“I tell you there is a fortune in gold there! Why don’t we start? Are you a coward?” he asked of the man with the aluminium-paint eyes.
Emilio Bender smiled an affable, ingratiating smile.
“We have to get our army together, my friend. It takes time.”
The Mexican laughed, and there was in that laugh a note which no peon ever yet achieved. It was the laugh of a man who laughs at life.
“Dios! Pablo Viscente de Moreno has to wait for an army to reclaim that which is his? Bah, you make me laugh! What are you, a soldier or a coward? Bah!”
He spat out the words with a supreme contempt.
“We need provisions,” said the man with pin-point eyes.
“Provisions!” said the Mexican. “Did we wait for provisions when the brave general Don Diego de Vargas went into the desert to reconquer those who had massacred our countrymen? I can show you the spot, señor, where we camped by the foot of a great rock, and I watched while the brave general wrote upon that rock with the point of his knife.
“I can tell you the words: ‘Aquí estaba el Gen. Do. de Vargas, quién conquistó a nuestra santa fé y a la real corona todo el Nuevo Mexico a su costa, año de 1692’.”
I translated mentally, “Here was General Diego de Vargas, who conquered for our holy faith and the royal crown all of New Mexico at his own cost, in the year 1692.”
The Mexican laughed again, that laugh that was a challenge to the universe:
“It was by camp fire that he wrote that message, and I stood beside him as he wrote. That day we had killed many Indians. We carried all before us. Those were the days! And now you babble about armies and provisions. Lead up my horse! Damn it, I will start alone! Get me my blade and dagger, give me the gray horse. He is better in the desert than the black... Come, let us away! I tell you there is gold to be taken!”
He whirled toward me and transfixed me with an eye that was as coldly proud as the eye of an eagle. His head was back, his shoulders squared.
The man with pin-point eyes got to his feet and made passes with his hands.
“Not now,” he said soothingly. “Not now, Señor Don Pablo Viscente de Moreno; but shortly. We shall go back into the desert. To-night, by the light of the moon I will come again and we shall start. Peace. Sleep until to-night at eight. Then we shall start.”
A cloud came over the proud eyes of the Mexican. The chest drooped backward, the shoulders hunched forward. The head lost its proud bearing.
The old woman swayed backward and forward in her chair, chanting a prayer. The fat woman crossed herself repeatedly.
Then the Mexican was no longer a proud soldier, but a cholo once more. He looked at me with dark eyes that were stolid in their animal stupidity.
“It is hot,” he said, and rolled a cigarette.
Emilio Bender took me by the arm.
“We will go,” he said. “Later, we will return.” And he led me to the door.
There was no word of farewell from the women. The man grunted the formula which the hospitality of his race demanded. The children scuttled from the front yard and hid in the greenery at the side of the house.
I took a deep breath of the afternoon air.
“What,” asked the man with pin-point eyes, “do you think of it?”
I was careful of my words.
“The rock he speaks of is known,” I said. “It is a great sandstone cliff and is known as El Morro, or as ‘Inscription Rock.’ It was by the old trail of the Spaniards who sought the Seven Cities of Cibola. They camped there, and because the sandstone offered a fitting place to inscribe their names and the date of their passage, they carved inscriptions. The first starts with Don Juan de Onate in 1605. After that many expeditions left their marks.
“There is not one person in a thousand who knows of this rock. But it is a great cliff that looks like a white castle. And there is a message from General Don Diego de Vargas upon it.”
The man with the curious eyes took a deep breath.
“Then,” he said, “we will start. I was not sure. They told me you could give me more information of the desert than any other man. I know now we will find gold.”
“Wait a minute,” I protested. “Do you think this man is at all genuine, or is he a slicker trying to promote something? Or is he hypnotized?”
Emilio Bender shrugged his shoulders.
“You have seen,” he replied. “The man who talked to us is Pablo Viscente de Moreno, a soldier who marched with General Diego de Vargas when the country was yet young. I know not the history; but I gather from what the man has said on other occasions that there was a massacre, and General de Vargas was then reconquering the country.”
“But,” I argued, “how could a man who marched in 1692 across the desert with General Diego de Vargas speak to us in a ’dobe house in Mexicali in 1930?”
The man with pin-point eyes shrugged his shoulders.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?”
I made a gesture with my hands and answered him in Mexican: “Quién sabe?”
He nodded. “All right,” he said; “that’s the answer.”
We went back to the Cantina Gold Dollar Bar and had another drink.
“We leave at eight o’clock,” he said, and fastened his metallic eyes upon mine.
“What’s in it for me?” I asked.
“Fifty-fifty,” he said.
“The Mexican?”
“He doesn’t count. We’ll give him what he has to have.”
I laughed at that.
“Be sure you have the half-breed personality on deck when you make the division, and not Pablo Viscente de Moreno, the soldier. You might have difficulties in getting even a cut out of the soldier.”
He nodded, and his pin-point eyes seemed whirling around in spiral circles, emitting little glitters like a whirling wheel reflecting the light.
We had another drink and then I went to roll my blankets. It was adventure, even if it wasn’t anything else. And how could a soldier who marched with General Diego de Vargas in 1692 talk to us in a ’dobe house in Mexicali in 1930?
It just couldn’t be done.
Chapter 3
Warrior Without a Sword
But I rolled my blankets and met the man with pin-point eyes at eight o’clock. We went back to the ’dobe. The women crossed themselves, and the children ran and hid. But the Mexican decided to go with us.
He had another of his surly fits on, and he seemed a little groggy as though he had been asleep and hadn’t fully waked up.
Emilio Bender treated him like a dog. He put him in the back of the touring car with the rolls of blankets and cooking stuff.
“Sit there!” he snapped.
“Si, señor,” said the Mexican.
The car started with a lurch. The old woman crossed herself. The fat woman watched us with apathetic interest. The children were hiding in the shadows cast by the full moon. I couldn’t see one of them.
We crossed the border, headed east toward Yuma. It was a hot night and a still night. The rushing ribbon of road and the drone of the motor made me sleepy. The man with pinpoint eyes did the driving until we got to Yuma. Then I took the car and made Phoenix.
The Mexican slept as well as he could, what with the jouncing around on the washboard road between Yuma and the Gillespie Dam. Then we hit paving again. I gave up the wheel at Phoenix, and Emilio Bender took the car over the black canon grade to Prescott. It was getting warm by that time, but out of Prescott we did some climbing and it was cool and nice by the time we got to Flagstaff.
Back of Winslow the road changed again to sage country, and we stopped the car in the shade of the last of the stunted cedars and had a siesta. We were on our way again by the time the moon got up. We weren’t letting any grass grow under our feet.