The sun went down before the sand storm abated. Two men, the one called civilized, the other a savage, crouched like rabbits in a covert beneath the body of the little car with a high sand drift piled up to windward even over the radiator top. Two mites in the wind-scourged wilderness of Altar with love o’ life the leveller that made them kin.

When the last vagrant wind fury had passed fell silence almost terrific by contrast with the uproar of the storm. In place of the slithering and whistling of driven sand an oppressive stillness, which seemed dropped from the void of the stars, now showing. Occasionally the dry rustle of sand dropping in rivulets from some desert bush lifting its head after the scourging; that was all.

When the two crawled out from beneath their shelter Guadalupe was for an immediate start afoot in the direction of the faint pencilings of red marking the west. But Doc Stooder possessed an abiding glimmer of faith in the soundness of the car and insisted on taking stock of its motive possibilities. A cursory examination convinced him of the hopelessness of his trust, for the sand was heaped entirely over the unprotected engine—desert cars dispense with a hood because it blankets the engine’s heat—and he knew that even with water in the radiator he couldn’t get a kick out of the thing before a thorough overhauling. This was out of the question. They must achieve their escape from the desert’s trap afoot.

The Papago started on a swinging walk a little north of west, the Doc following. They had not gone far when the white man discovered they were not following the road; each step was through loose sand which received the foot with a viscous hold and reluctantly released it. The Doc snarled a query at his companion: why in the name of deletion had he quit the Road of the Dead Men?

“Not quit—finding him,” came Guadalupe’s grudging answer. Then Stooder admitted to himself the possibility that during the time the little car had pushed on into the storm he had tooled it off the road. How far he had driven away from the single track which spans Altar he could not hazard a guess. Anyway, he knew one thing: he was dog tired, and if this mangy black coyote thought A. Stooder, M.D., was going to wallow through sand all night without a sleep he had another think coming.

Reaction from the excitements of the past two days added extra weight to the Doc’s already none-too-light handicap of alcoholic repercussions. The storm had torn his nerves to tatters; his mouth was as dry as an old church pew cushion; each of his legs felt as if they were dragging an Oregon boot. Stooder’s mind was too dulled to probe down below these afflictions and read the real seriousness of his situation; it dealt only with cogent aches and reluctances.

“Hey, Guadalupe! We take a sleep right here.” The Doc halted. Great was his surprise when he saw the Papago striding on. Hot rage bubbled to his lips in an explosive Mexican oath.

“Hey, you lizard-eatin’ mozo, hear me? We stop here for the big shut-eye!” The Doc spurred his long legs into a gangling run to overtake the Indian, who had plodded on unheeding. All the arrogance of the white man in his fancied superiority fell with the doctor’s hand on the Indian’s shoulder. Guadalupe wrenched free and turned to face him sulkily.

“Sleep here—to-morrow much sun—no water. Maybe to-morrow we die here. Walk!” Guadalupe’s sparse vocabulary of Spanish words was drained; but the manner of his resuming the forward hike was sufficiently eloquent. Guadalupe, born to the desert code and grown to manhood under the inexorable desert law, had in mind but a single impulse—to survive. His mind plumped through the bog of discomforts wherein Stooder’s was mired to read clearly the tablets of the desert’s decalogue: ten commandments in one—live! In extremity throw over loyalty, discard obligations of oath or of blood, strip the soul to its elemental selfishness; but live!

Guadalupe strode on, still bearing to the north and the west, and still no road. Stooder, growing more weary each step, spent his strength in blind rage at the stubbornness of the Papago. He conned over various capital operations he would like to perform with Guadalupe for a subject. His brain tired of that and began to nurture the germ of a new thought. Why strain himself keeping up with that ring-tailed kangaroo rat who skipped on and on without rest? Guadalupe left the print of his foot every step he took; those footprints would point to wherever Guadalupe might go—and the Papago, of course, knew the shortest way out of this hellhole—so why break his own neck? The old Doc would take a little snooze and then just follow the footprints when he felt good and ready to do so.

The gangling form crumpled up as if cut off at the knees. Guadalupe heard a thud, turned for a half-glance over his shoulder and pushed steadily on under the stars. It was not in the Papago’s code to add one ounce to the weight of circumstance obtruding between himself and water. In a dozen steps his figure was swallowed up in the dark.

Stooder may have allotted to himself only that minimum of sleep designated as a snooze. But a high sun pried open his reluctant eyelids. He sat up and sent a dazed glance around an unfamiliar world. Mountains tawny and black with knife-edge water scores down their flanks; a sea of scrub stretching interminably from their bases; patches of gypsum and salitre showing dull white as scars of leprosy here and there amid the grey-green of the camisa. The sky already was taking on the yellow-white glaze indicative of imminent heat.

The Doc arose and shook the sand out of the creases of his clothing. First definite impression coming to him was the need of a drink: his favourite tequila if might be, water in a pinch. All the nerves in his body twittered “Hear—hear!” to the first of the alternatives. Then, his mind beginning to function along the line of the night’s impressions, Doc Stooder read the story of the footprints leading off to the north and west. There they were: good li’l signposts; they’d take him to a drink just as easy!

Stooder’s renewed strength carried him easily along the trail the Papago had left. For an hour, that is; then trouble. For the sand disappeared under a broad apron of caliche—a hardpan of baked mineral salts and earth almost impervious even to the shod hoof of a horse. It was like a door swung shut on the trailer—the locked door to some labyrinth beyond. Here the last firm print of a boot in the sand, there nothingness. The Doc paused, looked back over the cup-like shadows marking the footprint trail he had been following to take its line of direction, then he pushed ahead along that line.

Another hour, and he still was on the caliche outcrop. He stopped to consider. Where in the name of all the angels was that road—the Road of the Dead Men? If he’d driven the car a little south of it during the sand storm, surely Guadalupe must have cut tangent to it by this time. And if the road passed over the caliche flat there’d be wheel marks; that was sure. Miss that road and miss the Papago’s trail both—why then old Doc Stooder’d be a goner!

He tried to follow his own back trail by such small signs as the scratch of a hobnail against an embedded rock and a thin print of a sole in a pocket of dust. A while and he had lost even that. He stopped and swabbed his streaming face with a shirtsleeve—he now was carrying his coat.

“By the eternal, Stooder, you gotta do something—and do it dam’d pronto!”

Once more he turned on his own tracks. Better go back and find that putrid Papago’s trail and let the road go to the devil. Whole half hour wasted a’ready—good half hour, by criminy! with a drink just that much farther off.

It was not so easy finding the scored rocks and the stamp of a heel in pools of dust; not so easy as the first essay. For the sun was at meridian now and foreshortened little shadows to nothingness. Plump! he came to the edge of the hardpan and into the sandy soil. No tracks there. Should he bear to right or left in circling the edge of the caliche on his hunt for the footprints? If he guessed wrong where’d he be? “Oh, dear God!”

He turned to the left and resumed his tramp. Furnace light refracted from the sand seared into his eyes, which must be always kept downward peering—spying. His mouth now was dry as rotted wood. Something alien there kept bothering him by pressing against the roof of it. He explored with his fingers and discovered the alien object to be his tongue, which was swelling.

“But my mind’s clear—clear as a bell. Got a steady mind anyway. Gotta hold onto that or I’m a gone coon.”

A slight breeze struck his right arm more penetratingly than it should. Stooder shifted his glance to his arm, held crooked.

“Good God! Coat’s gone!” Dropped somewhere—that coat in whose pocket was a prescription book; among its pages the map of the treasure site. The precious map showing where lay the bell and the beam! The man whirled and started on a staggering run along the rim of the caliche he had been travelling.

“Must find that coat! Don’t find the coat an’ I lose the pearls an’ the gold—the pearls an’ the gold!”

He halted as if shot. Down the wind came to him the faint tolling of a bell. Dong—dong. Silvery throb of a swinging bell. Measured, unhurried; like the sounding of a bell for mass of a Sunday morning. The Doc had heard the bell of San Xavier sending its call across the alfalfa fields of a Sunday morning, just like that.

Even as he strained his ears to drink in the full miracle of it the sound faded, ceased.

“I heard it! A bell! No illusion. Mind’s still clear—still clear!” On he went, his gaunt legs weaving in wide circles. He came to a dark patch on the hardpan and strided over it, unheeding. It was his missing coat, in the pocket the precious map of the treasure site. The Doc did not see the coat because again his ears were drinking in the maddening tolling of the bell; this time a little clearer down the wind in his face. An animal cry, half articulate, burst from his swollen lips:

“The mission bell! Bell of the Four Evangelists which I found t’other day! Callin’ me back!”

Right over yonder where the mountains cracked apart to let that arroyo down onto the plain: that’s where the bell sounded. Yes, sir, no mistake about it. ’Bout four-five mile, judgin’ from the sound. Hear what that bell’s a-callin’? “Gol-l-ld! Gol-l-ld!”

Doc Stooder, coatless, hatless, the high roach of his streaked hair fanning in the hot winds, was stumbling and falling—stumbling and falling ever forward toward the crack in the mountains. Light of madness flamed in his eyes; his great arms clawed forward as if to catch invisible supports to pull him the faster. Gol-l-ld—Gol-l-ld!

“Old mind’s still clear, else couldn’t hear that mission bell so plain— Gotta keep old mind clear—”

The way of the desert god, always beyond man’s comprehending, nevertheless sometimes approaches so close to the human scheme of thought and motive as to permit of analogy with it. When the director of destinies in the dry wastes seems to make a travesty of such a sacrosanct quality as human justice we may be moved to call the impulse satiric for want of a better name. Satiric, then, that reversal of the decree of death passed upon the Papago youth who confessed to murder before the overturned kettle at the Casa O’Donoju; more than satiric the moving finger now directing his path through the dead lands up to a union with the crazed doctor’s.

According to ancient custom the Indian retainers of the O’Donoju had taken the youth—his baptismal name was Ygnacio—down to the crater land of the Pinacate and there turned him loose without water to wander for a while and finally to die miserably. Other murderers had been so treated and never had been seen of men again. But the desert god who slays so peremptorily knew that Ygnacio had done the bidding to murder to save his brother from death—had killed without malice and only as the price of redemption for one of his blood. Wherefore the arbiter of life and death flung life at Ygnacio.

When he was athirst almost to the point of exhaustion he found a knob-like growth a scant two inches above the surface of the ground, recognized it for a promise of succour and with the last ounce of his strength dug the deep sand all about it. The end of his effort gave to him a strange and rare vegetable reservoir like an elongated radish, which miraculously holds scant moisture of summer rains the year round. “Root-of-the-sands” the Sonorans have named it. In the desolation between the Pinacate and the Gulf even the coyotes have the wisdom to dig for this precious sustainer of life.

Ygnacio devoured the whole of the root and was revived. He found others, which he tied into a bundle to carry over his shoulders. Food and drink had come to him from the hand of Elder Brother himself when it was decreed by man he should have neither. Wherefore love o’ life once more burned strong in the man. He set his course northward, travelling only by night when the heat had given place to the biting desert chill, keeping his precious roots buried in the sand while he slept by day so that evaporation would not rob him of the promise of escape from inferno. Straight as an arrow northward where, beyond the Line, lay tribes of Papagoes who never had heard of Don Padraic O’Donoju nor of a murderer named Ygnacio.

So it happened that on the third night of his march, when Ygnacio had paused to munch a segment of the sustaining root, came to his ears the sound of a voice, faintly and from a great distance. It might be a human voice, though there was a burred and thickened quality to it almost like a burro’s bray.

The Indian boldly followed where his ears gave direction. “Gol’—gol’—gol’” was the monotonous iteration, sounding almost like the muffled tapping of a clapper against metal. He walked a mile—so clearly do sounds carry in the desert night—and suddenly came upon the figure of a white man. Naked above the waist, wisp of a goatee tilted at the stars, arms rigid at sides and with fingers widespread, the spectre of a white man chanted the single word, “Gold.”