STORM
Bim translated Quelele’s intelligence for Grant. “Our li’l friend
Urgo’s been burnin’ the wind,” was his dry comment. Grant sent a quick
glance around the cul-de-sac of rock which encompassed them.
“Not the best place in the world to stand off ten men,” he gave his
opinion. “We ought to get our backs up against something that can’t be
surrounded.”
Quelele read the white man’s thoughts, for he pointed farther up the
cañon beyond the lava cistern. There the gorge narrowed to a veritable
doorway and the steps thereto were so precipitous that one ascending
would have to scramble and claw a way on hands and knees; no possible
chance for a rush en masse. Bim surveyed the natural citadel with the
eye of a trained Border man who occasionally has to reckon with such
elementals as the killing power of a rifle bullet and the protective
quality of a ’dobe wall. Finally he screwed one eye at the crack of
sky showing between the escarpments and shook his head dubiously at
what he saw there. Quelele, who had had the superior advantage of a
wider view from his aerie on the cliff top, bowed his arms in the shape
of a ball and waved a hand to the west.
“Papago says it’s a big storm brewing over yonder,” Bim explained.
“When these thunderheads finally get all boiled into one and come
a-runnin’ it’s a case of take to cover. If this thing is the regulation
rim-fire sock-dollager they’s goin’ be a sight of water pass over where
we’re standin’ before long. Me, I’d rather be somewhere else than in
this dry channel.”
Grant did not linger to discuss strategy longer. He went to where
Benicia was sleeping in the shade of a boulder and gently touched her
on the shoulder. The girl sat up, startled.
“We have to be moving,” Grant told her. “Quelele has just reported Urgo
and his rurales out on the desert and coming our way.”
“And El Doctor?” she quickly interposed. “He has returned from the
cave?”
Grant shook his head. Bitter disappointment flashed into her eyes at
the realization of how fate had played to interpose the grim business
of a fight just on the minute of realization of her great hopes. Grant,
stooping beside her and watching the play of emotions on her features,
saw quick remorse chase away the frown. Impulsively a brown hand
reached out to play upon the back of his.
“Grant, beloved”--how like the overtones from her own golden harp
the contralto richness of her voice!--“I am desperately selfish and
you will not understand.--Thinking only of my own purpose--bringing
you with your wound still unhealed out to this place to face--death
perhaps.--And you do this for me--”
“’Nicia, little girl--” He could go no farther than those words, for
the song in his heart was overwhelming. At last--at last the trammels
of the girl’s heart were shaken off and the call he’d waited for so
long had come! Call of the heart of her to his.
She was on her feet, vibrant with energy, alive to the exigencies of
impending action. Bim was saddling the horses and Quelele had the pack
on the mule when they joined them. Bim briefly explained to the girl
his survey of the gorge for strategical strength; at any cost they must
move up until they could find some sheep trail or other practicable
ledge giving escape from the flood water channel. “If that doddering
old medicine man would only quit his sing-song business and come back
for a rifle we’d be that much better off,” the big fellow grumbled.
When all was in readiness Quelele led the way up the tortuous
watercourse and through the mighty gates of porphyry nearly blocking
the farther reaches. They were forced to lead the animals, whose
sure-footedness was put to the test every yard of the advance. Beyond
the great pillars the gorge opened to a rough amphitheatre with less
steeply sloping sides. A narrow upward-springing ledge of rock led
away from the dry watercourse to a rock pulpit some seventy-five or a
hundred feet above. This they followed, to discover there was space for
their horses to stand behind the horn of malapais and still be screened
from observation from below. Quelele made some mysterious passes with
a tether rope which yoked all the animals to a single line that was
anchored at both ends.
“Look,” Benicia cried as Bim was taking the carbines from the saddle
scabbards. They followed her pointing hand and saw a dark spot against
the opposite wall of the gorge and higher than their level. A midget
figure was outlined against the opening of a cave. It was El Doctor
at his business of propitiating Elder Brother--El Doctor, much needed
behind the stock of a carbine. The men hallooed to him but he did not
turn.
“Go over and get that crazy fool,” Bim commanded Quelele. But the big
Indian, instead of obeying immediately, turned up the ledge and made
for a high point on the shoulder of the rock bastion constituting one
of the portals of the upper gorge. They watched him as he scaled the
almost perpendicular face of black lava. From the top Quelele had a
view of the cañon’s far-away exit onto the desert floor several miles
from the niche where the treasure seekers had refuge. The watchers saw
him lift himself cautiously over the top of his lookout and peer to
westward. Then he came scrambling and sliding down.
“They come into the valley,” the Papago reported. “Too late to get El
Doctor.”
It was Bim with his desert craft who made disposition of the little
force of defence. Quelele he sent back to the aerie with orders not to
shoot until he heard shots from the whites; the Indian’s fire from the
rear, once Urgo and his men had passed the rocky portals, would throw
the rurales into confusion. Grant and Benicia he disposed behind an
outcrop of porphyry a little behind and above the protected animals.
“Pick ’em off as they come through the Gate,” he suggested. “An’ don’t
try any fancy shooting; we haven’t got any too many cartridges.”
“But you--?” Benicia began. The Arizonan grinned broadly.
“Me, I always fancy a little solo game in this sort of rukus. I’m going
on t’other side of the gulch. Cross-fire, you sabe?” He left them with
a smile on his lips, and they watched him jumping lightly down from
rock to rock. Almost before he had begun to clamber up the opposite
wall he was lost to view amid the maze of fissure and castellated
boulder. Grant and the girl were stretched out behind their primitive
breastwork alone in this unfinished world of fire. They could see
neither Quelele nor Bagley. Came to their ears the faint drone of
barbaric song: El Doctor Coyote Belly at his traitorous devotions.
The whole gorge was filled with a saffron glare like the reflection
from oil fires under a boiler, unworldly, portentous.
They waited, these two, in the immensity of earth’s disgorged bowels.
Side by side, elbows touching, they counted the slow drag of minutes as
naught in the balance against the deep joy of love militant.
A stir in the bed of the dry wash below them. Up went their carbines
with cheeks laid against wood and eyes sighting along the lances of
light. Again the stir down there. A gaunt figure rose from hand and
knees to its feet, stood swaying for an instant, then pitched forward
against the support of a slab of rock.
A very leprechaun of the rocks was it: ribs creasing burned skin about
the naked torso; whity-grey hair streaming down to mingle with a beard;
bare arms like a spider’s legs and all cracked by the sun. The husk of
Doc Stooder, plaything of the desert god, was come here, following the
still living spark of instinct prompting a water search in a canyon.
Come, too, to the secret hiding place of the treasure whose glitter had
so mercilessly befooled him.
Grant, stupefied by the apparition of death and failing in any
recognition of the skeleton thing as the bibulous doctor of Arizora,
suspected a trick of Urgo. Again he laid his eye along his rifle sight,
vigilant for what might ensue. The creature spread-eagled against the
rock slowly pushed itself upright with its hands; its shaggy head
turned wearily as thirsting eyes scanned the dry chasm.
Then a shout from across the gorge. Bagley had leaped from his hiding
place and was rushing precariously down to succour the ghost. Just as
he reached Stooder and had thrown an arm about him to heave his wasted
form onto a shoulder the crack of a rifle shivered the gorge’s silence.
Rock dust spurted within a foot of the rescuer.
The sun went out that second--instantly, like a powerful incandescent
switched off. A yellow penumbra tinged the darkness.
Almost as one the rifles of Grant and Benicia jetted lead. Two more
shots from the dry wash. The giant figure of Bagley with Stooder limp
over one shoulder never faltered in its leaping and scrambling up the
declivity to the shelter he had quitted. The two who had been following
his flight with stilled hearts saw him disappear behind a great rock;
an instant and a jet of fire lanced down thence at the attackers by the
Gate.
A blob of rain large as a Mexican dollar smacked on Benicia’s hand
as she pumped the ejector--another and a third. Then the gorge was
blasted by a thunder shock amid the peaks, and a stab of lightning
painted the whole pit sulphurous blue. By its flash the defenders saw
scurrying figures leaping from rock to rock in the stream bed. Quelele,
the quick of eye, fired his first shot by the light of storm fire; one
of the rurales went down like a wet sack.
A second stunning burst of thunder which knocked out the underpinning
of the sky. Then deluge.
It was not rain that fell; it was solid water in sheets and cones which
hissed with the speed of its descent. Water so compacted that it was
like a river on edge, engulfing. With it the almost continuous quiver
and jerk of electrical flame. The gorge was become a watery hell. More
than that, for Urgo and his men in the wash it threatened momentarily
to be their tomb. Already a white streak of foam in the lightning
flashes marked where the once bone-dry watercourse was changing
character.
The rurales and their leader found the odds all of a sudden snatched
from their hands by this frenzied ally of the hunted girl and her
supporters. They had come eleven against five, with their quarry caught
in a hole in the Pinacate sierra; before the cloudburst had endured
three minutes Urgo realized he had let himself and his men into a fatal
trap. Their horses, confidently left behind them in the lower reaches
of the gorge, must already have stampeded under the lash of the storm.
Spiteful rifle flashes from both sides came with each baleful flicker
of fire from the sky to deny escape from the rising waters up either
wall of the chasm.
Now a dull roaring above the waterfall of the rain began to fill the
gash in the sierra. Away back at the head of the gorge and where the
slope from the twin volcano peaks shed water as from steep roofs
into this common trough, a solid wall, capped dull white, came with
the speed of a meteor down and down through the channel in the
living rock. It rolled boulders the size of box-cars in its flood; a
chevaux-de-frise of barbed cactus and scrub trees tumbled at its crest.
Even above the tumult of the deluge sounded the shrill alarm of the
rurales as they broke position and turned to flee through the Gate. But
already the flood was there, choking egress. They must scramble up the
sides of the gorge like rats from a flooded hold; they must grope and
cling by every illuminating flash of blue fire, waiting to see where
the next handhold lay, how near the hungry yellow waters rushed.
With Grant and the girl was nothing but security. Unprotected, they
had bent their heads to the pounding mallets of water. When the firing
abruptly ceased at the rush of their attackers for safety Grant heard
the scream of a horse near at hand and remembered their tethered
animals. Should they break away in their fright the plight of all five
would be a desperate one.
“Stay here!” he shouted in Benicia’s ear. “Going to the horses!”
Grant crawled and groped his way over the slippery rocks, each seeming
to be alive with the film of rushing water across it. He clambered down
and to the right until he came to the pulpit rock behind which the
beasts had been tethered by Quelele. The mule he found down, hopelessly
noosed in his hobble rope and slowly strangling; the horses were
huddled, tails to the storm, dripping and dejected.
It took several minutes’ precarious work to get the pack-animal to
his feet and freshly tethered. Then Grant began the retreat to the
breastwork where he had left the girl. It was largely a matter of
guesswork. Once he found himself against an unscalable wall and had to
retrace his steps. Another time one foot slipped and he caught himself
with his body halfway over the brink.
A flash of lightning showed him two rifles lying side by side on a
ledge below him--his rifle and Benicia’s; but the girl was gone. The
fist of fear smote him terrifically.
He screamed her name above the bellowing of the flood in the wash. No
answer. He ran along the ledge that had been theirs until he came to a
downward terrace; to that he leaped and along its blind way he fumbled.
Came the ghost of a scream, thin above the diapason all about. His
name--“Grant!”
Then merciful lightning blazed blue and he saw. Below him on a broad
shelf which overhung the whiteness of the torrent two figures,
glistening like seals, were locked--they swayed.
The man launched himself blindly out and down. He rolled; he slipped
and wallowed against and under great boulders. At the end of seconds
seeming æons he came to the rock apron where he had seen the struggling
shapes. Sound of stertorous breathing guided him. He rose from his
knees before Benicia and another, who was trying to drag her along the
ledge. A revealing flash of fire gave him just a glimpse of a weasel
face--Colonel Urgo.
Not so much rage as loathly horror of an unclean thing sped furious
summons to every muscle spring in his body. With his shoulder planted
against the Spaniard’s chest for a leverage Grant tore loose the man’s
grip from Benicia. Before he could whirl to shift his attack Urgo
had screamed an oath and was on the American’s back, legs twining to
cumber Grant’s thighs, both hands clamped about his throat. It was the
catamount’s attack.
The first impact of his antagonist’s weight nearly over-balanced Grant
and precipitated both into the maelstrom of waters not six feet below
their ledge. But, steadying himself, the American suddenly launched
backward, pinning the lighter body on his back against a wall of rock.
It was a terrific smash. Urgo’s breath came in a whistle from it. His
hands sank deeper into the muscles about Grant’s throat, closing his
windpipe. Deliberately the standing man took a few forward steps,
then swiftly back against the wall again. An elbow of rock found the
Spaniard’s ribs and cracked two. He shrieked.
Now Grant’s hands went up to lock behind the head that sagged over his
right shoulder. Strength of desperation flooded into his arms, for the
weaker man had him throttled. Urgo must release his hold on Grant’s
throat or suffer a broken neck. The constricting hands slackened their
grip ever so little. Grant bowed his shoulders, gave a mighty heave
and swept the Colonel’s body over his shoulder in a wide arc. The man
sprawled, arms wide, through the air, struck the edge of the rocky
apron. He clawed--slipped--clawed again, and disappeared.