Dust of the Desert

by Robert Welles Ritchie

  CHAPTER XXI

  TREASURE QUEST

  Colonel Hamilcar Urgo was not addicted to introspection. He tookhimself as he found himself and as a rule was well pleased with thefind. Had any non-partisan voice of conscience told him cruelty playeda large part in his make-up undoubtedly the little Colonel wouldhave denied the charge with hot indignation. Cruelty, to his way ofthinking, was exclusively a feminine defect; a woman was guilty ofcruelty, for example, when she spurned the honourable advances of sohonourable a suitor as Hamilcar Urgo. Benicia O'Donoju was the cruelestcreature he knew; wherefore like a fractious horse she must be broken.

  No, Senor Urgo found nothing reprehensible in his orders to Ygnacio,the Papago, that Don Padraic must be put out of the way. The sameimpulse had prompted him to strip the bandage of ignorance fromBenicia's eyes during that interview in the patio without the leastcompunction. These headstrong women! There was a way to handle themjust as there was a way to break the heart of a high-spirited mount:curb bits that tear and spurs that gouge. Let him have possession of aspirit-broken woman for a little while, to play with and then discard;possession was not nearly so diverting as the game of spirit breaking.At that Urgo considered himself rather a master hand.

  He had not hated the master of the Casa O'Donoju. Aside from thenecessity of clearing the field of a possible objector to his suit andbringing pain to the haughty desert girl, Urgo's murder impulse wasprompted by no personal bias. But with all the deadly spleen compactedinto his wispy body the little man hated the gringo Grant Hickman.Hated him because the American was in the lists against him; hated him,especially, because twice Hickman had humiliated him before the eyes ofBenicia: once in the Pullman out of El Paso and a second time--searingscar in memory--when the man, though weakened by a bullet wound, hadhustled him out the door of the desert manor.

  If whole-heartedness gives any palliation to hatred then was HamilcarUrgo's passion almost to be forgiven him. For very dynamic force noimpulse in his twisted career matched it. The vision of this gringo'simpudently smiling face went to bed with him at night and abided withhim all day--a veritable ache. Come what might, he would destroy GrantHickman and in a manner such as to entail the most refined tortures.

  So this was his single purpose--possession of the girl would be a mereby-product--when he used his power with the police arm of the Sonorastate government to assemble ten ruffians of the rurales force at apoint on the railroad within striking distance of the Road of theDead Men. Desert cars were at his disposal but he preferred to head amounted force because his plans looked to an excursion into countrywhere autos could not go, once Hickman was his prisoner. A complaisantspirit of justice at Hermosillo would accept in lieu of the escapedconvict's person some token symbolical of a justice already wroughtthrough the instrument of the state's worthy servant, Urgo.

  The day after the sand storm Urgo and his rurales set out from therailroad for the west and the Garden of Solitude at the end of a longroad. They were superbly mounted; two pack animals trotted behind thefile of horsemen. Revolutions had been squelched by a less imposingforce.

  After the cleansing storm the desert was bland and tolerant. Air clearas quartz, sun tempered by fresh winds from the west, on every club andspike of cactus fresh flowers born overnight to replace those destroyedby the driving sands. One of the rurales unslung a guitar from a mule'spack and strummed minor chords to the accompaniment of a song in whichthe rest joined. The ballad was gentle as a butterfly's wing, tellingof roses over a lady-love's window.

  Urgo, lulled by the immensity of the desert peace, perhaps even bythe tenderness of the song his murderers sang, pleasured himself bybuilding pictures in prospect. He saw himself riding alone up tothe door of the Casa O'Donoju--the rurales would be disposed beyondsight of the door but within call; saw the courteous bow he wouldmake to Senorita Benicia; heard himself inquiring in polite phraseconcerning her health and that of her respected father. Ah, Don Padraicdead--murdered! Grace of God, but that was sad news. But the Americangentleman who was a guest at the Casa O'Donoju; did his unfortunatewound still keep him under the beneficence of the casa's hospitality--?

  Five hours of the second day out on the Road of the Dead Men the ruralewho was riding at the head of the file reined in with a shout. Hisarm stretched to point a tiny black beetle away off to the westward:a beetle skittering down the long slope of a divide and in theirdirection. In ten minutes the beetle showed again, but it had grown tothe dimensions of an auto. It was upon them almost before the horsemenhad spread themselves in a fan across the road. Quelele, whom Urgoinstantly recognized, accepted the implied hint to halt; in the seatbeside him was a strange white man--a gringo by his looks. This manlet a bland, incurious eye range over the band of horsemen until itsettled upon Urgo; there it rested with a dispassionate stare somehowaffronting to the Spaniard's dignity.

  Urgo stiffly bowed and waited for the gringo to speak. Instead ofreturning his salutation the white man searched the pockets of his vestfor tobacco bag and papers and bent all his attention upon rolling acigarette.

  "You have come from the Casa O'Donoju, senor?" Urgo asked in English.Bim Bagley gave the clipped Spanish "Si" of assent and drew his rolledcigarette across his lips with a languid air. Urgo in a growing ragewondered if this boorishness were the stranger's typically Americanmanner or assumed to provoke hostility. His voice was silken as he puthis next question in Spanish:

  "The Senorita O'Donoju and Don Padraic, her father, they enjoy the besthealth, I hope."

  "I hope so, too," was Bim's short reply as he put a match to his smoke.Urgo's brows knitted. Here was no boor but a wise gringo with a chucklebehind every word.

  "I am doing myself the honour to call upon Don Padraic and his charmingdaughter," his temper pushed him to volunteer. Bim swept the company ofhorsemen with a lack-lustre eye and then let his glance return to thedapper figure of the Colonel.

  "Do tell," he drawled in broadest Border dialect. "See you brought allthe boys with you. Well, so long!" He nudged the Indian a signal togo ahead. Urgo would have liked to detain this impudent gringo for alesson in manners did not more pressing pleasure lie ahead. He gave animperceptible nod and the horsemen who blocked the road moved aside.The little car shot back a pungent cloud of smoke for a parting insultas it took the road in high. Urgo watched it rise to the low crest ofa divide and disappear. Insufferable gringo! What had he been doing atCasa O'Donoju? What did he know of recent events there?

  A shrug dismissed Bagley, and the file of horsemen resumed leisurelyprogress along the desert road. A night's dry camp, and early morningwould see them in the oasis green at journey's end.

  Colonel Urgo miscalculated when he dismissed Bim Bagley with a shrug.Did the little Spaniard but know it, this meeting in the wastes wasthe objective point in the gringo's strategy. Even under certain heavyhandicaps ten gallons of gasoline in the desert can achieve more thanten horses with rurales on their backs. It all depends upon the handthat nurses precious jets of this gasoline across the path of thespark. And Quelele's was a master hand. Wherefore the second phase inBim's strategy was entered upon.

  Bim and the Indian had made perhaps five miles along theeastward-bearing road beyond the point of the meeting with Urgo'sruffians when the Papago turned off the single wheel track and intothe sparse scrub. A low range separated them from the rurales; thecrumbling of that range into desert flatness lay a good ten miles tosouthward. Once around that, the little car could be tooled behind ascreen of hillocks back onto the Road of the Dead Men and ahead of therurales, but only by exercise of the most delicate driving judgment."Smack through the country--without roads?" whiffles the incredulousdriver of limousines along sedate highways in Pennsylvania and NewYork. Exactly that. It is done in Arizona and Sonora--thirty or fiftymiles of unfenced desert; compass to pick up direction and shovel todig out of arroyos. Johnny Cameron, of Ajo, even herds wild horses on amotorcycle.

  Quelele stopped to let air out of his tires that they might bettergrip the sand and pad through
soft places. Then began a jackrabbitskittering and twisting 'cross country, with every hundred yardsoffering the hazard of a broken axle and the little desert skimmerstanding on its nose at the brink of a dry wash while its passengersflattened the descent by hasty shovel work. Like a rowboat inmid-Atlantic the puny contraption of tin and steel took the long waves,snarling and grumbling over sand-traps, boggling through thicketsof _cholla_ which rigged its tires with festoons of prickly stubs.Quelele's hands possessed magic. They knew just when to give a twist tothe wheel, when to shoot the spark ahead. Every hummock and pitfall wasread by them surely and swiftly.

  The little car rounded the end of the mountain range and shot back on atangent for the road where Urgo and his rurales were travelling. Witha grunt Quelele suddenly let the car trundle to a halt; he clamberedout and knelt by the radiator. Drip-drip of precious water from somestab of brush through the honeycomb of cells there. Bim sacrificedhis tobacco in the emergency. The flaky mass was poured into theradiator with fresh water from a canteen; the stuff found the leak and,swelling, stopped it.

  Then on and on, around the flanks of the little hills and across wideflats where the brush was scattered. Always Quelele was sure to keepa height of land between the car and the Road of the Dead Men untilfinally he brought his gas mustang to a stop on the crest of a lavaridge and pointed back. Against the eastern horizon showed a crawlinginch-worm in the desert's immensity--Urgo and the rurales. Below thelava crest and near at hand was the objective of their detour, theroad that led to the Casa O'Donoju and those who must be warned.

  It was after sunset when the little car hiccoughed up under the avenueof palms. An hour later in the first dark of night a file of horsemenquit the perfumed precincts of alfalfa fields behind the Casa O'Donoju.At the head, driving a pack-mule, was El Doctor Coyote Belly, bigQuelele riding beside him. Behind were Benicia and Grant. Bim Bagleywas file closer. In scabbards at the saddle of each hung carbines.

  El Doctor, the guide, set the course away from the Road of the Dead Menwhich, passing through the Garden of Solitude, buries itself in theYuma Desert. His direction was south and west toward the Gulf and thelabyrinth of volcano craters on its hither shore called Pinacate.