INTO THE FURNACE
Meanwhile from another direction adventurers were moving through the
night upon the slag mountains of Pinacate. Empty space of Altar’s
ultimate sweep was become almost populous. A strange company this,
which passed ghostily under the great lights of the near stars with
only the clink of bridle metal and pack mule’s canteens to give tempo
to the march; Benicia O’Donoju, the desert girl, moved to this risky
hazard by compulsion of an incubus of fate visited upon her through
inheritance down the generations of her people; Grant Hickman, man
of cities and crowds, whom destiny had whirled out into a country of
the world’s dawn; Bagley the Arizonan, taker of chances, seeker after
rainbow ends; and the two Papagoes, Quelele and El Doctor Coyote Belly,
on whom was spread thin the veneer of so-called civilization.
It had been Benicia’s mastering purpose that had moved the cavalcade
away from the Casa O’Donoju and out onto the desert immediately upon
the return of Bim and Quelele reporting the leisurely approach of
Colonel Urgo and his rurales. This was not flight, she told Bim;
they would go in search of the treasure of the Lost Mission whose
hiding place the old medicine man was willing to reveal, and if Urgo
followed--well, eventualities could be met as they arose. In this
resolve Grant had strongly seconded her. The girl’s slavery under the
obsession of the bane of El Rojo, especially following the slaying of
her father, had laid an impenetrable barrier between her and him; he
had seized upon this possibility promising her emancipation from this
horror. This chance failing, he had but the last desperate recourse.
The first hour of their pilgrimage away from the desert oasis Grant
rode by Benicia’s side. He essayed to distract her thoughts from the
tragedy that lay behind by questioning her on the revelations El Doctor
had made: how had the old Indian come by knowledge of the buried gold
and pearls; what impulse had led him to promise their restoration? But
the girl was not to be drawn. She answered his queries by evasions
or meaningless monosyllables. It was as if Grant were a stranger,
impudently prying.
At first the man was stung by this treatment. His self-pride rebelled
against so arbitrary a closing of the door of confidence against him.
Why should he be treated thus cavalierly when the girl had surely read
the great love he bore her and his single desire to place himself
between her and the menace of one who had prompted murder? But these
hurts did not continue long. Riding by Benicia’s side in the starshine,
the man began to feel the emanations of a mastering will which poured
from her as the pungent prickles of ozone surround a high-power dynamo.
Her consciousness was frozen into a mould of purpose, locked against
any distractions. Benicia was alive only to the single resolve to free
herself from the curse of the Red One. Man nor spirit could invade that
preoccupation.
There under the steady-burning desert lamps the man of the cities
began to feel again that spell of the infinite which had chained him
the night of Don Padraic’s passing. Here was he, lately denizen of a
hive of stone and steel, tiny integer in that man-made machine called
a metropolis, moving through the darkness over a land unsullied by
hand of man since the floods of melting glaciers drove a shadowy
race of stone-axe people back to the highlands. The loves and hates,
the battles and deaths of these stone-axe folk occurred but yesterday
in the time-sheet of the waste places. The to-morrow of ten thousand
years would find the desert still untouched, supine under the stars.
What then of hidden baubles of gold; what then of the love of a Grant
Hickman for a Benicia O’Donoju? A fossil snail shell by the shore of
the gulf left a more enduring record.
“The thing that’s sorta got me fussed is how I’m goin’ explain all
this to the old Doc.” Bim’s voice broke through Grant’s contemplation
of shadowy frontiers; he noted with a start that his horse had dropped
behind Benicia’s and was ambling head-and-head with his friend’s. Bim
drawled on:
“It sure will look like a double-cross to Stooder--my sailin’ off down
into Sonora on the search for you an’ then hooking up with an outfit to
go get all the plunder the old Doc thinks he’s as good as got his hands
on. Me, I guess I’m queered all right,” was the man’s whimsical finish
to his lament. Grant, who had been too preoccupied with the sweep of
affairs to give any thought to his pal’s perplexities, could not now
offer much consolation. A point of honour involving the grotesque
creature who had elected to receive him as a book agent did not greatly
move Grant.
“A’ course,” Bim continued his monologue, “the way things lie with the
girl, her bein’ hipped on gettin’ back this swag somebody in her family
lifted from the mission, I’m more’n willing to see her get it. But the
old Doc hasn’t got a large store of what you might call sentiment, an’
I sure got my work cut out for me when I try to show him the light.”
“Too bad I got you into a tangle, old man,” Grant heartily commiserated;
then with a hopeless little laugh, “My own affairs aren’t set on any
straight and beautiful road to happiness either.”
Bim chuckled deep in his throat. “Me, I was all for your first idea
to rope the señorita right outa the home corral an’ put your brand on
her, fighting. But like’s not we’ll get _mucho_ plenty excitement along
this trail before we’re through.” He gave a short laugh. “Say, Cap’n
Hickman, I brought you out from the East on a whale of a proposition.
You’re sure getting it. A girl who assays higher’n any pearls an’ old
gold junk you could find in a church cellar--the feel and savvy of a
man’s country--a larrupin’ fight with old Urgo and his rurales bunch.
That last you can back right down to your last white chip.”
“But how can Urgo follow us from the O’Donoju house?” incredulously
from Grant. “Not one of the servants or other Indians there knows what
our destination is--we don’t ourselves except in a general way.”
The man of the big country chuckled at metropolitan innocence. “Horses
don’t leave tracks on your Fifth Avenoo because they’s no horses left
there for one thing, I reckon. But in this country they do. Five horses
make a trail a blind man could follow. I or anybody else could track
this outfit of ours in the dark. I look to see our li’l friend Urgo
drop in on us some time to-morrow. He’ll travel fast with fresh horses
his men round up at the O’Donoju corrals.”
They rode some time in silence, Grant turning over in his mind this
unthought-of possibility. Tenderfoot that he was--so he accused
himself--he had noted the carbines slung in scabbards at each
saddlehorn; noted with an unreading eye. So Benicia and all the others
had provided against a contingency he had not even suspected.
“Only thing I’m figgerin’ in this proposition,” he heard Bim saying,
“is, will the Papagoes stick under fire? Papagoes are not strong for
the knock-down-an’-drag-out stuff. An’, besides, you’re not a whole man
yet.”
“Whole enough to keep my end up,” Grant said shortly, knowing not why
he resented any imputation of disability against him.
“Oh, sure--sure!” the other hurriedly amended, and the subject died.
Dawn spread a ghostly panorama before them. In the greeny-white light
that heralds the sun’s first ruddiness the whole western horizon bulked
with black masses of slag heaped in fantastic shapes. High above the
lesser masses towered the two peaks of Pinacate, their summits yawning
in wide craters. The horses’ hoofs struck sparks from lava aprons; the
beasts had to pick their way carefully over traps and crevices. Ever
and again grey arms of cactus struck out to rake the riders’ legs with
claws of thorns.
Waxing light filled in details of a phantom land, terrific in stark
brutalities of scarp and battlement--a world just set aside from the
baking-oven of the Potter and unadorned by a single brush stroke. The
little company of horsemen threaded single file up a narrow gorge
between the main peaks of the range. Walls of porphyry and slag the
colour of furnace clinkers leaped to heights on either side which
dwarfed the riders to the stature of weevils. The trail they followed
was the path cut by the rushing waters of summer cloudbursts, which
pack into the downpour of minutes’ duration all the water denied
during months of drought; great blocks of fused glass and conglomerate
wrenched from the canyon’s eaves by the fingers of these storms choked
the way. Where capfuls of soil had been caught and held in some pocket
the gaunt sticks of the _ocatilla_ splayed out against raw rock like
cat’s whiskers. Low-lying _cholla_, that spined and vicious vegetable
tarantula of the desert, seemed to grow from the very rock; all its
nodules were frosty with close-set thorns. Over all dropped the veil of
mystical morning radiance.
The horses groaned as they had to choose, minute by minute, between
barking their hocks on the knife-like corners of obsidian or taking
the barbs of the _cholla_. The higher the ascent the savager grew
the way. Grant, awed by this penetration into the very laboratory of
earth, almost leaped from his saddle when a sharp clatter of small
pebbles to his right broke the silence. His eyes jumped up the canyon
wall to follow three dots of bounding dun-white against its sheer
side--bighorn sheep skipping surely along no visible foothold.
When the sun was well in the sky--though naught but its reflected
radiance penetrated the gorge--El Doctor, in the lead, signalled a
halt. The place was a constricted apron or shelf in the cleft between
rock walls whereon sparse galetta grass was growing. Reason for this
tiny oasis of vegetation lay just beyond in the fact of a water-worn
cistern in the lava--such a natural reservoir as the desert folk
called a “tank,” a godsend when it still contains the wash from a last
cloudburst. This one was bone-dry.
The party breakfasted meagrely, wood for their coffee fire being
grubbed by the Indians painfully and after long search. There was
little speech between them for they were tired; the night’s ride had
been wearing. Moreover, even the Indians appeared to feel a malign
presence bearing down upon them and forbidding desecration of the
silence. For them, in especial for Coyote Belly, there was a very real
and fear-compelling presence abroad. These mountains of Tjuktoak housed
Iitoi, Elder Brother himself; the god of all things who, with a coyote
and a black beetle, drifted four times round the earth in the time of
the Flood and came to anchorage in this place. El Doctor Coyote Belly,
driven by a great love to commit sacrilege, might well have heard the
voice of Iitoi in the wind and felt his heart turn to water.
In truth, the aged Papago was having a battle with himself. Before
he had gulped his coffee and tortillas the medicine man’s eyes were
roaming fearsomely and he whimpered snatches of sacerdotal songs as
he rummaged in the pack for a wicker basket. From it he took a wand
stained red and with an eagle’s feather bound to one end, an arrow very
handsomely feathered from the same bird, a string of glass beads and a
bundle of cigarettes--presents for Elder Brother, who must be beguiled
before being robbed.
The old man’s hands wavered to return the presents to the basket when
Benicia hurried to him, sat down by his side and earnestly pleaded with
him in his own tongue. Finally his resolution seemed to be brought to
the sticking point. He started up the gorge alone and with his basket
of trifles.
“Coyote Belly says he must go and sing to the god Iitoi before we are
permitted to visit his house,” Benicia gravely explained to her white
companions. “The poor man is desperately scared because we have come
to rob Elder Brother.”
Seeing the look of puzzlement on the men’s faces she continued with
that same grave respect as if speaking of a real presence. “This old
man through the love he bore my father has consented to betray a secret
the medicine men of his people have handed down for more than a hundred
years. The treasure of the Lost Mission, he tells me, was dug up by
Papago medicine men not long after the Mission was destroyed by the
Apaches and brought to these mountains--to the cave of Elder Brother--”
“And it’s all here now?” Bim put in excitedly. The girl nodded.
“It has been as well hidden from those who sought it as if it were
under the buried ruins of the mission,” she said; then simply: “While
El Doctor is gone it is best that we get some sleep.”
Benicia stretched herself under the shade of a rock with a saddle
blanket for pillow and slept. But neither of the white men could follow
her precept; both were too sensible of the prickling of some unnameable
essence of the strange and the unworldly--perhaps that very savagery of
atmosphere which had prompted primitive Indians to designate Pinacate
as the residence of their god. They were alone; big Quelele had quietly
slipped away shortly after El Doctor without saying where he was going.
The men sat smoking while their eyes roved the prospect of burnt cliff
and ragged parapet. The heat had whips; it drove them to burrow for
lessening shade wherever angles of the rocks offered. A curious cast to
the slice of sky visible above the cañon walls first caught Bagley’s
attention. He squinted up at it for a long moment of speculation.
“If it wasn’t so early in the summer I’d say a thunderhead was fixin’
up to give us a big razoo,” he ventured. Grant looked up and noted that
the blue had turned to a heavy saffron tint as if the sun were shining
through a stratum of light sand; such a tint he’d seen before the great
windstorm on the day of Don Padraic’s burial.
“If I could only look over the top of the wall yonder to west’ard,” Bim
grumbled uneasily. “These cloudbursts always come from direction of the
Gulf. We’re not very well put right here in the channel of all the wash
down from up top-side. Those horses now--”
He walked uneasily about the narrow confines of the shelf, scanning
the upshoots of rock for possible ways out. Then he seemed to dismiss
possibility of trouble from his mind and returned to where Grant was
sitting.
An hour passed. Perhaps they were dozing when the rattle of a shower
of rock down the cañon side galvanized both. Up there they saw the
figure of big Quelele. Like a wild goat he was leaping from foothold to
foothold downward; he was in mad haste.
The big Indian risked his neck a dozen times before he came panting up
to the watchers. He waved to the brink of the cliff.
“I been on top--watching--I see long way off--Urgo--rurales. They
come--fast!”