The Mexican theory of the treatment of prisoners, their status before the law and the responsibilities of government toward them has few complexities and knows no interference on the part of prisoners’ welfare leagues or humanitarian congresses. When a man is arrested south of the Line he straightway ceases to be enumerated among the living; if, haply, he reappears in the course of weeks or years his family looks upon the prodigy in the light of a resurrection. Such resurrections do not occur often enough to dull the edge of the popular interest attending them. There are several dim roads, peculiarly Mexican, down which a prisoner may march to oblivion, with no record of his expunction left behind. Officials with easy consciences find these extralegal methods of clearing the docket handy and expeditious.

Grant Hickman, new to the Border and utterly ignorant of customs and manners in the republic of poco tiempo, necessarily could not possess a background of sinister knowledge against which to build doubts of his immediate future when he found himself locked in a cell. He was in darkness deep as Jonah’s. He ached from his scalp to his toes. A gingerly groping hand applied to various parts of his body took stock of the exterior costs of that healthy fight in the gambling palace. The heat of battle was still on him. He recalled how nobly the big Arizonan swung his chair from the vantage of the crap table; what a virile call to battle was the stranger’s “Ride ’em, Noo Yawker!”

As for Colonel Urgo’s clumsy frame-up—the handful of lead dollars in his pocket to prompt arrest for counterfeiting—Grant dismissed the trick as childish spite. When he appeared before a judge in the morning he could easily prove that the only Mexican money he possessed was that given him in change by the fat Chinaman and what he had taken in across the baize. Some tool of the vengeful little wooer of Benicia had “salted” him during the progress of the game.

But when morning light through a four-inch slit in the wall roused him from a restless sleep long hours of doubt were ushered in. Came a jailer with dry tortillas and water but no summons to appear before a magistrate. Three tortillas—clammy rolled cakes of meal tasting strongly of a cook’s carelessness in matters of excluding the unessential—were the sum of his receipts from the outside world that day. The jailer, who had the features of a bandit, merely grunted a “no sabe” at the volley of questions the prisoner launched at him during the minute he was in the cell.

Those hours of solitude in the six-by-ten box of stone gave opportunity for much thinking. Little by little it was borne in on Grant how completely he was a victim of whatever spite Colonel Urgo might care to devise; and recollection of his smiling face seen in the prison office the night before—thin lips parted over teeth in a ferret’s grin—confirmed the assumption that at devising mischief Colonel Urgo would be hampered by no lack of ingenuity.

Grant weighed the hope of aid from the other end of the town across the Border fence. Bim Bagley, the only friend he had in all the Southwest, was still out of town and would not be back until the morrow. Doc Stooder—small chance! The worthy doctor was velvet drunk when he received Grant in his office; for reasons which only his satiric humour could explain he had elected to consider his visitor an impostor. Little chance that Doc Stooder would pay him a thought until Bagley returned and inquired of his whereabouts. Remained just the cobweb contingency that the Arizonan who had fought beside him had escaped the clutches of the rurales; Grant was certain the big fellow’s simple loyalty to a fellow countryman would prompt him to set going some kind of inquiry from across the Line.

Night came, with it three more tortillas and a bowl of carne seasoned with chili sufficient to burn the gullet of a bronze image. Then, several hours after the scant meal had been shoved in to him, the bandit jailer opened his cell door and motioned him to step into the corridor. Two men with rifles were waiting there; they stepped to his side and marched him off between them.

Down a flight of steps, through a courtyard heavy with shadows, then up tortuous stairs to a door beneath a dim electric globe. The door opened from within, and Grant found himself in a chamber which might have passed as a courtroom. At its far end on a raised dais was a long desk lighted from above, three men sitting behind it. A sort of wooden cage stood apart on a platform by itself. Six men with serapes over their shoulders and rifles hanging by straps across the blanket stripes were slouching before the judges’ dais. A black headed peon crouched timorously on a seat to the left and behind the guards.

Grant’s escort halted him before the judges. He kept silence, studying the faces of the three. Not pleasant faces. A hardness of eye and cat-like bristle of moustachios over thin line of lips was common to the trio.

“Grant ’Ickman?” challenged the man in the middle.

Grant nodded. His interrogator gave a sign to one of the rurales. The latter turned to the peon on the bench, dragged him to his feet and hustled him to the cage-like affair to the left of the dais, evidently a witness box. The little fellow’s head hardly showed above the top rail that fenced him in; his eyes were all whites.

The examining judge jerked a thumb toward Grant as he shaped a question in Spanish for the witness. The peon bobbed his head emphatically. Another question and, “Si,” chirped the witness. Then a lengthy flow of interrogation prompted by reference to some dossier in hand.

“Si! Si!” The witness hurried to oblige. Cat whiskers lifted in a smile as the judge turned back to Grant.

“You unnerstan’?”

“I don’t,” bluntly. More twitching of the spiked moustachios.

“Zeese man, ’oo’s make confession of counterfeiting and ’oo ees to be shot to-day, says ’e sells you thirty pesos made with bad metal—counterfeit. An’—”

“He lies!” Grant interrupted.

“Quieto!” The judge banged his fist on the desk and fixed the prisoner with a savage glare. “’E says, zeese man, ’e meets with you las’ night on Calle San Lazar outside Crystal Palacio gambling ’ouse an’ for ten veritable pesos ’e gives to you thirty pesos of bad metal. Then zeese man ’e says ’e sees you enter Crystal Palacio. What remark you make for zeese?”

The monstrous farce of this accusation numbed Grant. Judicial subornation fabricated to give colour to what was already determined in the minds of these three puppets. As clearly as if they were bearing on him he could see the cold, mocking eyes of Colonel Urgo behind the shoulders of his pawns on the bench. Perception of his peril steadied him.

“I demand a lawyer if I am to be tried on this outrageous charge. And I demand that the American consul in this town be told of the accusation against me.”

The interrogating judge turned to his confreres with a bland outspreading of the palms. Then to Grant:

“American consul ’as no business with crime against state of Mehico. You will ’ave lawyer when you are tried before court at Hermosillo. Zeese court ees not court of condemnation. Court of condemnation ees at Hermosillo. W’en you arrive there, w’ere you make for a start to-night, SeÑor ’Ickman, you ask for American consul if you desire.”

“But you cannot send me to this Hermosillo place without trial.” Grant took a step toward the bench in his vehemence. He was roughly jerked back by his guards. The interrogating judge beamed on him.

“In Mehico, SeÑor ’Ickman, it ees folly to say ‘you cannot.’ Much ees possible in Mehico. To-night prisoners make start for Hermosillo. You go weeth them.”

He nodded to Grant’s guards and they closed in on him. He heard a farewell, “Adios, SeÑor ’Ickman,” from the bench as he was rudely hustled out of the courtroom.

An hour later he stood with seven other shadows in the carcel courtyard. About them were the rurales with their rifles; four were mounted on horseback and a pack mule, lightly laden, slept on three legs behind the horsemen. Men came with lanterns and heavy loops of something which chinked metallically when it was dropped. They fixed a broad steel shackle on the left wrist of each prisoner and linked them all to a bull chain. Then the door of a courtyard swung inward, the mounted rurales closed in and the eight chained men went clinking out to the dark street.

A few midnight dawdlers paused to watch the shadowy procession stumbling over the cobbles. No word was spoken. The clink of the horses’ hoofs, the patter-patter of the short-legged pack mule and the metallic whisperings of the chain fitted into a measured cadence. Despite the presence of the pack mule, Grant first had thought the journey would be a short one, ending at the railroad station. But after fifteen minutes’ marching no railroad line was in sight and the houses began to be scattered. Suddenly houses ceased; nothing but the hump-shouldered shapes of mountains about; clear burning stars and ahead a dim ribbon of road leading out into the desert.

To Hermosillo, a town unheard of and at a distance unknown—across the desert to Hermosillo afoot and chained in line with seven men. In the slim rifle barrels so carelessly slung under shadows of sombreros was the sullen emblem of that unwritten law of Mexico which stills so many accusing mouths: ley de fuga—law of flight.

Out into the desert of Altar marched the American, whose name appeared only upon a secret cachet in the hands of the puppet judges—a man gone, as a German once put it, “without trace.”