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:
“Well, son, Jed Hawkins’ specifications of the gringo he fought with
atop the crap table in the Palacio tallies pretty closely with the
young man as I saw him in my office earlier in the day. But here’s the
funny thing: the rurales let Hawkins go even though he laid out two of
’em with a chair. Let that fightin’ wildcat go and trotted this fellah
Hickman off to the _carcel_. That’s what gets me.” Doc Stooder gave
his decision with a wave of the hand. He jack-knifed his bony knees up
to his chin and waited the younger man’s comment.
“But what did Hawkins say started the big row?” Bim’s long face,
all criss-crossed with the wind wrinkles that make desert men look
older than their years, gave a vivid picture of his distress, of his
eagerness to seize upon any detail that might point a solution of the
mystery. Doc Stooder recited with picturesque detail Jed Hawkins’ story
of the battle in the gambling palace as the redoubtable Jed himself had
narrated it in the Border Delight pool hall before returning to his
ranch at Dos Cabezas.
“That give me a clue,” he concluded, “so I laid my pipe lines an’ I’m
looking for to tap a well any time now.”
Doc Stooder’s pipe lines--of information, if not of wealth--were the
most productive of any along the Border. He was one of those rare white
men in the Southwestern country who enjoyed the unreserved respect if
not the love of the Mexican population, among whom nine-tenths of his
practice extended. Though he bawled at his patients, stricken dumb with
terror of their ailments, though he cursed the women and manhandled the
men, no poor Mexican’s hovel of ’dobe was too far out in the desert to
discourage Doc Stooder’s night prowling gas-wagon. Through dust storm
and withering heat this blasted jack-pine of a man flitted on wings of
gasoline, with his nostrums for dysentery and asthma, his splints for
broken bones and needles for knife thrusts.
Drunk he might be half the time, an indifferent physician all the
time--for the Doc had not been away from the Border for twenty-five
years and never read a medical magazine. But under his hard rind of
brutalities and cynicisms the Mexicans and Indians had come to discover
a deep sympathy with their homely tragedies, their patient sufferings.
Sometimes they paid him in coin; more often they paid him in slavish
fealty the coin of which was information. Of gold strikes in the far
hills; of shrewd business deals to be wrought through connivance of
knavish officials across the Line; even of stolen jewels to be picked
up from a pawnbroker:--these the flow of Doc Stooder’s pipe lines. No
man on the Border for a hundred miles each way knew so much of the
scrapple of life as A. Stooder, M.D.
“I’m lookin’ to hear of a woman,” the Doc drawlingly resumed, a wry
smile greeting Bim’s gesture of negation. “Yep, son, when any likely
lookin’ young fellah along the Border drops outa sight--and this
Hickman fellah’s got an eye with him for all his Noo Yawk bridle
trimmin’s--they’s a swish of skirts comes to my ears. Or”--he sat up
suddenly and threw a bony finger at Bim--“or he knows somethin’ about
why he’s come out here an’ went an’ babbled.”
“Rot!” Bim’s grey eyes were clouded with anger. “I told you he doesn’t
know why we got him out here--and he’s not the babbling kind if he did.”
“Well, it sizes up thisaway,” the Doc continued, ignoring the other’s
flash of temper. “They’s one man down in Sonora who knows all we
know about the Lost Mission and like’s not a dam’ sight more. That’s
this proud old don who lives down in the Garden of Solitude with his
red-headed daughter--name’s Padraic O’Donoju, if I haven’t told you
that before. If he ever got a line on the fact we’ve asked a Noo Yawk
engineer to come out here to Arizora he’d put two an’ two together an’
figure we’re after that Four Evangelists church his ancestors built.
You know he’s sorta king of all the Papagoes in Altar and--”
“How about your Papago who’s going to lead us to the Mission?” Bim
interrupted. “If there’s any leak likely as not it’s through him.”
Stooder’s great head wagged slowly; a grin tilted the rabbit’s tail
tuft under his lip until it stood out a quizzical interrogation point.
“No, son; no. I got that Papago brother where he thinks all I got to
do is crook my little finger an’ his wife passes away with asthma
overnight. We can rely--”
A timid knock on the office door giving onto the hall. The Doc bellowed
a command to enter. A wizened Mexican peon whose left arm was a stump
sidled quickly through the doorway and stood bowing, shaggy head
uncovered. He cast a quick glance at Bagley, then to the doctor for
reassurance.
“Go ahead, Angel--shoot!” commanded Stooder.
“Señor, I hear from Jesus Ruiz, ’e’s cousin to me an’ rurale at the
_carcel_; Jesus Ruiz ’e says the gringo arrest’ at Palacio goes last
night in chain gang for Hermosillo--”
Bim leaped to his feet with an oath. The peon’s eyes were on Doc
Stooder in an hypnotic stare.
“The gringo goes in chain gang for Hermosillo, but my cousin Jesus Ruiz
’e says that gringo mos’ like never arrive.”
* * * * *
That hour when Doc Stooder’s pipe line began spouting information Grant
Hickman was discovering deep down within him an unguessed hardiness of
spirit. A trial was on him, a test of his moral fibre no less than of
his physical powers. At the end of twelve hours’ steady plodding across
the desert he was coming into his second wind. Every effort a devilish
ingenuity could contrive had been tried out by the four rurales, his
guards, in their common endeavour to break down this gringo’s fighting
morale. The single result was a fixed grin on features smeared with
dried blood and sweat--a challenge provoking the Mexicans to fresh
barbarities.
During the first dark hours of the march Grant had nursed the hope
that at some point outside of town he and his fellow prisoners would
be brought to a railroad station to await the coming of a train. He
could not conceive a reason for transferring prisoners afoot when a
railroad would serve. But with the coming of the dawn and the lifting
of the dark from an empty land not even a telegraph pole raised above
the scrub to point fulfilment of his hope. Just the dry ribbon of road
stretching ahead and empty speculation as to the number of days or
hours which must intervene between present misery and journey’s end.
Grant never had heard the name Hermosillo until it was spoken by the
examining judge the night before; he did not know whether the town was
just over the horizon or half way to Panama.
Morning brought him the chance to study the men chained with him who,
during the night hours, had been just so many disembodied shadows
marching in a nightmare. The one ahead of him was a shrivelled little
Chinaman, whose legs were so short he was forced to a skipping step to
keep slack on his segment of the chain; his breath came in asthmatic
pipings and wheezes like the noise of a leaky valve in some midget
engine. Behind him was a giant of an Indian, almost the colour of teak.
With a timed regularity this Indian spat noisily all through the dark
hours and until the sun rose to dry up his throat. The rest were in
character with Grant’s nearer companions--just flotsam.
The guards were typical of their class; Mexican peons brutalized even
beyond the inheritance of their mixed bloods by their small taste of
power. The quarter-blood Indian south of the Line, whose ancestry is
devious as his own starved dog’s, knows but a single law of life and
that the law of fear. Lift him by ever so little from the station
of the one who fears to that of the one to be feared and he has no
counterpart for studied cruelty anywhere on earth.
The one who rode to the right of the line in which Grant’s position
was fourth from the front, had commenced with the dawn a calculated
campaign of nasty tortures. He would suddenly swerve his horse against
Grant, threatening his feet with trampling hoofs. He held his lighted
cigarette low at his side with elaborate air of carelessness, then
pressed in close for the burning tip to eat through the white man’s
shirt. Once he aimed a vicious backward kick at his victim; his heavy
spur left a line of red through the torn sleeve from elbow to shoulder.
At each of these refinements of humour the rurale’s snickering laughter
was met by the American’s wordless grin. Just a tense spreading of lips
and baring of teeth, which carried to the guard’s savage perception a
taunt and a threat. Always in Grant’s twisted grin lay the unspoken
promise of retribution once the odds against him were lightened.
The desert under sun at the meridian flexed its harsh hand to pinch the
crawling caterpillar of chained men. Heat waves made all the ragged
summits of the Sierras pulsate. A dust tasting of desert salts spread a
low cloud about the marching column. Thirst that was a poignant agony
was made all the more unendurable by the tactics of the guards. From
time to time one of them would unhitch a canteen from the pack mule’s
burden and in the sight of the eight helpless sufferers tilt his head
and guzzle noisily. Even he would allow some of the water to slop from
his mouth and be wasted in the sand.
When the little Chinaman marching before Grant sighed and dropped, the
line was halted for half an hour. First the yellow man was revived,
then the canteen at which he had sucked so noisily was passed down the
line to the rest of the prisoners. It was their first taste of water
since the prison gate was passed. After the canteen circulated, black
strips of jerked beef, sharp with salt, were distributed. Grant never
had seen the “jerky” of the Southwest; the leathery stuff would have
revolted him did his body not cry out for food. He tore at the tough
substance after the manner of his fellows while the guards brewed
themselves some more complicated mess over a fire of greasewood sticks.
Then the march again. Dragging hour after dragging hour. Clink-clank
of the swinging chain. Pad-pad of feet in time. Snuffle and
wheeze--snuffle and wheeze of the asthmatic Chinaman’s breathing.
All in an unvarying synchronism which tore at the nerves. All the
world--Grant’s world of a great city--was reduced to this dreadful
monotony of movement and sound.
He tried to think. Came to his mind a picture of his office in the
Manhattan skyscraper--his desk with the mounted bit of shrapnel for a
paperweight, its clear greeny-white glass top, the two wire baskets
which held his correspondence. He saw the squash court at the club--men
in sleeveless shirts straining after a white ball. Henry’s bar in the
little side street off the Rue D’Anou in Paris; Henry selling stolen
American cigarettes for five times their value at the commissary. St.
Mihiel and the old woman who knitted lace. Then the girl--Benicia
O’Donoju. Grant called to his mind the vivid glory of her hair, the
trick of her short upper lip in curling outward like the petal of a tea
rose, a something roguish always lurking deep down in the warm pools of
her eyes.
“Not Mexican. We are Spanish folk.” That was her sharp reproof when he,
blundering, had asked her if she was of Mexican blood. That night on
the train--it seemed a year back. “Not Mexican.” Now he understood why
the girl had corrected him so pointedly. Thank God she was not of that
breed!
Near dusk the line was halted and one of the guards dismounted. Grant
saw him fumble in his shirt and bring out a bright bit of metal, saw
him approach the head of the line and tinker with the first fellow’s
wrist shackle. He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him and,
turning, caught the stamp of terror on the giant Indian’s face.
Something was going forward which he could not comprehend, something to
shake the stoicism of this Indian. Within five minutes the steel band
about his wrist was unlocked and he stood free of the chain with the
rest of the prisoners. He saw on the faces of all of them that same
terror mask the Indian wore.
The freed men cast covert glances at the guards, followed their every
move with cat-like slyness. The little Chinaman began a falsetto
sing-song under his breath, which might have been a prayer to his
protecting joss. One of the guards turned in his saddle and called some
jocular order to the prisoners. They moved on in the wine-light of the
sunset, falling precisely into the line they had held when chained,
their eyes vigilant for every move of a hand on the part of the mounted
men.
The rurales now carried their rifles swung free across the saddles.
Though he could understand no word of the muttered scraps of speech
passed between man and man behind him, the magnetic fear waves
possessing all the rest began to prompt Grant to some comprehension.
The coming night--dropping of the chain--those rifles unslung from
shoulders and carried free across the saddles:--did these things
presage the near end of this farce of a pilgrimage across the desert to
a court?
Light now was nearly gone from the western sky and the guards were
riding farther away from the trudging line, deliberately inviting some
one to offer himself for fair target practice while gunsights still
could be seen. Grant faced the hazard squarely. Certain he was that
none of the eight would see another sunrise, that butcher’s work would
commence the minute sporting chances were definitively ignored by the
victims. He was of no mind to be the passive party to a hog killing.
Better a quick dash--a bullet from behind--
The line of men had just emerged from an arroyo with almost perpendicular
sides; the bed of the dry stream was thick with shadow. Grant leaped from
line and ran straight for the guard who rode between himself and the
course of the stream. Almost at his stirrup he swerved and cut under the
horse’s rump.
Shouts. A shot gone wild. Grant, zigzagging, was at the brink of the
arroyo. Two shots almost as one. A lance of fire through his shoulder.
Up went his arms and he plunged headlong into the gulf of blackness.