“And I found a rock slab with an iron chain, and the embers of a fire around it, an old fire, and there were bones, and the chain was wrapped around the bones, and the bones were blackened by fire, and bleached by sun. And I found a man who had had the soles of his feet peeled off with a skinning knife, and then been told to walk back over the hot sand.
“It’s a country where the Yaqui Indians don’t want any one to go. They say it’s where they get the gold that they do their trading with.”
“Trading?” he asked, and he had to wet his thin lips with the tip of his tongue before the word would come out.
“Yes,” I said. “They work up along the ridge of the Sierra Madre Mountains, come down into some of the Arizona towns and buy gunpowder.”
“Bullets?” he asked.
“They cast ’em out of silver. They don’t need to worry about lead.”
He was silent for several seconds.
Finally, he reached in a coat pocket and took out a little bag of buckskin. The buckskin was glazed with dirt and wear, all smooth, dark and shiny. He opened it up.
It was filled with gold.
There wasn’t a lot of it, but it was a coarse gold, about the size of wheat grains, and it looked good.
“That gold came from right here,” he said, and he tapped the greasy spot on the map with his forefinger. “If you’d go there with me you’d find all you wanted.”
His voice was smooth, seductive.
“Did you ever see a placer where the gold was like that?” he asked. “Just to be had for the taking?”
He was trying to arouse my greed.
I let my eyes lock with his.
“Did you ever see a man stuck on a pointed stake?” I asked.
Despite himself there was a little shudder that ran along his spine. I smiled to myself when I saw it. He was hard, but it was the hardness of the city. I didn’t think he’d be hard long in the desert.
“I can offer you much money,” he said, “a guarantee of success. You can be rich. You can go to the best hotels, eat at the best restaurants, take in the best shows, have the most beautiful women.”
I smiled at that. His idea of luxury was the city man’s idea.
“Did you ever see a man with the soles of his feet skinned off?” I asked him.
And then he got down to business.
“Listen,” he said, and he lowered his voice until it was almost a whisper, “I’ve got to go there. I’m administrator of an estate. The sole heir is a girl. That girl went there and didn’t come back. I’ve got to find her and bring her out.”
I was interested now.
“People who go there seldom come out,” I said.
“No,” he told me, “she’s alive. I’ve heard from her. She’s a prisoner there, and she’s inherited a fortune. I’ve got to find her to keep the fortune from going to another branch of the family that’s hostile.”
I knew, even then, that there was a chance he was lying, a big chance. But I kept thinking of a white woman, trapped in that country, held a prisoner.
I looked squarely into his gray eyes.
“I’ll go,” I said, “on one condition.”
“That is?”
“That you go along.”
He let his eyes turn watery. His lips drooped. His face blanched. He tried to look away from me, and couldn’t. I was holding his eyes with my own.
He heaved a deep sigh.
“I’ll go,” he said.
It wasn’t exactly the answer I had expected, and, perhaps, he read that in my eyes.
He laughed, and the laugh was hard.
“Don’t think I’m a fool,” he said. “I’ve got an ace up my sleeve you haven’t heard about, yet.”
He just let his laugh fade into a smile, then the smile was wiped out and his face was hard as rock, hard with a thin-lipped expression of cruelty.
“Yes,” he said. “We can go — and we can come back.”
And he looked at me.
“There will be four in the party,” he said.
“Four?”
“Yourself, myself, and two others.”
“The others?”
“A man named Pedro Murietta, and Phil Brennan.”
I stared at him. To get a Mexican to go into the Yaqui country was like getting a superstitious Negro to walk through a graveyard at midnight.
“Pedro Murietta?” I asked.
“A Yaqui Indian,” he said. “Pure blood.”
Then he laughed.
“I told you I had an ace up my sleeve,” he said.
I rolled a cigarette.
“When do we start?”
“How soon can we start?”
I flipped away the cigarette
“Right now,” I told him and got up from the table.
II. A Mystery Package
It was the third day that the desert gripped us with its full strength.
The desert is a wonderful place. It’s cruel, the crudest enemy man ever had. And it’s the kindest friend. Probably it’s kind because it’s so cruel. It’s the cruelty that makes a man — or breaks him.
Phil Brennan was one of these delicate, retiring individuals. He was always in the background. Pedro Murietta had something wrong with him. I couldn’t find out what. He was thin, and he was nervous, and his eyes were like those of a hunted animal.
Harry Karg was hard. He was cruel.
And on the third day the desert blazed into our faces, white hot with reflected sunlight, glaring, dazzling, shimmering, shifting. The horizons did a devil dance in the heat. The air writhed under the torture of the sun. All about us was a white furnace.
I’d had the two white men keep their skins oiled and covered with a red preparation that kept out some of the sunlight, letting them get accustomed to it by degrees.
But the sun was broiling their skins right through all the protective coverings.
A hot wind blew the stinging sand into little blistering pellets.
“How much longer?” asked Karg.
“Of what?” I inquired.
“Of this awful heat?”
It was the query I’d been waiting for. I faced him.
“You’ll have it so long that you’ll get accustomed to it,” I told him. “Until your body dries out like a mummy; until you get so you know it’s there but don’t mind it; until you get so you quit sweating, and can go all day on a cup of water.”
He cursed.
“Do you know what I heard?” he demanded.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“That we could have come this far, and fifty miles farther by automobile, and started from there, gaining over five days in time and sparing us all this agony.”
“You could,” I said.
“Well, you’re a hell of a guide,” he stormed. “What’s the idea in taking us through this hell hole?”
His face was writhing with rage, and his eyes, that had kept so clear all through his whisky drinking, were red now, so red it was hard to see any white in them.
The other two gathered around, made a little ring.
I wanted them to hear my answer, so I waited to make it impressive.
“The object in taking you on this trip was to toughen you up,” I said. “If we’d taken the first lap by automobile, you’d have had to drink water on the last lap just like you’re drinking it now. You’re going to walk through the heat of this desert until you get so you can have one drink in the morning and one drink at night — and no more.
“You’re going to walk through this desert until you quit thinking it’s a hell hole and think it’s one of the most beautiful places a man ever lived in.
“Then you’ll be ready to start on the real part of the trip.”
And I pushed him to one side and started on.
He was hard, and he was strong, and the heat had frazzled his nerves, and he was accustomed to all sorts of little tricks of domination. It was inevitable that we should clash sooner or later. We clashed then.