Consider now the interesting activities of Doc Stooder, fallen angel of Æsculapius:

On a March evening of sunset splendour the worthy doctor descended from the single combination coach and baggage car which a suffering locomotive drags once daily from a junction point on the transcontinental line south through naked battalions of mountains to the ghost town of Cuprico. Once Cuprico was famous; once when primitive steam shovels nibbled at solid mountains of copper up back of Main Street Cuprico roared with a life that was dizzy and vaunted itself the rip-roarin’est copper camp in all the Southwest. But the glory that was Cuprico passed, even as that of Rome; to-day they tell of the town that when its mayor fell dead on the post office steps his body remained undiscovered for three days.

No romantic craving for revisiting scenes of his youth had prompted the Doc to his journey Cupricoward—he had been its premier stud player in a day of glory fifteen years before. No, a far more material urge had ended a period of fretting in Arizora by shunting him on a westward-wending train. For a week Bim Bagley, his partner in a secret enterprise, had been absent on his quest of El Doctor Coyote Belly and the New York engineer, Bim’s friend, who was reported to be wounded and under the care of the Papago medicine man. Ten days prior to Bagley’s excursion into Sonora had been frittered away in groping for information concerning this vanished engineer. All precious time wasted!

It has, perhaps, become apparent that Doc Stooder was not enthusiastic over the inclusion of Grant Hickman, the Easterner, in his golden scheme of treasure trove in desert sands. The stubborn refusal of Bim Bagley to move without this fellow Hickman’s being party to the enterprise had prevented a start on the expedition for the Mission of the Four Evangelists six weeks before. The canny physician—whose share in the joint endeavour was to be his exclusive information concerning the whereabouts of the Lost Mission—possessed in large degree that sense of divination bestowed upon folk of the desert which gives their imagination wings over the horizon of time. Each day of delay he read a day to the advantage of Don Padraic O’Donoju, certain sure as he was that the master of the desert oasis had come by knowledge of his own treasure hunt intent through mysterious desert channels.

The vision of gold and pearls Doc Stooder had seen in the depths of raw alcohol on a night of dreaming in his office had become a goad. So he came to Cuprico, the ghost town not seventy miles away from the supposed site of the buried mission; his intent was to pick up his Papago informant, who lived midway between Cuprico and the Border, and, as Stooder happily phrased his purpose, “give things a look-see.” If his luck was with him and he should stumble onto the mission during this solo game so much the better. Conscience nor maxims of fair play were any part of the doctor’s moral anatomy.

The Doc upon his arrival did not pervade Cuprico’s centres of evening society—the Golden Star pool hall and soft drinks emporium and the back room of Garcia’s drug store—for reasons sufficiently potent to merit a paragraph of explanation.

Years before, when he was a resident of the mining camp and had money, Doc Stooder took unto himself a Mexican wife who had a passion for diamonds. Mrs. Apolinaria Stooder had a way with her which seemed to win deep into the atrophied heart of her spouse, and he showered her with the stones of her choice. No woman from Yuma to Tucson—so legend still recites—“packed so much ice” as Doc Stooder’s. Then in an epidemic of typhoid, which the Doc combated with the heroism of a saint, Apolinaria died.

Alone and with his own hands her sorrowing widower gave her sepulchre somewhere amid the gaunt hills surrounding the town. He let it become known after the interment that since Apolinaria loved her diamonds so he had buried them with her, adding for good measure of gossip that he figured their total value at round $5000. Immediately and for several years thereafter all the prospectors for fifty miles about gave up their search for dip and strike and prospected for Mrs. Apolinaria Stooder. Failing to find so much as a “colour” of her diamonds, the profession drew the conclusion that Doc Stooder was a monumental liar. His popularity waned accordingly.

Shadows were lengthening when Stooder tooled a rented desert skimmer out of Cuprico’s single garage and brought it to a stop before the general store. Into the wagon box behind the seat went his bed roll, brought from Arizora and containing certain glassware whose contents were more precious to their owner than life itself; boxes of grocery staples; extra cans of oil and gasoline. Two big canteens on the running board were filled. Plugs of chewing tobacco heavy and broad as slate shingles were stowed in the tool box. In all this preparation the doctor’s long legs calipered themselves from counter to car with remarkable efficiency.

“Goin’ on a little prospecting trip?” the storekeeper had volunteered when the Doc first commenced his stowing. No answer.

“Figgerin’ on a little pasear down ’crost the Line?” hopefully from that worthy as he helped noose the tarpaulin over the dunnage. The Doc’s head was buried above the ears among the engine’s naked cylinders and he professed not to hear. When Stooder was seated at the wheel and the storekeeper had the edge of the final pail of water over the radiator vent he feebly flung out his last grappling hook:

“Reckon you might be selling Bibles to the Papagoes.”

“Come here, friend,” sternly from the doctor. “Now I give you the way inside if you’ll promise to keep it mum.” The storekeeper hopped around to lean his ear over the wheel in gleeful anticipation.

“I’m a-goin’ south from here to give a Chinese lady a lesson on the ocarina. So long!”

When the Doc skittered down the brief Main Street and out onto the thread of grey caliche that was the road to the mysterious south all of the west was a-roil with the final palette scrapings of the sunset—umber, pale lemon and, high above the mountains standing black as obsidian, cirrus clouds dyed a fugitive cherry. Ahead showed the ragged gate into the valley of El Infiernillo—the Little Hell—place of bleak distances between mountain ranges bare as sheet iron; place of unimaginable thirst when summer sun hurls reflected heat back from burning walls. Beyond El Infiernillo just a hint of peaks like fretwork spires marked destination for the doctor; there at the foot of the Growler range and where the Desert of Altar washes across the imaginary line between two nations, lay the land of his desire. Somewhere on the Road of the Dead Men passing through that savage waste perchance a nubbin of weathered ’dobe wall lifted a few inches above the sand to mark treasure of gold and pearls below; maybe naught but a charred timber end concealed by a patch of greasewood and crying a secret to the ears of the searcher.

Gold and pearls—pearls and gold! The Doc’s rapt eye caught the colours of sacred treasure in the dyes of the sunset and read them for a portent of success.

“Me, I’m a-goin’ just slosh around in wealth! Doc Stooder, the man with the dinero—that’s me!” The gaunt head behind the wheel of the desert skimmer was tilted back and A. Stooder, M.D., carolled his expectations at the new stars. Then he reined in his gas snorter long enough to fumble with his bed roll in the wagon box. Out came a square bottle of fluid fire, such as passes currency with the international bootleggers in the Southwest. The Doc drank heartily to the promise spread across the western heavens. The bottle was tucked in a handy coat pocket for future reference.

Nights in the desert along the Line are psychic. They are not of the world of arc lights, elevated trains and the winking jewels of white ways. In that world man has so completely surrounded himself with the tinsels of his own making, the noise of his own multiplied squeakings and chatterings, that he comes to accept the vault above him as under the care of the city parks department. His little tent of night is no higher than the towers of his skyscrapers. But in the desert it is different.

Emptiness of day is increased an hundred fold at dark because it leaps up to lose its frontiers behind the stars. Silence of the day is intensified to such a degree that the inner ear catches a humming of supernal machinery in the heavens. The eye measures perspectives between the near and far planets. And the soul of man hearkens to strange voices; sighings from the pale mouths of the desert scrubs, born to a servitude of thirst; whisperings passed from mountain top to mountain top; faint stirrings of the earth relaxed from the torsion of the sun.

Doc Stooder, desert familiar as he was, never could blunt his senses to this emptiness of night in the wastes. It awed him, left him itching under half-perceived conceptions of the infinite. Hence the bottle carried handily in his pocket. From time to time as he careered over the road faintly marked by the feeble sparks of his headlights he braked down to have a swig. The more he felt lifted above sombre unrealities about him the greater his impulse to break into song. The iron gate of El Infiernillo heard his roundelay.

Miles unreeled behind him. Dim shapes of mountains dissolved to new contours and were left behind. The Doc came to a sharp eastward turning of the road but kept straight ahead out over the untracked flats to southward. He knew his way; the packed sand gave him as good traction as the road. Down and down into the unpeopled wilderness of sandhills and buttes bored the twin sparks of the little car.

Another shift of direction and the Doc was teetering up a narrow caÑon between high mountain walls. His course was a dry wash, boulder strewn. Only instinct of a desert driver saved him from piling up on some rough block of detritus. Sand traps forced him to shove the engine into low, and the snarling of the exhaust was multiplied from the caÑon walls.

A light flickered far ahead. A dog barked. The car wallowed and snuffled out of the wash to come to a halt before several silhouettes of huts. People, roused from sleep by the car’s clamour, stood ringed about in curiosity; one held a torch of reeds.

“Ho, Guadalupe!” Doc Stooder bellowed. A solid looking Indian with a mat of tousled iron-grey hair stood out under the torch light, grinning a welcome to “El Doctor.”

“Show me a place to sleep,” commanded the visitor, and the one called Guadalupe carried the doctor’s bed-roll to his own hut, of which squaw and children were speedily dispossessed. So the good doctor from Arizora slept the rest of the night in the rancheria of the Sand People, last remnant of that Papago family for which the Mission of the Four Evangelists was reared to save souls. In five hours the Doc had covered by gasoline what it would have cost Guadalupe of the Sand People as many days in painful plodding.

Morning saw the rancheria in a ferment of excitement and Doc Stooder viciously tyrannical in reaction from his accustomed alcoholic night. Guadalupe found himself in a difficult position. Once in a moment of gratitude when the white doctor had snatched his squaw from the tortures of asthma—the miracle had occurred in Guadalupe’s summer camp near Arizora—the Indian had babbled his knowledge of the buried mission, its treasure. But he had not counted upon this unexpected appearance of the white doctor, demanding to be led to the place of wealth. It is common with all the Southwestern Indians to believe naught but ill luck can follow any revelation to a white man of the desert’s hidden gold; some say the early padres, themselves consistent hoarders, inculcated this lesson. With the eyes of his fellow villagers disapprovingly upon him, Guadalupe first attempted evasion.

Stooder in an ominous quiet heard him through. Then without a word he opened a small medicine chest he carried in his bed-roll and took therefrom two tightly folded pieces of paper—blue and white. While Guadalupe and the rest watched, round-eyed, the doctor made quick passes with each bit of paper over the mouth of a small water olla. The surface of the water sizzed and boiled.

Guadalupe, two shades whiter, babbled his willingness to go at once to the place where the mission lay hidden.

“Prime cathartic for the mind,” grunted the Doc, and he tuned his engine for the trip.

They were off down the caÑon and into the yellow basin of El Infiernillo. Guadalupe, riding for the first time in the white man’s smell-wagon, gripped his seat with the delicious fear of a child on a merry-go-round. He watched the movements of the doctor’s foot on the gear-shift, marvelling that the beast concealed in pipes and rods answered each downward thrust with a roar. Earth spun under him as if Elder Brother himself, master of all created things, had a hold on it and were pulling it all one way.

Down and down into the untracked miles of Altar. A single iron post on a hill marking the Line. The sierra of Pinacate cinder-red in the south for a beacon. Right and left sheet iron ranges with stipples of rust where the camisa grew. Mirage quivering into nothingness just as its false waters were ready to be parted by the car’s wheels.

They came upon an east-and-west track in the sand—the Road of the Dead Men—and turned westward upon it. Away off to the north and east a spiral dust cloud walked across the wastes along the skirts of the mountains. Guadalupe pointed to it with an ejaculation in his own tongue. A sign—a sign! There was the place of the mission!

The Doc felt his internals quiver in expectation. Prickles of excitement played in fingers that gripped the wheel. Automatically he began to hum an ancient bar-room ditty.

The Papago indicated where he should turn off the road in the direction of a great gap in the mountains, into which the desert flowed as a sea. Here the mesquite lifted from its crouch and flourished in a five-foot growth—true index of hidden waters. The car made hard going, what with brittle twigs that caught at its tires and the cholla creeping like a spined snake to threaten punctures. At his guide’s word Doc Stooder stopped. Both scrambled out.

Before moving a step the Doc must have a ceremonial drink, a preliminary he did not deem necessary to share with Guadalupe. The man’s big hands trembled as he raised the bottle to his lips; his eyes were shining with gold lust.

Guadalupe stood for several minutes slowly swinging his head from landmark to landmark, his eyes following calculated lines through the scrub. Then he commenced a slow pacing through the close-set aisles of the greasewood and cactus, bearing in a wide circle. He peered into the core of each shrub, kicked at every naked stub of root and branch appearing above the surface. The Doc, cursing and humming alternately, was right at his shoulder.

An hour passed—two. The sun, now high, burned mercilessly. Still Guadalupe pursued a narrowing circle through the scrub. Of a sudden the Indian gurgled and dropped to his knees beside a salt-bush. He whipped out his knife and began hacking at the tough stubs of branches near the soil. The Doc, slavering in his excitement, dropped beside him and looked into the heart of the salt-bush. He saw nothing but a rounded slab of rock.

Guadalupe finished his knife work and started to dig with his hands. Terrier-like he pawed a hole away from what Stooder had taken for a rock. The smooth black surface began to curve outward in a form too symmetrical for nature’s work; it was rounded and gradually flaring.

Guadalupe dug on. Blood pounded in the Doc’s ears. Snatches of song trickled from his lips.

Suddenly patience exploded. Stooder pushed the Papago to his haunches and threw his own body full length into the hole dug. His arms embraced a flaring shape of metal. His eyes fell upon faint ridges and lines, like lettering. He spat upon the spot and rubbed it clean of clinging soil.

Gloria Dei et Mund——
Phillipus Rex
Anno Dom.——XXIV

“The bell! The mission bell!” screamed the Doc.