He worked the Dragoons for almost a year with only a few pyrite showings and then a trace that would die out before it had hardly started. It was enough discouragement to make him look for a new field. He decided to point south and follow the Bavispe down through Sonora, keeping the Sierra Madre on his left, working the foothills until he had the feel of the country, then go deeper into the range.
Five days after Juan Solo left his pueblo, Struggles found him in a barranca. They did not speak, because Juan was unable to. He was spread on his back in the middle of the depression, stripped, his hands and feet fastened with rawhide and pegged deep into the sand. Near him were the ashes of a fire over which his feet had been held before he was staked to the ground.
They spoke of it for a long time after in Soyopa. How Juan Solo rode out one morning on his burro and returned a week later tied to the animal with the American leading it, along with his own, and how the American stayed on with Juan at his adobe and tended him until his sickness passed.
STRUGGLES DID NOT consider saving Juan's life a special act of charity. He would have done the same for anyone. Nor did the man's reluctance to explain completely what had occurred bother Struggles. At first, all Juan offered in explanation was that an American, a man whom he had trusted as a friend, caught him unaware and performed this torture on him. Struggles accepted this without pressing conversation and gradually, as his wounds healed, Juan Solo became more at ease. A natural friendship was developing, in spite of their extremely opposite backgrounds.
Finally, one day when Juan's burns were almost healed, he said to Struggles: "That was a good thing you did before." It was his way of thanking Struggles for saving his life.
The surgeon brushed it off. "No more than any man would have done," he said.
Juan Solo frowned. "It is not of such a simple nature. There was a good thing you did before."
Struggles waited while Juan Solo unhurriedly formed the words in his mind.
"Once," Juan began, "I had a friend who desired to be rich. He begged me to show him silver, so I took him into the hills. But even being a friend, I blindfolded his eyes lest avarice lead him back for more, though I meant to give him plenty enough. For two days I walked behind his burro picking up the kernels of maize that he was dropping to mark the trail. And at the end of that time, I unbound his eyes and returned to him all the maize he had dropped, saying such a wasteful man would indeed not know how to use silver. And there I left him, discovering that he was no friend.
"The next time I went out from the pueblo, he was waiting for me and he took me and demanded that I show him the place of the silver. He had Mexican men with him, and at his word they built a fire to abuse the truth from me, as if the words would come from my feet; but I would not speak, so they left me to die."
Juan Solo's eyes did not leave Struggles' hard-lined face. He went on, "Now I have learned that friendship is not simply of words. Man, I will show you silver; as much as your burro can carry will be yours. And there will be no blindfold."
Struggles cleared his throat and felt a flush of embarrassment. "Juan, I didn't treat you for a fee." And then was sorry he had said it when the Indian's sleepy eyes opened suddenly.
But his voice remained even when he said, "To a friend, you offer a gift. You do not repay him." He hesitated. "And I say offer, for you need not accept it. Approaching El Sangre del Santo is not the same as entering the great city of Chihuahua. Often there is danger."
Struggles' cigar almost slipped from his mouth. "You know where it is?" he asked, amazed.
The Indian nodded his head.
Sketchily then, the story of the mine formed in the surgeon's head. He relaxed in his chair, putting the pieces together. He had almost forgotten the legend of Tomas Maria.
"What about the padre who acts as watchman?" he asked cautiously. "Is he the danger you spoke of?"
Juan Solo smiled faintly. "Here they say that he and I are good friends. No, the danger is from those who would take all the wealth from the poor padre."
Struggles smiled at the Indian and said, "I imagine he gets pretty lonely up there," but Juan Solo only shrugged his shoulders. Struggles added, "I mean your ex-friend, the American."
The Indian nodded. "After leaving me the thought would come to him that if I died his chance of discovering the mine would be remote. So he would return and find that someone had taken me. First he would curse, then inquire discreetly through one of his men if I had been brought to Soyopa; and finding this to be so, his choice would then be to wait for me to go out again and then to follow."
"Well, you're just guessing now," Struggles said.
Juan Solo shrugged again. "Perhaps."
On the fourth day after leaving the pueblo, Juan's conjecture came back to Struggles suddenly. From that afternoon on, there was little room in his mind for doubting the Indian's word.
They were in high, timbered country moving their horses and pack mules single file along a trail that cut into the pines, climbing to distant rimrock. Where the slope leveled, they came out onto a bench that opened up for a dozen yards revealing, down over the tops of the lower pines and dwarf oaks, the country they had left hours before. In the timber it was cool; but below, the sandy flats and the scattered rock eruptions were all the same glaring yellow, hazy through a dust that hung motionless. At first, Struggles thought he was seeing sun spots from the glare.
He blinked before squinting again and now he was certain there were no sun spots. Far off against the yellow glare, a confused number of moving specks were pointing toward the deep shadows of a barranca. Juan Solo was watching with the palm of his hand shading his eyes.
He looked at the surgeon when the specks passed out of sight. "Now there is no doubt," he said.
Struggles' rough face turned to him quickly. "Why, that could be anybody."
"Senor Doctor," Juan said quietly. "This is my country."
AT SUNDOWN they stopped long enough to eat a cold supper, then moved on into a fast-falling gloom. The country was level now, but thick with brush; mesquite clumps which in the evening dimness clung ghostlike to the ground and were dead silent with no breeze to stir them. Struggles, riding behind the Indian, felt his eyes stretched open unnaturally and told himself to quit being a damn fool and relax.
He chewed on the end of the dead cigar and let his stomach muscles go loose, but still a tension gripped him which his own steadying words could not detach. They were being followed. He knew that now, and didn't have to close his eyes to picture what would happen if they were overtaken. But there was more to the feeling than that. It was also the country--the climbing, stretching, never-ending wildness of the country. The Sierra Madre was like the sea, he thought. Both of them deathless, monotonously eternal, and so indifferent in their magnitude that either could accept the dust of all the world's dead and not have the decency to show it in posture. He thought: Now I know what people mean about wanting to die in bed. But again he told himself to shut up, because it was foolish to talk.
There was only a soft squeak of saddle leather and the muffled clop of hoofs on sand, and ahead, the dim figure of Juan Solo moving silently, rhythmically to the sounds.
The dusk thickened into night, and later Struggles could feel the ground beneath him changing though he could make out nothing in the darkness. There was a closeness above him along with the more broken ground, so that he sensed rather than observed that they were passing into rockier country.
And when first morning light reflected in the sky, Struggles saw that they were deep into a canyon. Ahead, it twisted out of sight, but beyond the rim a wall of mountain rose a thousand feet into the sky, tapering into a slender pinnacle at one end of its unbalanced crest. It seemed close enough to hit with a stone, but it was at least two miles beyond the canyon.