“ ‘The bullet, of course.’
“ ‘I have it here,’ I said, and handed it over.
“And at that time the door opened and Miss Marian, my regular office nurse, came strolling into the room.
“ ‘I’ve missed you,’ I said, and my tone wasn’t too cordial I’d almost lost the operation fee over her absence. She’d been due an hour earlier. She looked like the fag end of a big party. She made some carefully thought up excuse, a lie that I didn’t even bother to listen to.
“ ‘I want this bullet tested,’ said the girl.
“ ‘Tested?’ I wanted to know. ‘What for?’
“ ‘Gold,’ she said.
“ ‘Bullets,’ I explained, speaking as one would speak to a child, ‘are made of lead alloy. This one is discolored from having been embedded in the living tissues.’
“ ‘Will you please test it?’ she stormed.
“To please her I got out some acid, a little graduate, cleaned the bullet under a water faucet, and dropped it into the graduate with the tips of my forceps.
“Then I got the surprise of my life. The bullet was almost pure gold!
“My nurse crowded close, watching the test. I’d as soon Miss Marian hadn’t been there. The girl seemed not the least surprised at what the bullet was. She called for an ambulance, paid my fee for the operation, and had the unconscious man removed.
“When she had gone, Miss Marian, the nurse, looked after her with eyes that were smoky with thought.
“ ‘Know who she was?’ she asked.
“ ‘No,’ I said; ‘do you?’
“The nurse shook her head, but I knew she was lying, and that aroused my curiosity.”
The surgeon quit speaking as a fit of coughing seized him. The Mexican girl flung herself upon him, wiping his forehead with a wet rag. She pressed a little bottle of whisky to his lips. He drank, then resumed his story.
“My nurse, Miss Marian, took occasion to become impertinent a couple of days later, and I discharged her. At the time I thought there was a smirk on her face when I let her go. It seemed to be just what she wanted me to do.
“Then chance gave a clew as to the identity of the girl who had ordered the mysterious operation. She was Stella McRae, daughter of a man who had lost everything in the market. She was engaged to marry a chap named Craleigh, and it was more than rumored that Craleigh was a big creditor of the old man. He had agreed to take the daughter in payment of the debt.
“The girl, Stella, was reported to be visiting friends in the Imperial Valley. I read of that in the society column. But it wasn’t until I learned that my nurse, Miss Marian, and the chap she was going with, a fellow named Lugger, had gone into the desert on a prospecting trip, that I suddenly took a tumble. I got busy and traced them, then.
“The society girl, Stella McRae, had run onto this old prospector, and he’d told her of a secret mine somewhere in Mexico, probably in the Yaqui country. The Indians there are outlaws, and they use gold and silver for bullets. That’s the old story. I’ve heard it since, a dozen times.
“Stella McRae wanted to buy her freedom, so she could marry for love instead of for money. My nurse had doped it out and she’d gone down to hijack the mine when it was located. And I had been partially responsible.
“I went after them. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was the lure of the money. Perhaps it was because I wanted to do the square thing by the girl. Perhaps it was greed, perhaps it was sympathy. Anyway, I went.
“I traced Miss Marlan and Carl Lugger into the desert. They went through here. Tina knows the way. She acted as guide until I sent her back. That was when the country got dangerous. I was a fool not to have some one who knew the desert with me. I was just a tenderfoot. But I found them; and I was the one who blundered. It was too much smoke from a camp fire, I guess. At any rate, I got the Indians into the country, and then the trouble started.”
The dying doctor got that far and then there was another spell of coughing. I felt the form writhing and twisting beneath my hand, felt the pulse grow weak and stringy. I bent forward.
“Be calm,” I told him.
He knew it was the end. His eyes grew glassy with effort, but the coughing twisted his system, and then, when he got over the coughing, he was so weak he could hardly speak.
I figured he’d opened up bleeding in the wounds again, and told the girl to bring me some hot water and rags.
The doctor rolled his head in a half circle on the dirty pillow, gasped, and whispered to me in a husky voice.
“You’ll go... This is important — bend closer — got to tell you this or they’ll trap you... When you see a painted face on the rock, watch out for—”
And that was as far as he got.
The threadlike pulse stopped. The eyes snapped into some peculiar expression, the iris expanding, then contracting. The head ceased to roll. The whisper died into a rattle and then was silent.
It was a wail from the fat woman that conveyed the news to the girl.
“He is dead,” she wailed.
The girl fell forward, her shoulders heaving in sobs, and I comforted them as best I could.
I stayed the night there, and we buried him the next day. He’d been badly shot up, and there had been infection. Why a city physician should have been possessed of the wild urge to go after a secret mine in the Yaqui country was more than I knew.
As for the golden bullets — well, I’d heard whispers of golden bullets, but, then, one hears all sorts of whispers in the desert. It doesn’t do to take ’em too seriously.
But I got to wondering if what he said was true, and before we buried him I explored around a bit in the infected wounds, and I finally carved out a bullet.
The girl came in the room just then, and I dropped the bullet into my pocket. I didn’t want her to know. She seemed to be taking it awfully hard as it was.
We buried him in a sandy grave with a little ceremony that wasn’t orthodox, but it sounded solemn, and the Mexicans cried and covered their heads with their skirts as I filled in the dirt.
Then we erected a cross, and put a monument of stones on the grave.
After that I got a chance to examine the bullet. I whistled when I’d made a few tests. The bullet was almost pure gold.
That night the girl came to me as I sat by the fire, and slipped her hand in mine.
“He wanted you to go,” she said.
I nodded.
“I will go with you part of the way, to show you where the trail is.”
The old Mexican wailed a protest, but the girl turned flashing eyes upon her and spat forth sentences that sounded as the rattle of gunfire. The old woman dried up.
It was a strange thing: golden bullets, Yaqui country, a girl for a guide. Would the Indians be expecting some one to come in, following the wounded man’s outbound trail?
The Yaquis are queer chaps. They respect a white man as long as a white man respects them. They’re fiendishly cruel when the occasion warrants. The Mexicans persecute them, and they torture the Mexicans when they get a chance. They’re proud, and they’re independent, and they live in one of the richest mineral countries in the world.
They tell stories of the Yaquis following up the main ridge of the Sierra Madre range, and coming in to trade for rifles with certain tight-lipped traders who slink down from Arizona. It’s a grim business, and the story goes that a rifle brings its weight in gold.
I’d heard whispers of the rifle traffic, as has every one who has lived in the desert. And I’d heard of the reloading tools the Yaquis buy; and I’d heard of golden bullets.
The story goes that they won’t bother to pack lead back to their homes because gold and silver make good bullets, and they have all they want of them and more. But I’d never seen any golden bullets, nothing but whispers which had been through the desert, just like the whispers of the lost mines.