Robert Welles Ritchie

“ When man meets man, be he white, brown or copper coloured, news is a torch to be passed on to a new hand. Nothing can be long a secret. The latent must out.
Even as the worthy Doc Stooder in his shabby office at Arizora had a never-ending messenger service from all the Border and the lands beyond, carrying scraps of oblique news, another far distant in the Garden of Solitude enjoyed the same intelligence. This was Don Padraic O’Donoju, last of the line of masters over the once-great principality of El Rancho del Refugio. ”

“ That was all: the bell and the uncovered beam. But that was enough. Doc Stooder knew that beneath him lay the mission site; how deeply the blown sands of more than a century had buried it he could not guess. But it was here! Here lay the rich core of a legend that had sent many a man out into the desert to chase rainbow ends. His—Stooder’s! A’mighty God! how he’d riffle those pearls through his fingers—lay ’em all out on a piece of velvet under some secret lamp and match ’em, pearl with pearl.
But twenty-four hours in the desert exact their price; and that price is in measure of water. ”

“ Her love life must be awakened and given freedom to unfold like a flower in a garden. Yet I have permitted her to come back to me here in the Garden of Solitude because I was lonely. Better far that I sell what we have here and take you back to the world. In these evil days there is no fit mate to be found for you in all Sonora. Hamilcar Urgo has threatened me if I do not give you to him; he is of our blood, but he is abominable. ”

“ Remains that tale which carries itself over a span of a century and a half, linking lives of the present to lives of men and women whose very graves long since have passed from sight of folk. A tale strangely like the desert trail along whose course its episodes of hot passion and swift action befell; for its beginnings are laid in a mirage of an elder day which we of the present can see but dimly, and its ending is beyond the horizon of to-day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She rattled on to the stoical Papago at the wheel unending questions concerning her father and the most humble of the Indian retainers living on the rancherias about the oasis, Don Padraic’s fief in the waste lands. She told the credulous Quelele stories of the cities she had seen; of white men’s wickiups climbing as high as the hill of La Nariz; of water so plentiful that it was launched at a burning house out of a long serpent’s mouth; how men lifted themselves above the earth in machines like the king condor and flew hundreds of miles between sun and sun. ”

“ Cruelty, to his way of thinking, was exclusively a feminine defect; a woman was guilty of cruelty, for example, when she spurned the honourable advances of so honourable a suitor as Hamilcar Urgo. Benicia O’Donoju was the cruelest creature he knew; wherefore like a fractious horse she must be broken.
No, Señor Urgo found nothing reprehensible in his orders to Ygnacio, the Papago, that Don Padraic must be put out of the way. The same impulse had prompted him to strip the bandage of ignorance from Benicia’s eyes during that interview in the patio without the least compunction. ”

“ He rallied himself, for such drifting into the subjective was a new and puzzling experience for a practical man. But minute by minute the spirit of the desert, which is the spirit of chaos become ponderable, stole over him, chaining his [180] imagination to things felt but not seen of men. A chill of the untoward and the unreal swept over him. He seemed to be braced nervously for some blow out of the void. His imagination played with a dim figure, the shape of El Rojo of the red hair riding—riding through the dark on his eternal mission of damnation. ”

“ It was a condensed El Paso, jammed in the narrow compass of a mountain gorge, with railroad yards monopolizing the whole of the flat space between crowding hills. A man could go from his home to business by the simple trick of leaping off the front porch of his bungalow with an opened umbrella. Arizora’s streets were jammed with cars—fantastic desert coursers stripped to the nines and with canteens strapped to the running board. Sidewalks swarmed with men—big men with steady eyes looking out from beneath sombreros the size of a woman’s garden hat ”

“ 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! ”

“ Urgo and Benicia had been exchanging commonplaces. Suddenly the man leaned forward tensely and returned to the forbidden Spanish in a hurried burst: “For your own good, my cousin, I must have a few minutes with you alone. Arrange it, I command you.”
“You are hardly the one, sweetest cousin, to be the judge of my good. Nor the one to command me.” Benicia retorted in the same tongue. Then, turning with a smile of mock apology to Grant: “You will excuse Colonel Urgo his occasional lapse from a tongue that is difficult for him.” ”

“ Insensibly his eyes began singling out the stars, measuring the gulf between this and that steady-burning point of light. Somewhere outside a desert owl timed the pulse of the night with an insistent call, unvarying, unwearying. The man on the bed found himself tallying the blood beats to his brain by this ghostly metronome. Beat—beat!—passing seconds of mortality for the man Grant Hickman. Beat—beat!—How puny a thing, how inconsequential the life of a man when calipered by the time measure of those burning suns up yonder! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hated him because the American was in the lists against him; hated him, especially, because twice Hickman had humiliated him before the eyes of Benicia: once in the Pullman out of El Paso and a second time—searing scar in memory—when the man, though weakened by a bullet wound, had hustled him out the door of the desert manor.
If whole-heartedness gives any palliation to hatred then was Hamilcar Urgo’s passion [249] almost to be forgiven him. For very dynamic force no impulse in his twisted career matched it. ”

“ When it came Grant’s turn to throw his new-found friend played him vociferously against the Mexican field, calling upon all present to witness that a white man sure could skin anything under a sombrero, from craps to parchesi. For the first time since he had left the train that morning the New Yorker felt the warming tingle of fellowship; the gaunt, sunburned face of the desert man with the dancing imps of humour in the eyes was a jovial hailing sign of fraternity.
“Shoot ’em, Mister Man! You’re rigged for Broadway, Noo Yawk, but I can see from here that you has the lovin’ touch.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ An untoward incident jarred the merriment of the feasting that followed the re-dedication of the mission. When whole beeves were being lifted from the roasting pits and the skins of wine and tequila were passing from table to table beneath the flowering mesquite trees a column of dust strode across the desert from the east and spawned two horsemen upon the oasis. One, a naked Indian of the stature of a giant, reined in his horse at the far fringe of the mesquite as befitting a servant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Behind him was a giant of an Indian, almost the colour of teak. With a timed regularity this Indian spat noisily all through the dark hours and until the sun rose to dry up his throat. The rest were in character with Grant’s nearer companions—just flotsam.
The guards were typical of their class; Mexican peons brutalized even beyond the inheritance of their mixed bloods by their small taste of power. The quarter-blood Indian south of the Line, whose ancestry is devious as his own starved dog’s, knows but a single law of life and that the law of fear. ”

“ THE ORDEAL With the lithe spring of a cat Bim put himself between Grant and the advancing Indian. His face had gone dead white and his eyes were coals blown upon by the wind of anger.
“None of that! Get back there—you!” Bim’s voice was scarcely audible but his pose of furious battling on the hair-trigger of release was sufficiently vocal to awe the Papago giant into a backward stumble. Then to Benicia:
“Young woman, you’re making the mistake of your life. I’m a’mighty sorry for you, an’ you are going to be right regretful yourself when you have time to think.” ”

“ The desert under sun at the meridian flexed its harsh hand to pinch the crawling caterpillar of chained men. Heat waves made all the [93] ragged summits of the Sierras pulsate. A dust tasting of desert salts spread a low cloud about the marching column. Thirst that was a poignant agony was made all the more unendurable by the tactics of the guards. From time to time one of them would unhitch a canteen from the pack mule’s burden and in the sight of the eight helpless sufferers tilt his head and guzzle noisily. ”

“ That night Don Padraic and Benicia sat in [102] the candlelight of the big salon or living room which filled the space of one quadrangle off the patio. In all Sonora there was no counterpart of this chamber of mellowed antiquities, the collection of generations of the O’Donoju. Low ceiled and with crossing beams of oak, whereon the marks of the hewer’s adze showed like waves; walls hung with tapestries between the heavy frames of portraits of grandees and their ladies of forgotten days; a great fireplace wherein a man could stand upright, with its hand-wrought andirons and heavy crane shank ”

“ Rain comes only with occasional summer thunder storms up from the Gulf, storms which wake dead rivers into furious flood. So precious is this water from the sky that the primitive peoples weave mystic rain symbols into their basketry for a fetish, and their songs are all of thunderheads and croaking frogs.
Here in the Desert of Altar the impossible becomes commonplace. A man caught in a river bed by the spearhead of a freshet drowns in sand made mud and irresistibly rushing. Cattle drink no water for months on end but are sustained by munching cactus whose spines can penetrate sole leather. ”

“ Treble voices of squaws lifted the abomination of noise to the saw edge of a screech; men’s harsher notes rumbled and boomed intolerably. All the night was made bedlam.
Lights were winking through the chinks of the jacals when Grant and Bim came to the outskirts of the village. There was confusion of forms skittering about from hut to hut. Bim seized upon one man and demanded to know the whereabouts of Quelele, head man of the village. The big Indian soon stood before them with a gesture of hand to breast indicating they were to command him. ”

“ THE HEART OF BENICIA The Desert of Altar is transcendence of silence. From the savage Growler range in Arizona south to the obsidian bastions of Pinacate, by the dead Gulf, is space to crowd five million people with their tumult of cities, their crash of machines, hoot of locomotives and shriek of steel under stress. ”

“ Little by little pinnacles sharp as ice splinters lifted from a mountain mass and detached mountains with their tops blown off stood against the horizon like truncated columns of an acropolis. Here were the mazes of the Pinacate, raw shards of volcanoes and wilderness of lava flows down by the Gulf sandhills; country so fire-scarred and forbidding that even the Indian nomads give it wide berth. Only the big-horn sheep possess it, living no man knows how. ”

“ Benicia paused to give the parchment cheeks a kiss, then she danced down a flagged hall to the flare of green marking the patio garden in the centre of the house.
Here was a place of beauty and a fragrant cave of coolness—the very secret heart of the Garden of Solitude. Open to the sky and with cloistered dimness of the four sides of the house all about, the patio was a tiny jungle of climbing things, all green and riotous blossoms. ”