THIRST
The sun went down before the sand storm abated. Two men, the one called
civilized, the other a savage, crouched like rabbits in a covert
beneath the body of the little car with a high sand drift piled up to
windward even over the radiator top. Two mites in the wind-scourged
wilderness of Altar with love o’ life the leveller that made them kin.
When the last vagrant wind fury had passed fell silence almost terrific
by contrast with the uproar of the storm. In place of the slithering
and whistling of driven sand an oppressive stillness, which seemed
dropped from the void of the stars, now showing. Occasionally the dry
rustle of sand dropping in rivulets from some desert bush lifting its
head after the scourging; that was all.
When the two crawled out from beneath their shelter Guadalupe was for
an immediate start afoot in the direction of the faint pencilings of
red marking the west. But Doc Stooder possessed an abiding glimmer
of faith in the soundness of the car and insisted on taking stock
of its motive possibilities. A cursory examination convinced him of
the hopelessness of his trust, for the sand was heaped entirely over
the unprotected engine--desert cars dispense with a hood because it
blankets the engine’s heat--and he knew that even with water in the
radiator he couldn’t get a kick out of the thing before a thorough
overhauling. This was out of the question. They must achieve their
escape from the desert’s trap afoot.
The Papago started on a swinging walk a little north of west, the Doc
following. They had not gone far when the white man discovered they
were not following the road; each step was through loose sand which
received the foot with a viscous hold and reluctantly released it. The
Doc snarled a query at his companion: why in the name of deletion had
he quit the Road of the Dead Men?
“Not quit--finding him,” came Guadalupe’s grudging answer. Then Stooder
admitted to himself the possibility that during the time the little car
had pushed on into the storm he had tooled it off the road. How far he
had driven away from the single track which spans Altar he could not
hazard a guess. Anyway, he knew one thing: he was dog tired, and if
this mangy black coyote thought A. Stooder, M.D., was going to wallow
through sand all night without a sleep he had another think coming.
Reaction from the excitements of the past two days added extra
weight to the Doc’s already none-too-light handicap of alcoholic
repercussions. The storm had torn his nerves to tatters; his mouth was
as dry as an old church pew cushion; each of his legs felt as if they
were dragging an Oregon boot. Stooder’s mind was too dulled to probe
down below these afflictions and read the real seriousness of his
situation; it dealt only with cogent aches and reluctances.
“Hey, Guadalupe! We take a sleep right here.” The Doc halted. Great was
his surprise when he saw the Papago striding on. Hot rage bubbled to
his lips in an explosive Mexican oath.
“Hey, you lizard-eatin’ mozo, hear me? We stop here for the big
shut-eye!” The Doc spurred his long legs into a gangling run to
overtake the Indian, who had plodded on unheeding. All the arrogance of
the white man in his fancied superiority fell with the doctor’s hand on
the Indian’s shoulder. Guadalupe wrenched free and turned to face him
sulkily.
“Sleep here--to-morrow much sun--no water. Maybe to-morrow we die here.
Walk!” Guadalupe’s sparse vocabulary of Spanish words was drained; but
the manner of his resuming the forward hike was sufficiently eloquent.
Guadalupe, born to the desert code and grown to manhood under the
inexorable desert law, had in mind but a single impulse--to survive.
His mind plumped through the bog of discomforts wherein Stooder’s
was mired to read clearly the tablets of the desert’s decalogue: ten
commandments in one--live! In extremity throw over loyalty, discard
obligations of oath or of blood, strip the soul to its elemental
selfishness; but live!
Guadalupe strode on, still bearing to the north and the west, and still
no road. Stooder, growing more weary each step, spent his strength in
blind rage at the stubbornness of the Papago. He conned over various
capital operations he would like to perform with Guadalupe for a
subject. His brain tired of that and began to nurture the germ of a new
thought. Why strain himself keeping up with that ring-tailed kangaroo
rat who skipped on and on without rest? Guadalupe left the print of
his foot every step he took; those footprints would point to wherever
Guadalupe might go--and the Papago, of course, knew the shortest way
out of this hellhole--so why break his own neck? The old Doc would
take a little snooze and then just follow the footprints when he felt
good and ready to do so.
The gangling form crumpled up as if cut off at the knees. Guadalupe
heard a thud, turned for a half-glance over his shoulder and pushed
steadily on under the stars. It was not in the Papago’s code to add
one ounce to the weight of circumstance obtruding between himself and
water. In a dozen steps his figure was swallowed up in the dark.
Stooder may have allotted to himself only that minimum of sleep
designated as a snooze. But a high sun pried open his reluctant
eyelids. He sat up and sent a dazed glance around an unfamiliar world.
Mountains tawny and black with knife-edge water scores down their
flanks; a sea of scrub stretching interminably from their bases;
patches of gypsum and _salitre_ showing dull white as scars of leprosy
here and there amid the grey-green of the _camisa_. The sky already was
taking on the yellow-white glaze indicative of imminent heat.
The Doc arose and shook the sand out of the creases of his clothing.
First definite impression coming to him was the need of a drink: his
favourite tequila if might be, water in a pinch. All the nerves in
his body twittered “Hear--hear!” to the first of the alternatives.
Then, his mind beginning to function along the line of the night’s
impressions, Doc Stooder read the story of the footprints leading off
to the north and west. There they were: good li’l signposts; they’d
take him to a drink just as easy!
Stooder’s renewed strength carried him easily along the trail the
Papago had left. For an hour, that is; then trouble. For the sand
disappeared under a broad apron of _caliche_--a hardpan of baked
mineral salts and earth almost impervious even to the shod hoof of a
horse. It was like a door swung shut on the trailer--the locked door
to some labyrinth beyond. Here the last firm print of a boot in the
sand, there nothingness. The Doc paused, looked back over the cup-like
shadows marking the footprint trail he had been following to take its
line of direction, then he pushed ahead along that line.
Another hour, and he still was on the _caliche_ outcrop. He stopped to
consider. Where in the name of all the angels was that road--the Road
of the Dead Men? If he’d driven the car a little south of it during the
sand storm, surely Guadalupe must have cut tangent to it by this time.
And if the road passed over the _caliche_ flat there’d be wheel marks;
that was sure. Miss that road and miss the Papago’s trail both--why
then old Doc Stooder’d be a goner!
He tried to follow his own back trail by such small signs as the
scratch of a hobnail against an embedded rock and a thin print of a
sole in a pocket of dust. A while and he had lost even that. He stopped
and swabbed his streaming face with a shirtsleeve--he now was carrying
his coat.
“By the eternal, Stooder, you gotta do something--and do it dam’d
pronto!”
Once more he turned on his own tracks. Better go back and find that
putrid Papago’s trail and let the road go to the devil. Whole half hour
wasted a’ready--good half hour, by criminy! with a drink just that much
farther off.
It was not so easy finding the scored rocks and the stamp of a heel
in pools of dust; not so easy as the first essay. For the sun was at
meridian now and foreshortened little shadows to nothingness. Plump!
he came to the edge of the hardpan and into the sandy soil. No tracks
there. Should he bear to right or left in circling the edge of the
_caliche_ on his hunt for the footprints? If he guessed wrong where’d
he be? “Oh, dear God!”
He turned to the left and resumed his tramp. Furnace light refracted
from the sand seared into his eyes, which must be always kept downward
peering--spying. His mouth now was dry as rotted wood. Something
alien there kept bothering him by pressing against the roof of it. He
explored with his fingers and discovered the alien object to be his
tongue, which was swelling.
“But my mind’s clear--clear as a bell. Got a steady mind anyway. Gotta
hold onto that or I’m a gone coon.”
A slight breeze struck his right arm more penetratingly than it should.
Stooder shifted his glance to his arm, held crooked.
“Good God! Coat’s gone!” Dropped somewhere--that coat in whose pocket
was a prescription book; among its pages the map of the treasure site.
The precious map showing where lay the bell and the beam! The man
whirled and started on a staggering run along the rim of the _caliche_
he had been travelling.
“Must find that coat! Don’t find the coat an’ I lose the pearls an’ the
gold--the pearls an’ the gold!”
He halted as if shot. Down the wind came to him the faint tolling of
a bell. _Dong--dong._ Silvery throb of a swinging bell. Measured,
unhurried; like the sounding of a bell for mass of a Sunday morning.
The Doc had heard the bell of San Xavier sending its call across the
alfalfa fields of a Sunday morning, just like that.
Even as he strained his ears to drink in the full miracle of it the
sound faded, ceased.
“I heard it! A bell! No illusion. Mind’s still clear--still clear!”
On he went, his gaunt legs weaving in wide circles. He came to a dark
patch on the hardpan and strided over it, unheeding. It was his missing
coat, in the pocket the precious map of the treasure site. The Doc did
not see the coat because again his ears were drinking in the maddening
tolling of the bell; this time a little clearer down the wind in his
face. An animal cry, half articulate, burst from his swollen lips:
“The mission bell! Bell of the Four Evangelists which I found t’other
day! Callin’ me back!”
Right over yonder where the mountains cracked apart to let that arroyo
down onto the plain: that’s where the bell sounded. Yes, sir, no
mistake about it. ’Bout four-five mile, judgin’ from the sound. Hear
what that bell’s a-callin’? “Gol-l-ld! Gol-l-ld!”
Doc Stooder, coatless, hatless, the high roach of his streaked hair
fanning in the hot winds, was stumbling and falling--stumbling and
falling ever forward toward the crack in the mountains. Light of
madness flamed in his eyes; his great arms clawed forward as if to
catch invisible supports to pull him the faster. Gol-l-ld--Gol-l-ld!
“Old mind’s still clear, else couldn’t hear that mission bell so
plain-- Gotta keep old mind clear--”
* * * * *
The way of the desert god, always beyond man’s comprehending,
nevertheless sometimes approaches so close to the human scheme of
thought and motive as to permit of analogy with it. When the director
of destinies in the dry wastes seems to make a travesty of such a
sacrosanct quality as human justice we may be moved to call the impulse
satiric for want of a better name. Satiric, then, that reversal of the
decree of death passed upon the Papago youth who confessed to murder
before the overturned kettle at the Casa O’Donoju; more than satiric
the moving finger now directing his path through the dead lands up to a
union with the crazed doctor’s.
According to ancient custom the Indian retainers of the O’Donoju had
taken the youth--his baptismal name was Ygnacio--down to the crater
land of the Pinacate and there turned him loose without water to wander
for a while and finally to die miserably. Other murderers had been so
treated and never had been seen of men again. But the desert god who
slays so peremptorily knew that Ygnacio had done the bidding to murder
to save his brother from death--had killed without malice and only as
the price of redemption for one of his blood. Wherefore the arbiter of
life and death flung life at Ygnacio.
When he was athirst almost to the point of exhaustion he found a
knob-like growth a scant two inches above the surface of the ground,
recognized it for a promise of succour and with the last ounce of his
strength dug the deep sand all about it. The end of his effort gave to
him a strange and rare vegetable reservoir like an elongated radish,
which miraculously holds scant moisture of summer rains the year round.
“Root-of-the-sands” the Sonorans have named it. In the desolation
between the Pinacate and the Gulf even the coyotes have the wisdom to
dig for this precious sustainer of life.
Ygnacio devoured the whole of the root and was revived. He found
others, which he tied into a bundle to carry over his shoulders. Food
and drink had come to him from the hand of Elder Brother himself
when it was decreed by man he should have neither. Wherefore love o’
life once more burned strong in the man. He set his course northward,
travelling only by night when the heat had given place to the biting
desert chill, keeping his precious roots buried in the sand while he
slept by day so that evaporation would not rob him of the promise of
escape from inferno. Straight as an arrow northward where, beyond
the Line, lay tribes of Papagoes who never had heard of Don Padraic
O’Donoju nor of a murderer named Ygnacio.
So it happened that on the third night of his march, when Ygnacio had
paused to munch a segment of the sustaining root, came to his ears
the sound of a voice, faintly and from a great distance. It might be
a human voice, though there was a burred and thickened quality to it
almost like a burro’s bray.
The Indian boldly followed where his ears gave direction.
“Gol’--gol’--gol’” was the monotonous iteration, sounding almost like
the muffled tapping of a clapper against metal. He walked a mile--so
clearly do sounds carry in the desert night--and suddenly came upon the
figure of a white man. Naked above the waist, wisp of a goatee tilted
at the stars, arms rigid at sides and with fingers widespread, the
spectre of a white man chanted the single word, “Gold.”