DUST OF THE DESERT
Dust of the Desert
BY ROBERT WELLES RITCHIE
[Illustration]
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 Note: printer’s information was not supplied in the
source text.]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PROLOGUE 1
I WHAT HAPPENED ON THE LIMITED 17
II A GIRL NAMED BENICIA 25
III DOC STOODER 36
IV COLONEL URGO REPAYS 51
V THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE 65
VI JUSTICE 76
VII THE CHAIN GANG 85
VIII THE HEART OF BENICIA 98
IX GOLD AND PEARLS 108
X AT THE CASA O’DONOJU 112
XI THE MARK OF EL ROJO 129
XII DESERT SECRETS 145
XIII CROSSCURRENTS 159
XIV REVELATION 168
XV WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT 178
XVI ACCUSATION 184
XVII THE ORDEAL 195
XVIII THE DESERT INTERVENES 211
XIX THIRST 219
XX THE COMING OF EL DOCTOR 232
XXI TREASURE QUEST 247
XXII ALTAR TAKES ITS TOLL 257
XXIII INTO THE FURNACE 266
XXIV STORM 279
XXV TREASURE TROVE 293
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?”