Dead Man's Gold/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
Diamond Dick
ON THE trip, with money to spare in the exchequer, Stone broached the suggestion of securing a guide, acquainted, not only with the country through which they had to travel, but with the customs and temper of the Indians. Since the triple agreement was signed, Healy had become more communicative as to their destination, so far as he could lead them. They got a map of Arizona and studied it out together. From the terminal of the branch railroad that served Globe and the surrounding settlements of that mining district they were to work north through the Apache Mountains and debouch upon the desert that lies between the streams of Cherry and Tonto creeks, known generally as the Tonto Basin.
To the right and east of their route, beyond Cherry Creek, ran the intangible line of the White Mountain Indian Reservation where savage tribes brooded and bided their time for outbreaks, always sternly put down but ever foremost in the minds of the savages both as amusement and revenge against the white man, who had narrowed their hunting grounds and circumscribed their pleasures. The line vanished northward in the breakdown of the great Mogollon Mesa. Somewhere, close to that line, near the northwestern boundary of the reservation, among the maze of tall cliffs and cañons, lay their objective. The dry placer once drained into the eastern fork of Tonto Creek by its headwaters at the foot of Promontory Butte. Show him these headwaters, declared Healy, and he would have no difficulty in turning over the quest to Lefty at a point specifically described to him by the dying prospector. What these exact specifications were Healy refused to divulge, despite the partnership, until the last moment.
It all looked simple enough on the map. But casual talks on the train with various "natives" confirmed the wisdom of the suggestion thrown out to Stone by his attorney friend in Los Angeles that they take a desert-salted man along with them. Healy at first demurred.
"What's the use of letting in a fourth man?" he asked. "If we find the stuff you can't hide it from him. More 'n that, he's likely to blab about it and start a rush. That's the last thing we want. We've got to keep this thing on the q.t."
"We don't have to mention gold at all to the man," said Stone. "My idea is to let it be generally known that we are exploring among the cave-dwellings. Those cliffs are full of them."
"What cliffs?"
"Along the Mogollon Mesa. Almost any cliff in Arizona, for that matter. I know something about the way they lived, enough to throw a bluff. We needn't be scientists, only looking for material to write a book. We can pack in a camera. You can be the official photographer, Healy, and I'll be the author and do the talking. We can pull it off and cover ourselves. We'll set up a permanent camp at the headwaters of the Tonto Fork and dismiss our guide once we are located."
"Anybody 'd think we were going to trail across Africa," objected Healy. "Why, we ain't got more 'n fifty miles, all told. What's the use of spilling money for someone to dry-nurse us? We're not infants or tenderfeet."
"We don't know the first thing about desert travel," answered Stone. "We don't know two words of Apache or Zuni or Moqui, or whatever may be needed, among the three of us. We don't know how to talk sign language or how to handle Indians. I'd say we were very much tenderfeet. But of course we've got to find the right man."
At Globe they posed as exploring authors and photographers. Globe had seen others of their kind and passed no especial comment save to caution them against going too close to the reservation boundaries.
"It's a hell of a country you're goin' into," frankly stated a miner in the Matrix Hotel lobby. "I went up there once looking for turquoise and I didn't find it. Hell's backyard, with the gate open. And Apaches prowling round sore as a kicked dorg at any one they think is butting in on their reservation. You can't teach them any notion of surveying any more 'n you can drive the devil out of 'em. They's just one ranch along their western line an' you can bet yore last dollar the rancher ain't got his wife living there within reach of them yeller-bellied devils. You can't ever tell when they'll break out. A bunch of 'em gave me the hint to vamose from Tonto Fork and I just naturally vamosed."
There was more of this sort of talk, not reassuring, save as it showed that conditions had not changed so greatly since Lyman's day. And there was always the vaguely troubling thought that later comers might have uncovered the treasure-trove.
At Miami they gathered together their simple outfit and prepared to take the field equipped only by their own experience. The evening before they proposed to start they were seated in the office of the little hotel, chatting with their landlord, when the latter pointed at a figure coming up the street, driving before him a limping burro with one ear flopping,
"Thar's Di'mond Dick," said the landlord. "Comin' back broke from di'mond huntin'. Thar's yore man for a guide. Knows all the Tonto Basin like a book. He's cracked on one subject—di'monds. Outside of that he's all right. An' he gits by with the Injuns—bein' cracked, they think he's holy, or something. If you can git him, half yore trouble's over. I'll hail him."
The man came in willingly enough, leaving the patient drop-eared burro, laden with his scanty outfit, outside, waiting like a faithful dog. The prospector's swart skin was dark as an Indian's. The desert sun seemed to have desiccated all superfluous flesh from his bones, leaving only enough to pack his veins and arteries, his tendons, sinews, and muscles. Lean and tall and taciturn he seemed, his black eyes gleaming through lowered lids like fragments of newly chipped obsidian, taking in his audience with a certain suspicious cunning.
"Get any sparklers this time?" asked the landlord. The man's face changed from a leather mask into animation.
"Not yit," he replied. "But I'll do it. I'll turn 'em up afore long. Stands to all reason an' scientific logic. Then we'll see who'll do the larfing. I'll find 'em. Never you fear." He pulled out a mass of grayish rock from his pocket that shone with crimson gleams.
"See them garnets?" he said, eagerly, with a certain childishness in the display. "Look at them olivines." He scooped up half a palmful of bottle-green fragments that gave out little gleams of light, "chrysolites, some call 'em—or peridots. What grows in the rocks where peridots and garnets are found? Tell me that. Or I'll tell you. Di'monds!"
The landlord laughed.
"Come in because you're broke, Dick? Well, here are three gents who want to explore the head-waters of the Last Fork of the Tonto. Goin' to take pictures an' pick up arrer-heads an' write books about the cave-dwellings. They're lookin' for a guide. Want to go along?"
"Di'mond Dick" surveyed them narrowly.
"I know the country," he said. "An' I'm needin' a job for a fresh stake. How long do ye figger on wantin' me?"
"You can come back as soon as we decide on a permanent camp," said Stone. "We may want you to stay around until we run into any Indians or they into us. We'd like to establish friendly relations with them if we can." Diamond Dick threw back his head and guffawed.
"Fr'en'ly relations with Apaches? Thet's sure a good 'un," he said. "They may leave ye alone. 'Pends upon what they think you're doin' up thar. 'Pends some on the mood they happen to be in. You can't tell a thing about it till we git close to their line. They may leave ye alone, they may warn ye, or they may start in to raise hell an' ha'r from the jump. But they won't be fr'en'ly. You can bank on that. They ain't no more fr'en'ship in a 'Pache to'ards a white man than they is juice in lava rock.
"But," he went on, "I can show you cliffs where the passages go back for miles, with runnin' water soundin' way in, an' pools that ain't got a bottom. Dug by Indians for cisterns, I reckon. I can show you pits where the steam comes a rollin' out like it was the mouth of hell. An' ruins, if thet's what you're after. Cross-walls way back in the heart of the limestone. Picters grav6ed on the walls, store-houses o' mummied corn-cobs, hand-mills for grinding it, stone hammers an' axes, arrer-heads of agate. Up in Stone Men Cañon, where the water comes out of the cliffs so thick with lime it 'ud petrify a lizard 'fore he could wiggle, I can show you all you want, I reckon."
"How close is Stone Men Cañon to the head-waters of the Tonto Fork?" asked Stone.
"We pass it on the way, toward the end of the trip. I ain't ever bin clear up to the head of the Fork. I ain't hankering after too much excitement these days. Whenever I gets too close to the reservation line my scalp itches and I takes it as a sign the climate ain't healthy. But I can take ye there, if you're sot on it. Leave you there an' come back for you later if ye like."
"If we find our way there we'll manage to get back all right," said Stone. "Now let's get down to price. We want to start in the morning."
At dawn Diamond Dick went with them down into the misnamed Basin of the Tonto, a wilderness of weird, burned-out, ragged mountain spurs, dotted with extinct volcanoes, set with wide rivers of flinty lava flows. Sandy wastes often entirely barren, sometimes covered with greasewood or thorny mesquite, sometimes set with barrel cactus, fifty feet tall, branched like giant candelabra. They trudged painfully across the dry beds of prehistoric lakes in whose alkali no green thing may grow and puddles of rain water turn to deadly poison. They crossed mountain passes by following trails worn a few inches deep in the solid limestone by the pattering pads of hundreds of thousands of generations of coyotes. Mirages mocked them, and the sudden winds formed by the ever swiftly changing layers of hot and cold air inflamed nose and ears and throat and eyes. At midday the thermometer might be a hundred and thirty degrees in the shade, sunset would see it down to fifty and midnight to freezing. All round the dock they fought the elements and the elements remained unfriendly, hostile, resistant.
The three of them—for the Desert Rat, Diamond Dick, paid no attention to such matters—became afraid of the things that lay out in the broiling sun of the desert spaces, not with the cowardice that retreats, but with the fear that respects and recognizes danger. Sidewinders—rattlesnakes with horned projections over their devilish eyes—pichucuates, true asps, gray and stubby and deadliest of snakes, hairy tarantulas, pinkish-yellow Gila monsters, flabby, bloated things, leprous with black patches. Between these things that crawled and the gaunt ravens sailing over the wan landscape there seemed a link, a partnership of death, the sharing of secrets concerning the beings that faltered and fell and rotted on the sand.
Fifteen miles a day, they found, was good travelling. The second afternoon proved the value of having along Diamond Dick, whose real name was Harvey. They were nearing the chaos of crags and peaks that marked the southern edge of the Mogollon Mesa, whose purple rimrock seemed less than two miles away, though Harvey assured them that it was more than twenty. The soil under their feet was caked, flaking off under the sun. Suddenly Harvey grasped at Healy's arm and pulled him hastily aside. The heat had set everyone's temper more or less on edge and Healy flared up.
"What's the idea? Playing tag?"
Harvey pointed to the ground a few feet ahead of them and replied in one word:
"Sumidero."
Stone could see nothing but the flaky burned surface of the flat. Healy and Lefty looked about for some sign of snakes. Diamond Dick never talked much when on the march. There he appeared to conserve the slightest of efforts, reserving his talk for the evening camp. Now he stepped off and came back with a fragment of lava from a black and bristling flow that had finned its way up through the alkali. He tossed it into the air and it came down to strike the cracked surface with a sucking, suggestive plomph! In the glaring alkali appeared a splotch of black muck that geysered up as the rock sank down into a mud-pit, a masked well, too thick to flow, too liquid to dry up, a trap some ten feet in diameter, a shaft of slime perhaps twenty-five, perhaps a hundred, feet deep.
Healy shuddered. Lefty looked at the gradually disappearing patch of mud fast caking again under the fierce sun.
"Wot-o!" said the Cockney, softly. "Wot-o! Nice little prize-package that, I don't think."
"How do you tell those things? "Stone asked. "I can't tell it even now from the rest of the place."
Harvey shrugged his shoulders.
"I couldn't teach you," he said. "Can't allus tell myself. They's bin Injuns caught in sumideros, plenty of times, 'sides hawsses an' sheep an' cows. On'y knowed one man to ever git clear. He was a Mexican. Hawss fell in an' chucked him out of the saddle. He grabbed the edge, got a foot on the horn of the saddle as the hawss went down, an' scrambled out. All luck. If a sumidero's fixed for ye, it'll git ye. Same way with a snake, though that ain't goin' to stop me buildin' a cactus hedge round my blanket nights when I'm sleepin' in the Basin, an' can git the cactus."
That night Harvey got talking about his diamonds once again.
"After I git through with you folks," he said, "I'm off again to my di'mond prospect. I ain't tellin' where that is though it wouldn't make no' difference, becoz they all think I'm crazy. But listen. They's di'monds bin found an' recorded, reg'lar an' authentic, all over these United States. Georgy, North an' South Caroliny, Kentuck, Virginny, Tennessee, Indianny, Oregon, Wisconsin, Califomy, Arkansaw, Michigan, an' Ohio. Twelve year ago they found blue-whites at Murfreesboro, Pike County, Arkansaw. In 'eighty-six they find one in Wisconsin weighin' twenty-one an' a quarter carats. Way back in 'fifty-five, they pick one up in Virginny which weighs twenty-four. Them that's bin found is mostly in gold-bearin', alluvial deposits, along with garnets and olivines. In volcanic country. It takes heat to make a di'mond, which is pure carbon. Don't it stand to reason that a volcanic country like this, which has got garnets and olivines in spots sown thick as grain on a farm, is bound to hev' diamonds? I'll say so, and I'll find 'em 'fore I die."
He was a monomaniac on the subject and they humoured him. So long as he was looking for diamonds he was not so likely to nose into their private affairs. And he stated very frankly that he had seen no garnets along the Tonto Fork.
The next day, in the clear atmosphere, the indescribable grandeur of the edge of the Mogollon Mesa began to show in all its rugged and raw detail of sudden and fearful cliffs, white and glaring red and brilliant yellow, purple, and black rimrock and, beyond, the three snowy crests of the San Francisco Peaks, almost thirteen thousand feet above sea level. It ran east and west, half of it forming the northern line to the reservation. To their left the Mazatzal Range tapered away north and west toward the gap where the fertile Verde River unrolled its emerald ribbon oasis.
They had left the flats behind them and had entered a land of roughly tabled masses of limestone with wild gorges winding between, pressing on to the fork of the Tonto. One branch of that daring stream they had already passed, rapidly sinking and narrowing as it endeavoured to pierce the desert, but this was known as the South Fork, Harvey explained.
Gradually they mounted from the floor of the Basin and emerged upon a wide tableland, naked of all verdure, floored with chalcedony, on which the sun beat with fearful emphasis. This, said Harvey, ended in steep cliffs at the foot of which ran the water they sought.
"How we're goin' to git down is more than I can tell ye for sure," he said. "But they'll likely be a gash of some sort we can negotiate.'
It was too hot for more than the briefest conversation. By common, unspoken consent they passed up the noontide meal and halt. Rest in that furnace glare was a mockery. Their animals plodded on with drooping heads and down-bent ears. Each man had a pebble in his mouth, endeavouring to promote a flow of saliva, but the sun seemed to have sucked all the moisture out of them. Healy suffered the most. He complained of pains at the back of his neck and Stone feared a sunstroke.
The stupendous escarpments of the Mogollon Mesa stared at them blankly without promise of any relief, pitiless in garish hues. The snow on the San Francisco Peaks, seventy miles away, showed in minarets of tantalization. The water in their canteens was brackish, alkaline and warm. Any bit of metal scorched and blistered the touch. Somewhere ahead ran a corridor of stone between the downfallen, waterbroken masses of the mesa and in this corridor flowed the Tonto. Promontory Butte loomed up in strata of red and yellow and orange with deep purple shadows defining its ledges and crevices. Each step, toward mid-afternoon, seemed to mark the limits of endurance, and the thought began to persist of what would befall them if they found no way down to the stream.
Harvey, holding the lead, halted suddenly. Stone, doggedly coming next, almost blundered into him. Harvey was anxiously scanning the broken skylines to north and east. Stone's cracked and swollen lips refused their office of questioning and Harvey contented himself with pointing to the summit of Promontory Peak. Healy and Larkin came up, glad of the stop, inquisitive.
From near the summit of the great pyramid of coloured rock little puffs of smoke were rising. Then they stopped and changed to a steady, threadlike column of white vapour. Harvey essayed a word:
"'Paches."
Eastward along the mesa terraces other smokes were answering the first. The jealous tribesmen had detected the entrance of strangers into what they considered their domain. Stone forced out some syllables though they brought little, salty streams of blood trickling from his lips.
"What 'll we do?" he asked, jerkily. "Go on?"
"Got to," said Harvey. "Get down to water. Smoke-talk won't hurt us."
An hour more of torture and they came abruptly to the end of the plateau. They gazed down upon a shallow stream, sparkling through banks of emerald that were set with cottonwoods, cherry, and pine. The magic of the water extended to each side of the steep-walled valley. Sage-brush and candlewood were plentiful, with groves of giant cactus and lesser spiny growths, brilliant with pink and orange, yellow, scarlet, and crimson blossoms. On narrow ledges grew Yucca juniper and cedars with here and there a sycamore thicket. It seemed miraculous, this pleasant place hidden among walls of lava and limestone girdled by desert.
They rode along the rim, seeking a place of descent, and found at last an eroded split that was steep but practical. It was sunset before they gained the lower level, and the burros quickened their steps toward the needed water. They shivered in the change of temperature. Promontory Peak blazed in the sunset, but the valley was in violet shade and at least fifty degrees cooler than on the chalcedony heights. It did not take long to make camp after their first thirst was quenched.
"How about a fire?" asked Stone.
"Why not?" asked Healy. "Lots of wood. It's damned cold. Let's have a hot meal. I'll bet there are trout in the stream, too, for breakfast."
"How about the Indians?"
"They know we're here," said Harvey. "We won't see anything of them to-night. But I wouldn't be surprised to have 'em pay us a little visit in the mornin'. They'll want to see what kind of folks we are. How we're armed. Whether we'll fight if necessary. If we can be scared away, or bluffed. An' I want to tell all of ye right now that a 'Pache can size up a bluff quicker 'n most. You got to show 'em you ain't afraid or you're a cooked goose. They may not start anything. They know their boundaries better than they pretend they do. We got to establish in their minds that you have got a pull with the Gov'mint, or that folks know you've come out here an' will be comin' after ye if you don't go back. They've got so they don't often start somethin' for nothin' unless they're in licker, or young bucks who've got the trail-fever. We'll keep watch to-night, case they git an idea in their heads to swipe the burros. Termorrer 'll tell the story. Either they'll tell you to git out or they'll tell e jes' how far you may go."
"We're not going to go back until we've got what we came for," said Stone. "So long as we don't cross their lines we're within our rights and I know that the place we are after is not in the reservation."
Harvey regarded him in silence, looking at the firm line of his jaw.
"That goes for me," put in Larkin.
"No, I reckon ye ain't the turnin' back kind," said Harvey, slowly. He turned to Healy, who was shivering and complaining of the cold.
"How about you, pardner?" Harvey asked. "You goin' through with it?"
There was a certain significance about the question that struck Stone, though he could not fathom it.
"I'm going through with it to the end," said Healy. His teeth chattered as he spoke. "What's the idea? You didn't think I was afraid, did you?"
"Wal, they ain't no sense in bein' afraid," said Harvey, slowly. "It don't do no good. Only a lot of harm. I jest wanted to be sure you was goin' to stick."
"Well, I am," snapped Healy and curled himself up in a blanket. Stone could see Harvey watching him with his obsidian eyes. Then Stone got up to hobble the burros. Larkin joined him.
"Kind of rum, the w'y Diamond Dick tackled Healy, don't you think?*' he asked.
"Why?"
"I don't know w'y, but I've got a bloomin' hunch them two ain't strangers. I'm goin' to keep my heyes peeled, I am."
Stone dismissed this as fanciful. The place was full of fancies. It was more, it was sinister, mysterious. Circumstances combined to make it so. The high cliffs of this stone passage so blended with the deep purple of the sky that the rim lines could be determined only by their shutting off the stars that blazed above them. Within the walls were caves once peopled by cave-dwellers who had lived and fought and died in their primitive fastnesses. Within an hour or so's journey must be Lyman's treasure, the eroded flakes of gold upon the bars of the dried-up placer creek, the glittering wall of the Madre d'Oro, and the mummied bodies and skulls the old prospector had muttered about in his last moments. Hovering somewhere in the night were the Apaches who had made the signal smokes.
They split the watching into two-hour spells. Harvey was to take the last one, just before the dawn. That was the danger time, in case the Indians made up their minds to take a hand in the game, and Harvey was best qualified to handle the contingency. Stone's turn came just before, Healy awakening him. It was chilly work and he paced off a sentry-go to keep his blood in circulation, smoking pipe after pipe, listening to the steady murmur of the shallow, busy stream and the night noises—a scutter on the hillsides, a rustle in the bushes—that kept him on the alert. Once he caught sight of two spots of green glaring out of the blackness, but as he shifted his rifle they disappeared.
He got to thinking about Larkin's idea that Harvey and Healy were not strangers and along this line suspicion grew. One thing showed plainly: If they were going to have any trouble with the Indians it would not be advisable to let Harvey return. It might not be dangerous for the Desert Rat to leave, for he would be obeying the wish of the Apaches, but his departure would deprive them of all the benefit of his experience and the possibility of holding any parley with the tribesmen. It would be better to let him have a share in the gold. There should be plenty for all. They could guard against him starting any rush. All they had to do was to keep him with them; and he did not seem to be the type to babble of his own good fortune for benefit of those who had mocked at his plans for finding riches.
But if he and Healy were in some sort of league? Stone remembered the warning of Lola, that Castro and Healy had some mutual scheme against Stone. Stone still held the trump card. Compared to the Madre d' Oro, the placer mine was only a drop in the bucket. He knew that the secret of its uncovering, revealed to him by Lyman, could not lightly be stumbled upon. If he was the goose he had not yet laid the golden egg. Stone did not trust Healy. Of the two he by far preferred Larkin, self acknowledged crook though Lefty was. But anything that Healy might start would not happen until Stone had disclosed the mother lode. Like Larkin, and like Healy, he had instinctively hung on to his share of the secret. He realized now that Lyman had known that each would do so.
Did Healy plot to get rid of Larkin and of Stone in this wilderness, and keep the entire treasure for himself and his accomplices, if Harvey, and perhaps Castro, were banded with him? To murder them? It would be easy to return and blame the Apaches for whatever crime had been committed. Murder, as Stone knew, was done in New York for half a hundred dollars. Here, in the desert holding, the temptation amounted to millions.
The girl, Lola, had spoken of finding out more definitely what Castro and Healy had been planning. Obviously she had seen them talking together after Stone had lost his stake at roulette and was mooning about the dance hall, before Lola had been waylaid by Padilla. But her knowledge could do him no good, could not be sent to him. He had dropped her a postal card from Globe, stating their destination as Miami and, generally, the Tonto Basin. He had done this out of a feeling of sympathy for the girl who had said she was not selling herself and that she was working in the Mexicali resort because she needed the money for others besides herself. Stone had no thought of warmer acquaintanceship. He recognized the passionate nature of the girl, warm-blooded, impetuous, quick to anger, and swift and strong in gratitude for his taking up her cause and thrashing Padilla. But she was not his type. If, indeed, he had a special type. Stone had never been in love, had never felt the stir to mate in his careless progress through life. Most of the women he had intimately known were not the mating sort.
He switched back to Healy and to Harvey. What had the Desert Rat meant by asking Healy if "he was going through with it, if he was going to stick?" Through with what? If Harvey and Healy were leagued it would be policy for Stone to form an alliance with Larkin. But at present they all faced a common peril in the Indians.
The Desert Rat suddenly materialized out of the night.
"Two o'clock," he said. "Heard or seen anything?"
Stone told him of the green orbs.
"Coyote likely. Might have bin a mountain lion. Did the burros cut up any?"
"No."
"Then I reckon it was just a coyote an' the wind was agin him. You better turn in. I'll stay on till sun-up an' start the coffee. Did you say you was goin' to write a book about the caves?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Nothin'. On'y I never did see no sense 'bout fussin' over dead things. Then Indians warn't any account. 'Cept in magic."
"In magic?'" asked Stone. He was not sleepy. Harvey's remark about writing the book smacked of more than just curiosity. Stone saw that while he might pass for an author and, without demonstration, Healy for a photographer, Lefty Larkin's general air of partnership and intimacy, which could not be offset, did not fit in. Under all the circumstances he thought it well not to switch the subject. "You mean their medicine men, I suppose?" he said.
"Yep. I've seen 'em do curious things with my own eyes. They ain't over and above eager to exhibit afore a white man but they didn't know I was on deck on some of them occasions. But their own men was close up to 'em an' they don't use any paraphernalia. I tell ye, Hermann the Great was a dub to 'em. I've seen 'em read the future blowin' cigarette smoke over a bowl of water, an' find out witches the same way. I've seen 'em suck out a big chunk of buckhorn cactus through an eagle quill from a man's mouth. Seen the quill swell an' the shaman cough up the cactus after he'd sucked it out through the stem. I've seen 'em plant a kernel of corn an' sing it to full growth in plain view. Takes all day, that trick. They plant it at sunrise and at noon it's tosseled out. At sunset the ears are on it in the silk. The corn grows with the song. If the shaman quits chanting the corn stops growin'. I've seen 'em dance bare-footed on live coals an' stroke each other with cedar-bark torches in the fire-dance.
"Them's Pueblo tricks.
"The 'Pache shamans can make a thuder storm in a dark room or cave. Thunder and streaks of lightnin', w'en it's clear as a bell outside an' the stars shinin'. An' they'll swaller eighteen-inch arrers. Then there's the Moquis handlin' of the rattlesnakes. You've heard of them, likely. I tell ye they 're a rum lot. And a bad lot.
"I see a sight once, back in 'eighty-eight, down at San Mateo, New Mexico, that 'ud make yore blood crawl. The Penitentes were celebratin' Holy Week. A fine way of celebratin'. Mexican Indians they was, but kin to these Pueblos. I was trailin' with my burro late one night so's not to make a dry camp, w'en I hears a shriekin' sound thet seemed to come from everywhere an' nowhere. I learns later it was the Indians blowin' through reeds, but it sounded to me then like ten dozen mountain lions gettin' ready to fight. Then a bit of a moon come out an' I see 'em from the top of my ridge. If they'd seen me, or even 'spicioned I was nigh, I'd have been toasted alive. They was on one of their pilgrimages, as they call 'em. A band of 'em, naked as worms, with their limbs all bound tight with wire and rope an' their shoes full of sharp pebbles, scourging each other. An' carryin' big crosses.
"I see one of them crosses nex' day. I didn't foller them that night after they was out of sight. I didn't figger it was healthy. I sneaked back a ways an' camped dry, after all. In the mornin' I found a spring. In the afternoon I come across the cross. They was a man hangin' to it. An Indian, mother-naked, nailed, nigh dead. I was minded to put a bullet through his head an' end the poor devil's misery, but I heard the shrieking of the reeds again an' I vamosed. They choose 'em by lot an' they don't allus die, they say. But, sometimes, it's a woman. An' their scourges is aloe fibre, I've seen 'em. Another trick is for them to lie on beds of cactus. Now I'm puttin' it to ye, what kind of use is it for folks like them to be made pets of by the gov'mint? An', if they do that to themselves, what 'ud they do to a white man? I thought along that line while I was movin' off from that cross an' I'll promise you I hurried some. Like to wore off my burro's hoofs gettin' cl'ar of that neighbourhood."
Stone shivered involuntarily in the raw chill of the air as a little breeze came whispering down the valley.
"Better you turn in for all the sleep you can git," suggested Harvey. "We'll all need our nerve termorrer, likely, an' they's nothin' to fix up yore nerves like sleep an' a full stummick."