,” when she
countered, “But we don’t want any chauffeur.”
He looked hopefully at me, recognizing the weaker will.
“No,” I said, glad to agree with Toby, “that is perfectly true. In fact
the whole point of our trip is to see if we can get along without a
chauffeur.”
It was the point; his wistful smile had been so persuasive that I had
almost forgotten it. Fortunately this reason convinced him without
further arguing. He gave us directions about our route, and we left
him, hat off, smiling and waving us bon voyage.
Crossing a state line is an adventure in itself. Even with no apparent
difference of landscape there seems inevitably a change, if only the
slight psychological variance reflected by any country whose people
are marked off from their neighbors by differences however slight.
The universe reflects many distinctions, I firmly believe, so subtle
as to be undefined by our five senses, which we note with that sixth
sense finer than any. Their intangible flavor piques the analyst to
the nice game of description. Hardly had we crossed the political line
dividing sand and sage brush from sage brush and sand before we sensed
New Mexico;--a new wildness, a hint of lawlessness, a decade nearer the
frontier, Old Spain enameled on the wilderness.
Or perhaps it was only Mrs. Flanagan, with her Mexican face and Irish
brogue, when we stopped to buy gas, whose longing to have us for guests
at her hotel made her paint the dangers of New Mexico with Hibernian
fluency and Iberian guile. She thickened the coming twilight with sand
storms, bandit shapes and murders.
“Do ye know what a sandstor’rm is in these parts? Ye do not! I thought
not! Last month a car left here to cross the desert to Deming, as ye’re
doing. Late afternoon it was,--just this hour, the wind in the same
place. I war’rned thim to stay, but they w’d be gettin’ along,--like
yourselves.”
“And what became of them?”
She gave us a look that froze the blood in our veins, despite the
scorching wind from the edge of the desert.
“Yes, what did become av thim? That’s what many would like to know.
_They have not been heard of since!_”
“You would advise us to stay here for the night, then?”
“Suit yourselves, suit yourselves. I see your rad-aytor’s leakin’.
’Tis a serious thing to get out in that desert, miles fr’m anywhere
wid an impty rad-ayator. What could ye do, an’ night comin’ on? Ye’re
hilpless! An’ suppose ye get lost? The road’s not marked. ’Tis a mass
of criss-cross tracks leadin’ iverywhere. At best, ye’d have to stop
where ye are till mornin’, if ye don’t git too far lost ever t’ find
y’rselves again.”
Here entered a Gentleman from Philadelphia, a traveler for Quaker
Oats, who listened to our debate with great interest. He was a brisk
and businesslike young man, with a friendly brown eye and a brotherly
manner.
“If you ask _me_, Mrs. Flanagan,” he began diplomatically, “I’d advise
the young ladies to take a chance. I think they can make it.”
Something in this advice, slightly stressed, implied a warning.
Mrs. Flanagan with her swarthy Mexican features was not the most
prepossessing landlady in the world, nor did a lonely roadhouse on
the edge of the desert, with no other guests than ourselves, promise
complete security. Tales of Swiss inns, and trap-doors yawning at
midnight came to me, faintly conveyed by the young man’s tones. She
turned on him with ill-concealed anger.
“It’s nothin’ to _me_, go or stay. But here’s a good hotel,--with a
bath-room, even,--and there’s night, and sandy roads, and a stor’rm
comin’. If ye had a man wid ye, I’d say ‘go on,’ though it’s not safe,
even f’r a man. But bein’ two ladies, I say stop here.”
We wavered, anxious to get on, but not to meet a violent end. On the
pretext of filling our water-bag, the Gentleman from Philadelphia took
us aside.
“Don’t let Mrs. Flanagan fool you,” he advised. “She only wants
customers. I stayed here once,” he twitched nervously,--“and I’d rather
run the chance of being robbed and murdered. Not that I think that will
happen to you.”
So we thanked him, nice brisk, friendly young man that he was, taking
care not to incriminate him before the watchful Mrs. Flanagan, and
bade that lady adieu. She gloomily wished us good luck, but it was
apparently more than she dared hope.
“Only last week, two men were held up and murdered by the Mexicans,”
she called after us. “Watch out for thim Mexicans,--they’re a wicked
bad lot.”
With the sky yellow-green from the gathering sand-storm, night coming
on fast and her warning in our ears we struck out into our first desert
with a sense of uneasiness, exhilarated a little by the warm beauty of
the evening. We seemed to have left all civilization behind, although
after passing the last hamlet about nightfall, we had only forty-odd
miles more to go. Never shall I forget the eerie charm of that drive.
We saw not a soul. Occasionally a jack rabbit, startled as ourselves,
leaped athwart the gleam of our lamps. Sometimes we wandered, in the
pitchy black, from the guiding Southern Pacific into a maze of twisting
trails. Sometimes we dived into a sudden arroyo, wrenching the car
about just in time to stay with the road as it serpentined out again.
When, now and again, a lonely light far off suggested a lurking bandit,
we remembered with a homesick twinge the last words of Toby’s mother,
and wondered when we should get a chance to obey them. At four cross
roads, the only guide post lay flat midway between the roads. We were
obliged to guess at the most likely route. At last we came on the
lights of Deming, five miles away, in the valley. We sighed with relief
and moved toward them rapidly.
And then a figure stepped out from a truck blocked beside the road, and
a deep voice called “Stop a moment, please!”
At that moment we sincerely wished ourselves back in Mrs. Flanagan’s
road house. Then, before Toby could get out the monkey wrench which was
our sole weapon of defense, the voice changed shrilly on a high note,
and we saw our bandit was a fourteen year old boy. He hopped aboard,
never dreaming of the panic he had caused our bandit-beset minds,
explaining that his batteries were out of order, and he must return to
Deming. He added, naïvely, that his father owned the second best hotel
in town, which he recommended if we failed to find a room in the best
hotel. Then he swung off the car, and we went on to the Mecca of all
Western voyagers,--a clean room, a hot bath, and a Harvey eating house.
Like all of the Southwest, Deming was in the midst of an oil boom.
Beneath the arid sand and cactus of long unwanted acreage, rich
sluggish pools were in hiding, arousing the old gambling spirit of
the West. It was a timid soul indeed who had not invested in at least
one well. In newspaper offices we saw the day’s quotations chalked on
blackboards, and in the windows of real estate agents were greeted by
imposing sketches of Deming Twenty Years from Now; no longer half a
dozen streets completely surrounded by whirling sand, but a city of
oil shafts and sky scrapers. We dropped into a hairdresser’s to be rid
of the desert dust, and found a group of ladies as busily discussing
oil as were their husbands at the barber’s.
“Jim and I had five hundred dollars saved toward a house,” confided one
gray-haired gambler, “so we bought Bear Cat at a cent a share. If it
goes to a dollar, like the land next it, we’ve got fifty thousand. If
it don’t, why, what can you get with five hundred anyway, these days?”
“Way I do is to buy some of everything,” said the hairdresser, rubbing
the lather into my scalp. “Then you’re sure to hit it right. I got a
claim out to Stein’s, and they’re striking oil all around. When they
find it on my claim,”--(it is always “when,” never “if”)--I’m going to
have a rope of pearls to my waist, and a Colonial Adobe house,--twenty
rooms and a dance hall.”
We left the little town, hideous in its barrenness and dreaming of
its future, the waitresses chewing the inevitable toothpick, the
two motion picture houses, the sandstorms, and the railway with its
transcontinental standards, and hastened through to Arizona, leaving
a more thorough inspection of New Mexico for spring. At the garage,
we had one word of advice from a weather beaten old-timer, of whom we
inquired as to roads.
“The w’ust trouble ye’ll have in a prohibition state is tire trouble.”
“Why should prohibition affect our tires?”
“Dead soldiers.”
“Dead soldiers?”
“Empty whiskey bottles.”
When we looked back half a mile down the road, he was still laughing
at his wit. What would have happened if the really good one about our
being a long way from home had occurred to him I cannot picture.
Two routes offered for Tucson; the short cut through Lordsburg and
Willcox, and the longer way by Douglas and the Mexican border. When we
inquired which route would have more interesting scenery, we had met
invariably with a stare and a laugh.
“Not much _scenery_, wherever you go,--sand and cactus! Just as much on
one road as another.”
We therefore chose the shorter way, to learn later that the
Douglas-Bisbe route which we discarded was one of the most beautiful
drives in the country. Yet we ourselves moved into a theater of
loveliness. Saw-toothed ranges, high and stormy, snow-topped, shadowed
our trail. The wide amphitheater of our golden valley was encircled
with mountains of every size and color; blue, rosy, purple, and at
sunset pure gold and transparently radiant. The gray sage turned at
sun-down to lavender; mauve shadows lengthened on the desert floor;
gorges of angry orange and red cliffs gave savage contrast to the
delicate Alpine glow lighting white peaks; a cold, pastel sky framed
a solitary star, and frosty air, thinned in its half-mile height to a
stimulating sharpness, woke us keenly to life. We felt the enchantment
that Arizona weaves from her gray cocoon toward sunset, and wondered
at eyes which could look on it all, and see only sand and cactus. Show
them the unaccustomed, and they would doubtless have been appreciative
enough. A green New England farm with running brooks and blossoming
orchards would have spelled Paradise to them, as this Persian pattern
of desert did to us; beauty to the parched native of Arizona is an
irrigation ditch, bordered by emerald cottonwoods.
If I tint these pages with too many sunsets, it is not from unawareness
of my weakness, but because without them a description of Arizona does
not describe. In the afternoon hours, between four and eight, the
country wakes and glows, and has its moment, like a woman whose youth
was plain but whom middle age has touched with charm and mystery. Not
to speak of the sunsets of Arizona, till the reader is as saturated
with their glory as is the traveler, is to leave the heart of the
country unrevealed.
From Willcox to Lordsburg we realized there was more than jest in
the remark of our old-timer concerning “dead soldiers.” All the way
through that uninhabited desert, we picked our road through avenues
of discarded flat bottles of familiar shape, turning all shades of
amethyst under the burning rays of the sun. It is an odd effect of
the sun on glass here in the desert that it slowly turns a deeper and
deeper violet. The desert-wise can tell the date a bottle was discarded
from its hue. I was told that one man made a fortune by ripening
window-glass in this manner, and selling it to opticians at a fancy
price. It may have been a similar industry which lined our path with
empty bottles. It must have been so, for Arizona had been “dry” for
three years.
Even the lakes were dry. When we met with the term “dry lake” in the
guide book, we set it down as another flight of the fanciful creature
who had composed its pages, but soon we came upon it. Four miles and
more we drove over the bottom of a lake now not even damp, making deep
tracks in the white sand. Dry rivers were later to become commonplace,
but we were children of Israel but this once. Suddenly beyond us in the
distance, through a heat where no drop of water could live, we saw a
sparkle and a shimmer of cool blue, and cottonwoods reflected in wet,
wavering lines. Our dry lake had turned wet! Mountain peaks rose and
floated on its surface,--and not till they melted and skipped about
could I believe Toby’s assertion that we were gazing on a mirage. When
she focused her camera upon the mirage I scoffed loudly. Tales of
travelers in the desert had early rooted in my none too scientific mind
the idea that a mirage is a subconscious desire visually projected,
like the rootless vines which climb the air at the command of Hindu
fakirs. When our finished print showed a definite, if faint, outline of
non-existent hills, my little world was slightly less shaken than if
Toby had produced a photograph of an astral wanderer from the spirit
world. I do not like to look at it. It seems like black magic.
The desert, bleached dazzling white under an afternoon sun, seemed
shorn of all the mysteries and apprehensions with which the previous
night and Mrs. Flanagan had enveloped it. Now it lay stark and
unromantic, colorless in a blare of heat. We were only a few miles
from Tucson, when we mounted a hill, and poised a second, looking down
on a horseshoe canyon. Our road, narrow and stony, threaded the edge
of it,--a sharp down grade, a quick curve at the base, and a steady
climb up. As we turned the brow of the hill and passed a clump of
trees hiding the view of the bottom, ahead, directly across the road
and blocking all passage stood a car. I put on the brakes sharply,
and our car veered toward the edge and wavered. How stupid to leave
a car directly across a dangerous road on a down grade! This was
my first reaction. Then we saw two men, with the slouch that marks
the Westerner, step from behind their car, and await our approach.
Even while I concentrated on avoiding turning into the ditch, their
very quiet manner as they awaited us arrested attention. It was not
stupidity which made them choose to alight at that spot. It was an
ideally clever place for a hold-up! Concealed itself, it commanded a
view of the entire canyon, and would catch a car coming from either
direction at lowered speed. These men were not waiting our approach for
any casual purpose; something too guarded and watchful, too tensely
alert, lay taut beneath their easy slouch. The elder, a bearded
thick-set man, carelessly held his hand on his hip pocket, as they do
in all Western novels. The taller and younger man stepped into the
middle of the road, and raised a hand to stop us.
“Toby,” I said in a low voice, “this looks serious.”
“Bandits!” said Toby, her tone confirming my suspicions.
“Get out the monkey wrench, and point it as if it were a gun. I’ll try
to crowd past the car and up the hill.”
“If we only had the ammonia pistol,” sighed Toby, murderously, getting
the wrench and cocking it.
A gentle voice tinged with the sharp edge of command came from the
younger man. “Better stop a minute, lady!”
We stopped, entirely contrary to our hastily made plans. Something in
his level tone, and in a quick little gesture the man behind him made,
changed our minds.
Without removing his hand from his hip the other man, who I quickly
decided was the more desperate character of the two, strolled about our
car with an appraising and well satisfied look. At that moment we felt
we were indeed a long, long ways from home. I began to calculate the
time it would take to walk to Tucson,--hampered, possibly, by a bullet
wound. Then he pulled open his coat, and a gleam of metal caught the
sunlight.
“I’m the sheriff of Pima County,” he said, briefly.
I did not believe him. I put my foot on the gas, and tightened my grip
on the wheel, measuring the road ahead and calculating the slight
chance of crowding past his car and up the steep hill ahead.
“Please show us your badge again, if you don’t mind.”
He gave us a full view of it this time. It looked genuine enough,--a
silver star, not quite so large as the planet Jupiter, with rays
darting therefrom, and Pima printed on it in bold letters,--a
staggering affair, calculated to inspire respect for law and order.
“Were we speeding?” Toby faltered, remembering Houston.
“We’re making a little search,” he replied very crisply.
“Search,--for what?”
“Booze, for one thing,” said the lank young man. The other did not
waste words.
It was evident from their manner they expected to find what they
were hunting for. They walked about and punched our tires, darkly
suspicious. We could not have felt more guilty if we had been
concealing the entire annual output of Peoria. I heard Toby gasp, and
knew she was wondering what Brattle St. would say.
“Where did you come from?” asked the sheriff.
“Benson,” we replied, mentioning the last town we had passed through.
“Ah!” Evidently a highly incriminating place to come from. They
proceeded to examine our suit-cases thoroughly.
“I hate to search ladies,” said the sheriff, in brief apology, “but if
ladies _will_ smuggle booze into Pima County, it has to be done.”
At that moment his assistant caught sight of our knobby looking auto
trunk.
“Ah!” Such a queer shaped trunk was beyond explanation. I handed over
the keys in silence. They made a grim search, with no sign of unbending
until they came to our funny little folding stove. Then the sheriff
permitted a short smile to decorate his official expression, and I knew
the worst was over. A moment later, the lank young man discovered our
number-plate.
“Say! Are you from Massachusetts, lady?”
“Boston.”
I pass over his next remark. The reader has heard it before, and so
had we. The air was cleared, and so were we. To the sheriff of Pima
County and his deputy, Boston meant only Susan B. Anthony and Frances
E. Willard. They had evidently never heard of Ward Eight.
We passed on, amid apologies, to Tucson. Once more the spectres evoked
by Mrs. Flanagan had been laid. Artistically, it was a pity. The canyon
made a perfect setting for a hold-up. As such I recommend it to the
outlaws of Pima County.
As we drove into the city, acquitted of boot-legging, a wonderful odor
stole to our nostrils. We sniffed, looked at each other and sniffed
again. We were entering Tucson on the historic afternoon when sixty
thousand dollars worth of liquor had been poured relentlessly into the
gutters of the old town,--a town which a generation ago had stood for
wild drinking and picturesque lawlessness.