The rock known as El Morro in New Mexico is off the beaten trail. Not many tourists get to it. It’s where a mesa juts out into a valley, and a couple of canons run together. The mesa plunges into an abrupt drop to the level of the valley. It’s over two hundred feet straight down from the top to the bottom, and the sandstone sides gleam in the sun.
They’ve protected it from vandals. For a while people wrote their names and addresses on the rock, scratching out the messages of the early Spaniards to leave their own names. Why they did it I don’t know. But they did.
We made a camp. The Mexican looked to me as though he were about half conscious. His head lolled around and his black eyes were utterly expressionless in their stolid stupidity.
“Wait,” said the man with the aluminium-paint eyes.
So we had a siesta, cooked some beans, and warmed up some tortillas and waited for the moon.
It came up over the desert, casting long, black shadows. In the places where there weren’t any shadows the desert gleamed like silver, and the inscription rock was like some huge castle.
We sat and watched the Mexican.
Once or twice Emilio Bender made passes with his hands and crooned low words. The Mex seemed groggy. I figured the whole thing was going to be a flop.
I don’t know just what time it was, but the moon was up a good two hours and the camp fire had died down to a bed of coals before I noticed anything.
The Mex was sitting all humped over, as motionless as the rock that had weathered the countless ages, and which cast a great blob of shadow in the moonlight.
I saw his shoulders twitch and his head come back. The chin stuck out and the eyes glanced around the desert. The flesh lost its heavy look of sordid animalism and took on the fine lines of the thoroughbred. I glanced at Emilio Bender, but the man with the pin-point eyes was staring unwinkingly at the Mex.
It happened all of a sudden.
The Mexican sprang to his feet, and looked all about him. The moonlight caught his eyes, and there seemed to be fire in his glance. He looked at me and jumped back, his hand flying across his body to his left hip, groping for the hilt of his sword.
“Who are you?” he shouted. “Friend or foe? Speak, before Pablo Viscente de Moreno slits your gullet with a blade of Damascus!”
And then he frowned as his groping fingers failed to encounter the hilt of his sword.
“Dios! I am disarmed!” he roared. “And whence came these clothes? What witchery is this? Where are the sentinels? How about the horses? We are in hostile country! The horses are more precious to us than gold. Where are those horses?”
He whirled and fixed the man with pin-point eyes.
“You!” he bellowed. “I’ve seen you before — a sniveling scribe, a hunchbacked, round-shouldered, driveling devil who is learned in something or other. Who the devil are you?”
Emilio Bender said nothing, simply continued to stare with his pin-point eyes, and the moonlight glinted from them and made them seem more than ever as though they had been coated with aluminium paint.
“Speak!” roared the Mex, and made a swift imperious stride toward the hypnotist.
Bender faltered in his glance. I mean it. He shifted his eyes quickly as does one when he is afraid. It was the first time he had ever lost that positive, unwinking stare, that incisive power.
Once more the Mexican’s hand groped about his left hip.
“If I can find the devil who stole my sword I will spit him like a rabbit and leave him to writhe on the sand in the hot sunlight of to-morrow... Where’s the commander? Where is General Don Diego de Vargas?”
He paused, waiting for an answer; and as he stood there, the moonlight clothing him with a silver aura, he seemed like a man of fire. Gone was the stolid Mexican who was a peon, a cholo. In his place was this imperious man of fire and courage, a soldier who had made a profession of soldiering when carrying arms was not merely being a cog in a military machine.
He took a swift step toward Emilio Bender, then halted.
“Carramba! We have few enough men as it is, even if you are a devil of a scribe. The general would like it none too well if I should run you through. But show me where my sword is, or by the Virgin I will spit you to the gills!”
Emilio Bender made a few passes, muttered soothing words, but the passes were without effect. The Mexican turned to me.
“Crazy,” he said. “It is the heat of the desert, and the constant watching for raids from the savages. I have seen men so before. Tell me, comrade, where is my sword, and how come I by these clothes?”
I met his eyes, feeling a strange fascination for this man of fire.
“You left your sword and your armor at a cave where you stored much gold plunder. Have you forgotten?”
He shook his head as a swimmer shakes his head upon emerging from the water.
“Damn it, you tell the truth!” he said. “I had forgotten about that cave. It seems that I have been in a long sleep. Things are not as they should be. There is much that has intervened.
“Bien, we will go to the cave. Let me get my blade in my fingers once more and I will be myself. But how quiet it seems! Where are our comrades? Where is the general? Where are the horses?”
“They, too, are at the cave.”
He glared at me.
“If you are lying you will be spitted like a bird!”
I shrugged my shoulders.
He looked around him at the desert.
“Strange!” he muttered. “The moon was well past the full. Now it is but turned on the wane... This must be the rock. Surely, this is where the general carved his name and the date of his passage. But last night it was. And to-day seems a haze. I must have had the fever. Tell me, you scrivener, have I had the fever?”
The man with pin-point eyes nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “you have been sick.”
The Mexican said no further word but strode across the sand toward the white silence of the glittering rock. The moonlight sent a grotesque shadow, as black as a pool of ink, accompanying him. And I trotted after.
Following me came the man with the aluminium-colored eyes, and he had to trot rapidly to keep up.
The Mexican went directly to the place on the rock where the autograph of General Vargas has been protected from vandalism by the fence. He stared at the fence.
“Done to-day!” he exclaimed.
We said nothing. He raised his eyes to the inscription on the rock and nodded.
“I had thought it was more clear. Perhaps it’s the moonlight. Perhaps it’s my eyes that have become dim with the fever; but it’s the inscription all right.”
His eye caught the yellow pasteboard box in which a roll of films had been brought to the spot by some tourist.
“What the devil?” he exclaimed, and stopped to pick it up.
We waited. He turned it over and over in his fingers.
“Cascaras!” he exclaimed. “There is magic in this thing, or else it is the fever.”
“It is the fever,” said Bender.
The Mexican glared at him. “Speak when you’re spoken to, scribe. Tell me, how do we join our comrades? Which way do we go?”
“Where is the cave?” asked Bender.
He pointed toward ancient Zuni. “It lies in that direction, a march of two days.”
Bender nodded.
“Come,” he said. “We have a new chariot”
And he led the way toward the automobile which had brought us.