DESERT SECRETS
Consider now the interesting activities of Doc Stooder, fallen angel of
Æsculapius:
On a March evening of sunset splendour the worthy doctor descended
from the single combination coach and baggage car which a
suffering locomotive drags once daily from a junction point on the
transcontinental line south through naked battalions of mountains to
the ghost town of Cuprico. Once Cuprico was famous; once when primitive
steam shovels nibbled at solid mountains of copper up back of Main
Street Cuprico roared with a life that was dizzy and vaunted itself the
rip-roarin’est copper camp in all the Southwest. But the glory that was
Cuprico passed, even as that of Rome; to-day they tell of the town that
when its mayor fell dead on the post office steps his body remained
undiscovered for three days.
No romantic craving for revisiting scenes of his youth had prompted
the Doc to his journey Cupricoward--he had been its premier stud
player in a day of glory fifteen years before. No, a far more material
urge had ended a period of fretting in Arizora by shunting him on a
westward-wending train. For a week Bim Bagley, his partner in a secret
enterprise, had been absent on his quest of El Doctor Coyote Belly and
the New York engineer, Bim’s friend, who was reported to be wounded
and under the care of the Papago medicine man. Ten days prior to
Bagley’s excursion into Sonora had been frittered away in groping for
information concerning this vanished engineer. All precious time wasted!
It has, perhaps, become apparent that Doc Stooder was not enthusiastic
over the inclusion of Grant Hickman, the Easterner, in his golden
scheme of treasure trove in desert sands. The stubborn refusal of
Bim Bagley to move without this fellow Hickman’s being party to the
enterprise had prevented a start on the expedition for the Mission of
the Four Evangelists six weeks before. The canny physician--whose share
in the joint endeavour was to be his exclusive information concerning
the whereabouts of the Lost Mission--possessed in large degree that
sense of divination bestowed upon folk of the desert which gives their
imagination wings over the horizon of time. Each day of delay he read
a day to the advantage of Don Padraic O’Donoju, certain sure as he was
that the master of the desert oasis had come by knowledge of his own
treasure hunt intent through mysterious desert channels.
The vision of gold and pearls Doc Stooder had seen in the depths of
raw alcohol on a night of dreaming in his office had become a goad.
So he came to Cuprico, the ghost town not seventy miles away from the
supposed site of the buried mission; his intent was to pick up his
Papago informant, who lived midway between Cuprico and the Border, and,
as Stooder happily phrased his purpose, “give things a look-see.” If
his luck was with him and he should stumble onto the mission during
this solo game so much the better. Conscience nor maxims of fair play
were any part of the doctor’s moral anatomy.
The Doc upon his arrival did not pervade Cuprico’s centres of evening
society--the Golden Star pool hall and soft drinks emporium and the
back room of Garcia’s drug store--for reasons sufficiently potent to
merit a paragraph of explanation.
Years before, when he was a resident of the mining camp and had money,
Doc Stooder took unto himself a Mexican wife who had a passion for
diamonds. Mrs. Apolinaria Stooder had a way with her which seemed
to win deep into the atrophied heart of her spouse, and he showered
her with the stones of her choice. No woman from Yuma to Tucson--so
legend still recites--“packed so much ice” as Doc Stooder’s. Then in
an epidemic of typhoid, which the Doc combated with the heroism of a
saint, Apolinaria died.
Alone and with his own hands her sorrowing widower gave her sepulchre
somewhere amid the gaunt hills surrounding the town. He let it become
known after the interment that since Apolinaria loved her diamonds so
he had buried them with her, adding for good measure of gossip that he
figured their total value at round $5000. Immediately and for several
years thereafter all the prospectors for fifty miles about gave up
their search for dip and strike and prospected for Mrs. Apolinaria
Stooder. Failing to find so much as a “colour” of her diamonds, the
profession drew the conclusion that Doc Stooder was a monumental liar.
His popularity waned accordingly.
Shadows were lengthening when Stooder tooled a rented desert skimmer
out of Cuprico’s single garage and brought it to a stop before the
general store. Into the wagon box behind the seat went his bed roll,
brought from Arizora and containing certain glassware whose contents
were more precious to their owner than life itself; boxes of grocery
staples; extra cans of oil and gasoline. Two big canteens on the
running board were filled. Plugs of chewing tobacco heavy and broad as
slate shingles were stowed in the tool box. In all this preparation
the doctor’s long legs calipered themselves from counter to car with
remarkable efficiency.
“Goin’ on a little prospecting trip?” the storekeeper had volunteered
when the Doc first commenced his stowing. No answer.
“Figgerin’ on a little _pasear_ down ’crost the Line?” hopefully from
that worthy as he helped noose the tarpaulin over the dunnage. The
Doc’s head was buried above the ears among the engine’s naked cylinders
and he professed not to hear. When Stooder was seated at the wheel
and the storekeeper had the edge of the final pail of water over the
radiator vent he feebly flung out his last grappling hook:
“Reckon you might be selling Bibles to the Papagoes.”
“Come here, friend,” sternly from the doctor. “Now I give you the way
inside if you’ll promise to keep it mum.” The storekeeper hopped
around to lean his ear over the wheel in gleeful anticipation.
“I’m a-goin’ south from here to give a Chinese lady a lesson on the
ocarina. So long!”
When the Doc skittered down the brief Main Street and out onto the
thread of grey caliche that was the road to the mysterious south
all of the west was a-roil with the final palette scrapings of the
sunset--umber, pale lemon and, high above the mountains standing black
as obsidian, cirrus clouds dyed a fugitive cherry. Ahead showed the
ragged gate into the valley of El Infiernillo--the Little Hell--place
of bleak distances between mountain ranges bare as sheet iron; place
of unimaginable thirst when summer sun hurls reflected heat back from
burning walls. Beyond El Infiernillo just a hint of peaks like fretwork
spires marked destination for the doctor; there at the foot of the
Growler range and where the Desert of Altar washes across the imaginary
line between two nations, lay the land of his desire. Somewhere on
the Road of the Dead Men passing through that savage waste perchance
a nubbin of weathered ’dobe wall lifted a few inches above the sand
to mark treasure of gold and pearls below; maybe naught but a charred
timber end concealed by a patch of greasewood and crying a secret to
the ears of the searcher.
Gold and pearls--pearls and gold! The Doc’s rapt eye caught the colours
of sacred treasure in the dyes of the sunset and read them for a
portent of success.
“Me, I’m a-goin’ just slosh around in wealth! Doc Stooder, the man with
the _dinero_--that’s me!” The gaunt head behind the wheel of the desert
skimmer was tilted back and A. Stooder, M.D., carolled his expectations
at the new stars. Then he reined in his gas snorter long enough to
fumble with his bed roll in the wagon box. Out came a square bottle of
fluid fire, such as passes currency with the international bootleggers
in the Southwest. The Doc drank heartily to the promise spread across
the western heavens. The bottle was tucked in a handy coat pocket for
future reference.
Nights in the desert along the Line are psychic. They are not of the
world of arc lights, elevated trains and the winking jewels of white
ways. In that world man has so completely surrounded himself with the
tinsels of his own making, the noise of his own multiplied squeakings
and chatterings, that he comes to accept the vault above him as under
the care of the city parks department. His little tent of night is
no higher than the towers of his skyscrapers. But in the desert it is
different.
Emptiness of day is increased an hundred fold at dark because it
leaps up to lose its frontiers behind the stars. Silence of the day
is intensified to such a degree that the inner ear catches a humming
of supernal machinery in the heavens. The eye measures perspectives
between the near and far planets. And the soul of man hearkens to
strange voices; sighings from the pale mouths of the desert scrubs,
born to a servitude of thirst; whisperings passed from mountain top to
mountain top; faint stirrings of the earth relaxed from the torsion of
the sun.
Doc Stooder, desert familiar as he was, never could blunt his senses
to this emptiness of night in the wastes. It awed him, left him
itching under half-perceived conceptions of the infinite. Hence the
bottle carried handily in his pocket. From time to time as he careered
over the road faintly marked by the feeble sparks of his headlights
he braked down to have a swig. The more he felt lifted above sombre
unrealities about him the greater his impulse to break into song. The
iron gate of El Infiernillo heard his roundelay.
Miles unreeled behind him. Dim shapes of mountains dissolved to new
contours and were left behind. The Doc came to a sharp eastward turning
of the road but kept straight ahead out over the untracked flats to
southward. He knew his way; the packed sand gave him as good traction
as the road. Down and down into the unpeopled wilderness of sandhills
and buttes bored the twin sparks of the little car.
Another shift of direction and the Doc was teetering up a narrow cañon
between high mountain walls. His course was a dry wash, boulder strewn.
Only instinct of a desert driver saved him from piling up on some rough
block of detritus. Sand traps forced him to shove the engine into low,
and the snarling of the exhaust was multiplied from the cañon walls.
A light flickered far ahead. A dog barked. The car wallowed and
snuffled out of the wash to come to a halt before several silhouettes
of huts. People, roused from sleep by the car’s clamour, stood ringed
about in curiosity; one held a torch of reeds.
“Ho, Guadalupe!” Doc Stooder bellowed. A solid looking Indian with a
mat of tousled iron-grey hair stood out under the torch light, grinning
a welcome to “El Doctor.”
“Show me a place to sleep,” commanded the visitor, and the one called
Guadalupe carried the doctor’s bed-roll to his own hut, of which
squaw and children were speedily dispossessed. So the good doctor
from Arizora slept the rest of the night in the rancheria of the Sand
People, last remnant of that Papago family for which the Mission of
the Four Evangelists was reared to save souls. In five hours the Doc
had covered by gasoline what it would have cost Guadalupe of the Sand
People as many days in painful plodding.
Morning saw the rancheria in a ferment of excitement and Doc Stooder
viciously tyrannical in reaction from his accustomed alcoholic night.
Guadalupe found himself in a difficult position. Once in a moment
of gratitude when the white doctor had snatched his squaw from the
tortures of asthma--the miracle had occurred in Guadalupe’s summer
camp near Arizora--the Indian had babbled his knowledge of the buried
mission, its treasure. But he had not counted upon this unexpected
appearance of the white doctor, demanding to be led to the place of
wealth. It is common with all the Southwestern Indians to believe
naught but ill luck can follow any revelation to a white man of the
desert’s hidden gold; some say the early padres, themselves consistent
hoarders, inculcated this lesson. With the eyes of his fellow villagers
disapprovingly upon him, Guadalupe first attempted evasion.
Stooder in an ominous quiet heard him through. Then without a word
he opened a small medicine chest he carried in his bed-roll and took
therefrom two tightly folded pieces of paper--blue and white. While
Guadalupe and the rest watched, round-eyed, the doctor made quick
passes with each bit of paper over the mouth of a small water _olla_.
The surface of the water sizzed and boiled.
Guadalupe, two shades whiter, babbled his willingness to go at once to
the place where the mission lay hidden.
“Prime cathartic for the mind,” grunted the Doc, and he tuned his
engine for the trip.
They were off down the cañon and into the yellow basin of El
Infiernillo. Guadalupe, riding for the first time in the white man’s
smell-wagon, gripped his seat with the delicious fear of a child on
a merry-go-round. He watched the movements of the doctor’s foot on
the gear-shift, marvelling that the beast concealed in pipes and rods
answered each downward thrust with a roar. Earth spun under him as if
Elder Brother himself, master of all created things, had a hold on it
and were pulling it all one way.
Down and down into the untracked miles of Altar. A single iron post on
a hill marking the Line. The sierra of Pinacate cinder-red in the south
for a beacon. Right and left sheet iron ranges with stipples of rust
where the _camisa_ grew. Mirage quivering into nothingness just as its
false waters were ready to be parted by the car’s wheels.
They came upon an east-and-west track in the sand--the Road of the
Dead Men--and turned westward upon it. Away off to the north and east
a spiral dust cloud walked across the wastes along the skirts of the
mountains. Guadalupe pointed to it with an ejaculation in his own
tongue. A sign--a sign! There was the place of the mission!
The Doc felt his internals quiver in expectation. Prickles of
excitement played in fingers that gripped the wheel. Automatically he
began to hum an ancient bar-room ditty.
The Papago indicated where he should turn off the road in the direction
of a great gap in the mountains, into which the desert flowed as a sea.
Here the mesquite lifted from its crouch and flourished in a five-foot
growth--true index of hidden waters. The car made hard going, what
with brittle twigs that caught at its tires and the _cholla_ creeping
like a spined snake to threaten punctures. At his guide’s word Doc
Stooder stopped. Both scrambled out.
Before moving a step the Doc must have a ceremonial drink, a
preliminary he did not deem necessary to share with Guadalupe. The
man’s big hands trembled as he raised the bottle to his lips; his eyes
were shining with gold lust.
Guadalupe stood for several minutes slowly swinging his head from
landmark to landmark, his eyes following calculated lines through the
scrub. Then he commenced a slow pacing through the close-set aisles of
the greasewood and cactus, bearing in a wide circle. He peered into
the core of each shrub, kicked at every naked stub of root and branch
appearing above the surface. The Doc, cursing and humming alternately,
was right at his shoulder.
An hour passed--two. The sun, now high, burned mercilessly. Still
Guadalupe pursued a narrowing circle through the scrub. Of a sudden the
Indian gurgled and dropped to his knees beside a salt-bush. He whipped
out his knife and began hacking at the tough stubs of branches near
the soil. The Doc, slavering in his excitement, dropped beside him and
looked into the heart of the salt-bush. He saw nothing but a rounded
slab of rock.
Guadalupe finished his knife work and started to dig with his hands.
Terrier-like he pawed a hole away from what Stooder had taken for a
rock. The smooth black surface began to curve outward in a form too
symmetrical for nature’s work; it was rounded and gradually flaring.
Guadalupe dug on. Blood pounded in the Doc’s ears. Snatches of song
trickled from his lips.
Suddenly patience exploded. Stooder pushed the Papago to his haunches
and threw his own body full length into the hole dug. His arms embraced
a flaring shape of metal. His eyes fell upon faint ridges and lines,
like lettering. He spat upon the spot and rubbed it clean of clinging
soil.
GLORIA DEI ET MUND----
PHILLIPUS REX
ANNO DOM.----XXIV
“The bell! The mission bell!” screamed the Doc.