CROSSCURRENTS
An hour after the sun had set on the day of Colonel Urgo’s humiliation
at the Casa O’Donoju, Quelele tooled his car into the avenue of palms
at the end of the long return journey from Magdalena, on the railroad.
With him were his master, Don Padraic, and an American stranger, Bim
Bagley of Arizora.
Fate had played capriciously with Bim. When he set out from Arizora on
the quest of his pal Grant Hickman it was only on the bare report that
the man was seriously wounded and under the care of El Doctor Coyote
Belly at Babinioqui, south of the Line. Near the end of his journey
his car had wrecked itself beyond repair hard by Magdalena; a mule had
been requisitioned to carry him over the mountains to the home of the
medicine man; once there he was as far from the end of his quest as
ever.
For grey old Coyote Belly lied unblinkingly. He knew nothing of a
wounded man. Persuasion of words nor the chink of silver dollars
availed to budge him from a trust he conceived to be joined between
himself and the master of the Casa O’Donoju.
The hours following the scene in the patio and the sudden gust of
action concluding the visit of Hamilcar Urgo had been trying ones
for Grant. Spent as he was by the struggle with the Spaniard, he had
suffered himself to be half-carried to his room by the Indian servants.
Benicia, accompanying him to the door, had permitted her hand to rest
in his at farewell; a clasp tried to tell what the storm in her soul
denied speech. The girl’s face was etched by suffering; sacrificed
pride and a shadow of some deep fear lay heavy in her eyes and the
drawn lines about her mouth. The wound made by her spiteful suitor was
deeper than Grant could conceive.
Alone on his bed he conned over the tale Urgo had told. Unfamiliar as
he was with the Latin temperament, the belief of the romance peoples
in the very reality of inherited curse and whips of Nemesis pursuing
innocent generations, yet the raw tragedy of the story fired his
imagination. He tried to put himself in the place of the girl he loved
with all her pride of race and family; to feel with her the stripes
of scorn the despicable Urgo had laid on. El Rojo’s desecration of
the mission sanctuary by an act of blood; his flight into the desert
with the pearls of the Virgin and a girl, “who was wife to him without
priest or book”; the blotting of the mission from sight of man; all
this cycle of tragedy of the dim past linked to a gloriously vital
creature of the present by the chance colour of her hair. The thing was
monstrously absurd! And yet--
A knock at the door and Don Padraic entered. He turned to beckon some
one behind him. In the candlelight Grant saw the head of a giant stoop
to avoid the lintel.
“Bim Bagley!”
The desert man crossed to the bed by a single wide step and threw both
arms about Grant in a bear hug.
“You dam’d old snoozer. You dam’d old snoozer!” was all Bim could give
in greeting. Don Padraic stepped outside and closed the door on the
reunion. Bim let his friend’s body lightly down on the pillows and sat
back to grin into Grant’s eyes.
“I sure been burnin’ the ground all over North Sonora on your trail,”
he rumbled. “You’re the original little Mexican jumping bean.”
“Jumped right into a flock of trouble, old side partner, with more
right beyond the front line waiting for me. The reserves seem to have
come up just the right time.” Grant gave his pal’s great paw a squeeze.
Bim roared assurance:
“Reserves got all bogged down through failure in liaison--just like the
days of the Big Show. But they’re with you now from hell to breakfast,
young fellah; an’ I think I know the name of the outfit we got to trim.
Name’s Hamilcar Urgo, huh?” His buoyant spirit was wine to Grant; the
very animal force of him seemed to fill the old room.
“Ran acrost that li’l sidewinder this afternoon when the old Don was
bringing me up here from Magdalena. Just our two cars on the road. He
pulls up when we’re makin’ to pass him--face on him just as pleasant as
a polecat’s. Your friend the Don passes the time of day courteous as
you please.
“‘I had the honour to visit your daughter this day,’ whinnies this Urgo
gazabo; of course he speaks in Spanish, which is nuts for me. ‘And I
discover she is entertaining a convict who escaped from a chain gang.’”
Bim grinned. “I take it that convict is my li’l friend from Noo Yawk.”
Grant nodded. The other wagged his head in a grotesque mockery of grief.
“‘My daughter and I are entertaining an American gentleman who was
wounded on the Hermosillo road,’ your Don answers, civil enough. ‘While
he is a guest in our house we naturally ask no questions.’
“‘Then,’ snaps this Urgo boy, ‘I must inform you that for harbouring an
escaped criminal you are responsible before the law. The rurales will
visit your house and it is for me to say whether they take you as well
as the gringo convict.’”
Grant started. Here was a phase of the situation he had not guessed:
that his courteous host might be made to suffer for Urgo’s rage and
jealousy.
Eagerly, “What did Don Padraic say to that?”
“He says something to the effect that the laws of hospitality were
above any this-here Urgo might care to dig up, the same I call being
mighty white of your Don Whosis with the Irish twist to his name.”
Bim broke off to shoot a quizzical look into his friend’s eyes. “Say,
brother, what you been doin’ to this little black-an’-tan stingin’
lizard to make him ride your trail so hard? You a tenderfoot an’
riding your herd across the fence line of the biggest little man in the
whole Sonora government!”
Grant grinned childishly. “Well, I threw him out of the front door here
this afternoon for one thing and--”
Admiration beamed from every wind wrinkle about the Arizonan’s eyes.
“Sho! You did that? Now I call that steppin’ some for a man with a
bullet through him. I thought from the gen’ral slant to Señor Urgo’s
manner when he met up with us some one’d been working on his frame
somewhere. He just sweat T.N.T. But why did you crawl him?”
“He insulted Señorita O’Donoju,” was Grant’s answer. Bim lowered the
lid of one eye owlishly and his gaunt face was pulled down to a comic
aspect of concern.
“Uh-huh; now I begin to get the drift. Old Doc Stooder was right
when he says there’s the shoo-shoo of a skirt somewheres in your big
disappearing act. Boy--boy! I had you figgered for the orig’nal old
hermit coyote who travels the meat trail alone. No wonder li’l Urgo’s
all coiled up for the strike, you aimin’ to run him out on his girl.”
Before Grant could head off his friend on a topic that brought sudden
embarrassment to him ’Cepcion and a second servant entered with a
spread table. Bim tucked pillows under his friend’s shoulders with
clumsy tenderness, then in mellow candlelight they ate and talked. Both
were bursting with questions to be asked, but Bim claimed the right of
priority by virtue of his ten days’ blind search through the country
south of the Line. At his demand Grant gave him the whole story of
his feud with Colonel Urgo, from the meeting at El Paso down to the
afternoon’s events in the patio. Lively play of sympathies about the
Arizonan’s features followed the narrative of the dreadful march in
the chain gang and Grant’s burst for freedom under the rifles of the
rurales. The little his friend left unsaid Bim was shrewd enough to
supply; he guessed the story of Grant’s thraldom under the witchery of
the desert girl and found it good.
When the man on the pillows began recital of what had occurred just
a few hours before--Urgo’s savage assault on a girl’s pride through
the story of El Rojo’s impiety--the big man by the bed stiffened in
intensified interest. He heard Grant through with scarce concealed
impatience.
“But, man, that was the Mission of the Four Evangelists Urgo was
telling of!” explosively from Bim. Grant nodded confirmation.
“Why, that’s the Doc’s big proposition--our proposition!”
Grant looked his puzzlement. The other’s excitement swirled him on:
“That proves what the Doc’s Papago told him. Pearls buried there. An’
gold--lots of gold, the Papago says. I had a sneaking hunch all the
time it might be one of Stooder’s wild dreams, but this story proves
we’re on the right track.”
“Do you mean--?”
“Sure! That’s what I brought you out from the East for--to help us
uncover this Lost Mission, as folks in Arizona call it. Doc Stooder’s
such a cagey old monkey he wouldn’t let me put on paper just what I
wanted you to whack in on. Now you got it all--the pure quill. Isn’t it
a whale of a proposition!”
Though Grant’s surface perception had grasped the full import of his
friend’s words some sub-strata of mind, or of heart, stubbornly refused
to be convinced that he had heard aright. He groped for words:
“You say you brought me out here to help you uncover pearls and gold
that belong to the Church?”
“Why not?” A subtle note of pugnacity in the other’s speech. “The
stuff’s been lyin’ buried for a hundred an’ fifty years more or less.
The priests’ve never lifted a finger to find it, though slews of
prospectors have rooted round trying to uncover this cache.”
“But the old O’Donojus built this church and endowed it with that very
treasure you want to dig for,” Grant persisted. “What about their
rights?”
He did not hear Bim’s arguments. Instead he was conning over the story
of the bane of the house of O’Donoju. Before his eyes was the face of
the girl he loved, as he had last seen it, deeply graven with tragedy.
Grant’s hand went out in a comrade’s clasp. “Bim, old man, count me out
on this thing. I couldn’t consider it for a minute.”