Robert Welles Ritchie

With evenly divided cause and equal cheerfulness Grant could have kicked the porter and himself when he awoke tardily next morning and found his car at a standstill. He raised the berth curtain and looked out. On the eaves of a station he saw a white board with the name “Arizora” painted upon it and certain irrelevant advice as to the distance to New Orleans and to Culiacan. Out through the curtains popped his head and he whistled the porter.

“Why didn’t you give me a call?” was his angry demand.

“Yassuh, yassuh, ev’body in this kyar gets out here. Mos’ have gone an’ done it a’ready. You see, Cap’n, this kyar’s been switched off here at the Line two hours ago; train’s kep’ right on goin’ into Sonora.”

Grant, cursing his luck, boiled into his clothes and made a race for the washroom. He was hoping against luck that Benicia O’Donoju had not been an earlier riser than himself. With his face puffy with lather, he stopped from minute to minute to peep through the window giving onto the station platform. A decrepit autobus was backed up against the curb with a few passengers sitting patiently on its frayed seats; loungers were dangling their legs from baggage trucks; under wooden awnings of a business block across from the station a Mexican was languidly sweeping out a store. Arizora had not yet come to life.

Just as Grant was towelling the last remnants of shaving lather from his cheeks he made another quick survey of the platform and his heart dropped into his shoes. Benicia walked into the field of the washroom window; with her the unspeakable Spaniard, who carried her neat travelling satchel as well as his own bag. The girl was fresh as the dawn in a suit of khaki, short-skirted over high laced boots of russet leather. Rebellious hair strayed from beneath the brim of a soft-crowned Stetson, saucily noosed to her head by a fillet of leather under her chin. Soft green of a scarf lightly drew together at her throat the wings of her khaki collar. Nothing of the theatrical or self-consciousness of tailoring in the picture the desert girl made; she was the spirit of the Southwest, unsophisticated and without pretence. By her side the little Spaniard with his knife-edged trousers and thin-waisted coat appeared comic.

As Grant, towel in hand, lingered by the window feeding his soul with vain regrets, a crazy thing on wheels swung around the station and came to a stop by the girl’s side. It might have been called an automobile by courtesy, though there was little to identify it as a member of the gas family save that it went of its own traction. Engine naked, dash gone, two high-backed seats of unpainted tin like the wing of an old-fashioned sitz-bath and unprotected by a top; behind these a home-built box body wherein a trunk and a suitcase were lashed. Grant was seeing his first desert speeder, rebuilt for service of a highly specialized kind. The man at the wheel was no less in character—an Indian in overalls and high peaked sombrero; a giant of a man with shoulders of a wrestler and dull bronze features of a Roman bust.

What ensued upon the arrival of the auto nearly drove the watcher, shirtless as he was, out to two-fisted intervention. Urgo, the salamander, evidently was of a mind to make a third in the car. Grant saw his humped shoulders and expostulating hands, saw Benicia tilt her chin as she gave him some cold refusal. But the colonel calmly stowed his suitcase by the side of the trunk in the box body, evidently planning to use it as a seat. Again Benicia, now in her place by the side of the Indian giant, turned to give him peremptory refusal. The Indian at the wheel had his engine going and was sitting statue-like, utterly detached from the quarrel.

Urgo stepped on the rear wheel’s hub and had one hand on the floor of the box body when one of the Indian’s hands flashed up the spark even as his foot went down on the gear pedal. The crazy little car leaped like a singed cat. Colonel Urgo cut a neat arc, hit the road on his back and rolled over just in time to escape receiving amidships his suitcase, which the Indian driver had dropped from the car without turning his head.

In the Pullman washroom Grant collapsed to the seat and smeared soap into his eyes while he tried to check tears of laughter. The fall of the peppery little Spaniard had been colossal, and he guessed it had been wrought at the quick prompting of the spirited girl in khaki. What a wonder she was! All laughter and bubbling spirits one minute; quick as a leopard to strike the next.

“Man”—Grant addressed a beaming face in the glass—“man, always lay your bets on a red-headed girl!”

That minute of communion with a smiling confidant was an important one in the life of Grant Hickman, cautious bachelor. For it came to him with the force of a hammer blow that he wanted and must have this vivid creature of the desert named Benicia O’Donoju. Girl of fire and sparkle—of a spirit free and piquant as the winds that blow across the wastes—unspoiled of cities and the stale conventions of drawing rooms. Oh, he would have her! Gone she might be, out into a land beyond his ken. Unguessed barriers of circumstance, of others’ intervention, might have to be scaled; but somehow, somewhere, Grant Hickman was going to find and win Benicia O’Donoju.

Love at first sight—old-fashioned, mid-Victorian stuff, says the cynical dÉbutante over her cigarette and outlaw cocktail. In New York tearooms and Washington ballrooms, quite so. Where girls of twenty must know the sum that stands in bank to Clarence’s credit, before Clarence is marked down as eligible, love at first sight is, in truth, dead as the dodo bird. Even so, spirit still calls to spirit and like leaps to like most all the world over. It is only where fungus spots stain the garden that love will not bloom.

When Grant quit the Pullman Colonel Urgo was nowhere to be seen. Grant idly wondered as he walked to the hotel, directly across a plaza from the station, how long it would be before he encountered this half-portion rival of his and what would be the Spaniard’s first move in his frank threat of reprisals of the night before. But when he was shown to his room—and the New York man whimsically reflected he had seen better ones at the Admiral on Madison Avenue—events of recent hours were pushed back from his attention by the more immediate demands of his presence in Arizora. He took from his suitcase the letter that had brought him sky-hooting across the continent to this back-water of life on the Mexican Line and skimmed it through:

“... I know just how hard it is for you to settle down to office routine after the Big Show. All of us are in the same fix, Old-timer, but I have the edge on you because out here in this man’s country there’s something breaking every minute. That’s the reason I’m writing you this mysterious letter.... Old Doc Stooder is counted the prime nut of Southern Arizona, but I believe he’s got a whale of a proposition and that’s why I’m counting myself—and you—in on the deal.

“I’ve sewed myself up with him—promised not to peep a word of the real dope to you in this letter. The old Doc says, ‘We’ll need a good engineer and if your buddy in France has a head on him and knows how to keep his mouth shut tell him to come out here.’ ... So if you still have that old take-a-chance spirit that hopped you through the Big Mill from Cantigny to Sedan I’ll see you in Arizora. If I’m not in town when you arrive dig up Doc Stooder—everybody knows him.

“Yours for the big chance,

“Bim.”

Grant folded the letter with a smile. Good old Bim with his “whale of a proposition.” Running true to form was Bim in this characteristic letter. Just as Grant had come to know and love him in training area and dugout: Bim Bagley, six-feet-one of tough Arizona bone and muscle and brimful of wild optimism. Always ready to take a chance, whether at the enemy on all fours through midnight mud or at fortune in the wild lands of the Border: that was Bim Bagley of Arizona, “the finest country in the Southwest.”

And Bim had shot truer than he could know when he sent this hint of big things in the offing back to a man two years out of uniform and moping for excitement on the sixteenth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Two years of civilian’s life had been just that span of slow moral suffocation for Grant. For all his thirty years, for all his better than moderate success in a profession of sharp competition, Grant Hickman still could hear the call to the swimmin’ hole of adventure. How he had yearned to hear it these past two years when the springs of his soul still tingled with the high tension of battle lines! Then this letter from a pal, promising all the substance of his dreams. It had not been a week in the engineer’s pocket before he was on the train for Arizora.

Grant went out to find Bagley. He located his office—“Insurance, Bonds, Investments” was the sign on the glass of the door; but the lock was turned and no one opened at his knock. His eye caught a corner of white paper projecting through the letter slot.

“Grant:—Called out of town—back Friday. B. B.” was the scrawl across the face of it. A stab of disappointment was his; he had builded heavily on that moment of meeting when Bim’s big hand would have his own in a vise. Nothing to do now but see the town and amuse himself as he might, or call on that mysterious Doc Stooder and discover why Grant Hickman had come racing out to this Arizora. He decided to do both.

The Arizora Grant saw in an hour’s swinging round the circle was something different from the “hick town” his New York smugness had pictured in anticipation. It was a condensed El Paso, jammed in the narrow compass of a mountain gorge, with railroad yards monopolizing the whole of the flat space between crowding hills. A man could go from his home to business by the simple trick of leaping off the front porch of his bungalow with an opened umbrella. Arizora’s streets were jammed with cars—fantastic desert coursers stripped to the nines and with canteens strapped to the running board. Sidewalks swarmed with men—big men with steady eyes looking out from beneath sombreros the size of a woman’s garden hat; men with high-heeled boots and the pins of many lodges stuck on their unbuttoned vests; lantern-jawed, hollow-templed men of the sun, whose bodies were indurated by the desert law of struggle and whose souls were simple as a fairy book.

Across Main Street stretched a fence of rabbit-proof wire with three strands of barbed wire topping that; a fence with something like a pasture gate swung back for traffic. This was the Line. On the hither side of that rabbit-proof wire web the authority of a President and his Congress stopped; on the far side the authority of quite a different president and his peculiar congress began. Over yonder, where stood a man under a straw sombrero and with a rifle hung on one shoulder, lay Sonora and the beginning of a thousand mile stretch of fantastic land called Mexico. A cart with solid wooden wheels and drawn by oxen under a ponderous yoke blocked the way of a twelve-cylinder auto seeking clearance at the international gate.

When he had tired of sight seeing Grant inquired at a cigar counter where Dr. Stooder could be found. The breezy man in shirtsleeves grinned and glanced at the clock on the wall behind him.

“Well, sir, usually mornings he’s over across the Line getting organized for the day on tequila. Mostly he comes back to his office round noon time, steppin’ wide and handsome. Office’s over yonder, top-side of the Bon Ton barber shop. You might give it a look.”

Grant acted on the cigar clerk’s advice. He located a dingy door at the end of a dark upper hallway with the lettering, “A. Stooder, M.D.,” on a tin sign over the transom. Entering, he found himself in a sad company. Three Mexican women and a man of the same race sat like mourners on chairs about the wall; a big-eyed child squatted in the middle of the floor and listlessly pulled a magazine to bits. The stamp of woe and of infinite patience was set on all the dark faces. Mephitic smell of iodoform was in the air. Grant hastily withdrew. After an hour’s walking and when the whistles were blowing noon he returned. A different collection of patient waiters occupied the chairs; evidently the doctor was in and at work.

He took a chair by the window where he could look down into the street and so keep the set masks of misery out of his eyes. After fifteen minutes the door to the inner office was violently opened and a Mexican woman shot out of it as if propelled by a kick. Thundering Spanish pursued her. Grant saw a scarecrow figure framed in the doorway.

Tall beyond the average and gaunt almost to the point of emaciation; frock coated like a senator of the Eighties; thin shoulders seeming bowed by the weight of the garments hung thereon; enormous, heavily veined hands carried as if hooked onto invisible hinges behind the stained white cuffs:—this the superficial aspect of Dr. Stooder. Vital character of the man was all summed up in his face: skin like wrinkled vellum stretched on a rack; eyes glinting from deep caves on either side of a veritable crag of a nose which had been broken and skewed off the true. A great mane of grey hair reared up and back from his high forehead; tufts of the same colour on lip and chin in the ancient mode of the “Imperial” added the last daguerreotype touch to his features.

Black eyes roved the room and fell on Grant, who had risen. The doctor crooked a bony finger at him and he passed through into the private office, taking the seat indicated. Without paying his visitor the least heed, Dr. Stooder went to a closet, poured two fingers of some white liquid into a graduating glass and drank it. His lips smacked like a pistol shot. Then he returned and took a swivel chair before a very shabby and littered desk.

“I never seen you before, sah”—the man’s accent reeked of Texas, the old Texas before the oil invasions. “So I’ll answer the question every stranger’s just mortal dying to ask and don’t dare. How’d I come to get this scar?” The surprising doctor tilted his great head back and traced with his fore-finger an angry weal which encircled his throat like a collar gall. “Well, sah, I was informally hanged once—and cut down. Now we can get down to business. What’s your symptoms?”

Grant, caught off balance by so unconventional a reception, stammered that he had no symptoms.

“My friend, Bim Bagley, who is out of town for a few days, told me to look you up. My name is Grant Hickman. I’m from New York.” The black eyes, never deviating from their disconcerting stare, showed no flicker of recognition at the name.

“What you want of me if you have no symptoms?” abruptly in the doctor’s nasal bray. “I’m not in the market for the World’s Library of Wit and Humour. I’ll cut you for a tumour or dose you for dyspepsia; but I won’t buy a book.”

“I have no books to sell.” Grant found his temperature rising. “I have come out from New York because you told my friend Bagley to send for me.”

Doc Stooder suddenly snapped out of his chair like a yard rule unfolding and strode to the closet. With bottle and graduating glass poised he bent a severe eye upon his visitor.

“You say you don’t drink. Highly commendable. I do.” Again the pistol shot from satisfied lips. He replaced the bottle and tucked his hands under the tails of his coat where they flapped the sleazy garment restlessly.

“You call yourself an engineer. How do I know you are?”

Grant had said nothing about being an engineer. Doc Stooder had identified him right enough. What reason for his bluff, then?

“My dear sir, graduates of Boston Tech. do not carry their diplomas round with them on their key rings. You’ll have to take Bagley’s word for it that I’m an engineer if my own is not convincing.”

The gangling doctor took two turns of the office with enormous strides; one hand tugged at his straggling goatee. Abruptly he stopped by Grant’s chair.

“Young man, what need do you figure a doctor in Arizora would have of an engineer—more especial an engineer from New York? Why should I tell this Bagley, who’s as crazy as a June-bug, to fetch a graduate engineer out to Arizora? Engineers are a drug on the market here—and every one of ’em a crook.”

Grant’s patience snapped. He rose and strode to the door.

“Dr. Stooder, I didn’t come away out here to your town to have somebody play horse with me. When you are sober you can find me at the International Hotel.”

A grin started under Doc Stooder’s moustache and travelled swiftly to his ears.

“God bless my soul, boy! When I’m sober, you say. I’m never sober and I hope I never will be—”

Grant slammed the door behind him.