Meanwhile from another direction adventurers were moving through the night upon the slag mountains of Pinacate. Empty space of Altar’s ultimate sweep was become almost populous. A strange company this, which passed ghostily under the great lights of the near stars with only the clink of bridle metal and pack mule’s canteens to give tempo to the march; Benicia O’Donoju, the desert girl, moved to this risky hazard by compulsion of an incubus of fate visited upon her through inheritance down the generations of her people; Grant Hickman, man of cities and crowds, whom destiny had whirled out into a country of the world’s dawn; Bagley the Arizonan, taker of chances, seeker after rainbow ends; and the two Papagoes, Quelele and El Doctor Coyote Belly, on whom was spread thin the veneer of so-called civilization.

It had been Benicia’s mastering purpose that had moved the cavalcade away from the Casa O’Donoju and out onto the desert immediately upon the return of Bim and Quelele reporting the leisurely approach of Colonel Urgo and his rurales. This was not flight, she told Bim; they would go in search of the treasure of the Lost Mission whose hiding place the old medicine man was willing to reveal, and if Urgo followed—well, eventualities could be met as they arose. In this resolve Grant had strongly seconded her. The girl’s slavery under the obsession of the bane of El Rojo, especially following the slaying of her father, had laid an impenetrable barrier between her and him; he had seized upon this possibility promising her emancipation from this horror. This chance failing, he had but the last desperate recourse.

The first hour of their pilgrimage away from the desert oasis Grant rode by Benicia’s side. He essayed to distract her thoughts from the tragedy that lay behind by questioning her on the revelations El Doctor had made: how had the old Indian come by knowledge of the buried gold and pearls; what impulse had led him to promise their restoration? But the girl was not to be drawn. She answered his queries by evasions or meaningless monosyllables. It was as if Grant were a stranger, impudently prying.

At first the man was stung by this treatment. His self-pride rebelled against so arbitrary a closing of the door of confidence against him. Why should he be treated thus cavalierly when the girl had surely read the great love he bore her and his single desire to place himself between her and the menace of one who had prompted murder? But these hurts did not continue long. Riding by Benicia’s side in the starshine, the man began to feel the emanations of a mastering will which poured from her as the pungent prickles of ozone surround a high-power dynamo. Her consciousness was frozen into a mould of purpose, locked against any distractions. Benicia was alive only to the single resolve to free herself from the curse of the Red One. Man nor spirit could invade that preoccupation.

There under the steady-burning desert lamps the man of the cities began to feel again that spell of the infinite which had chained him the night of Don Padraic’s passing. Here was he, lately denizen of a hive of stone and steel, tiny integer in that man-made machine called a metropolis, moving through the darkness over a land unsullied by hand of man since the floods of melting glaciers drove a shadowy race of stone-axe people back to the highlands. The loves and hates, the battles and deaths of these stone-axe folk occurred but yesterday in the time-sheet of the waste places. The to-morrow of ten thousand years would find the desert still untouched, supine under the stars. What then of hidden baubles of gold; what then of the love of a Grant Hickman for a Benicia O’Donoju? A fossil snail shell by the shore of the gulf left a more enduring record.

“The thing that’s sorta got me fussed is how I’m goin’ explain all this to the old Doc.” Bim’s voice broke through Grant’s contemplation of shadowy frontiers; he noted with a start that his horse had dropped behind Benicia’s and was ambling head-and-head with his friend’s. Bim drawled on:

“It sure will look like a double-cross to Stooder—my sailin’ off down into Sonora on the search for you an’ then hooking up with an outfit to go get all the plunder the old Doc thinks he’s as good as got his hands on. Me, I guess I’m queered all right,” was the man’s whimsical finish to his lament. Grant, who had been too preoccupied with the sweep of affairs to give any thought to his pal’s perplexities, could not now offer much consolation. A point of honour involving the grotesque creature who had elected to receive him as a book agent did not greatly move Grant.

“A’ course,” Bim continued his monologue, “the way things lie with the girl, her bein’ hipped on gettin’ back this swag somebody in her family lifted from the mission, I’m more’n willing to see her get it. But the old Doc hasn’t got a large store of what you might call sentiment, an’ I sure got my work cut out for me when I try to show him the light.”

“Too bad I got you into a tangle, old man,” Grant heartily commiserated; then with a hopeless little laugh, “My own affairs aren’t set on any straight and beautiful road to happiness either.”

Bim chuckled deep in his throat. “Me, I was all for your first idea to rope the seÑorita right outa the home corral an’ put your brand on her, fighting. But like’s not we’ll get mucho plenty excitement along this trail before we’re through.” He gave a short laugh. “Say, Cap’n Hickman, I brought you out from the East on a whale of a proposition. You’re sure getting it. A girl who assays higher’n any pearls an’ old gold junk you could find in a church cellar—the feel and savvy of a man’s country—a larrupin’ fight with old Urgo and his rurales bunch. That last you can back right down to your last white chip.”

“But how can Urgo follow us from the O’Donoju house?” incredulously from Grant. “Not one of the servants or other Indians there knows what our destination is—we don’t ourselves except in a general way.”

The man of the big country chuckled at metropolitan innocence. “Horses don’t leave tracks on your Fifth Avenoo because they’s no horses left there for one thing, I reckon. But in this country they do. Five horses make a trail a blind man could follow. I or anybody else could track this outfit of ours in the dark. I look to see our li’l friend Urgo drop in on us some time to-morrow. He’ll travel fast with fresh horses his men round up at the O’Donoju corrals.”

They rode some time in silence, Grant turning over in his mind this unthought-of possibility. Tenderfoot that he was—so he accused himself—he had noted the carbines slung in scabbards at each saddlehorn; noted with an unreading eye. So Benicia and all the others had provided against a contingency he had not even suspected.

“Only thing I’m figgerin’ in this proposition,” he heard Bim saying, “is, will the Papagoes stick under fire? Papagoes are not strong for the knock-down-an’-drag-out stuff. An’, besides, you’re not a whole man yet.”

“Whole enough to keep my end up,” Grant said shortly, knowing not why he resented any imputation of disability against him.

“Oh, sure—sure!” the other hurriedly amended, and the subject died.

Dawn spread a ghostly panorama before them. In the greeny-white light that heralds the sun’s first ruddiness the whole western horizon bulked with black masses of slag heaped in fantastic shapes. High above the lesser masses towered the two peaks of Pinacate, their summits yawning in wide craters. The horses’ hoofs struck sparks from lava aprons; the beasts had to pick their way carefully over traps and crevices. Ever and again grey arms of cactus struck out to rake the riders’ legs with claws of thorns.

Waxing light filled in details of a phantom land, terrific in stark brutalities of scarp and battlement—a world just set aside from the baking-oven of the Potter and unadorned by a single brush stroke. The little company of horsemen threaded single file up a narrow gorge between the main peaks of the range. Walls of porphyry and slag the colour of furnace clinkers leaped to heights on either side which dwarfed the riders to the stature of weevils. The trail they followed was the path cut by the rushing waters of summer cloudbursts, which pack into the downpour of minutes’ duration all the water denied during months of drought; great blocks of fused glass and conglomerate wrenched from the canyon’s eaves by the fingers of these storms choked the way. Where capfuls of soil had been caught and held in some pocket the gaunt sticks of the ocatilla splayed out against raw rock like cat’s whiskers. Low-lying cholla, that spined and vicious vegetable tarantula of the desert, seemed to grow from the very rock; all its nodules were frosty with close-set thorns. Over all dropped the veil of mystical morning radiance.

The horses groaned as they had to choose, minute by minute, between barking their hocks on the knife-like corners of obsidian or taking the barbs of the cholla. The higher the ascent the savager grew the way. Grant, awed by this penetration into the very laboratory of earth, almost leaped from his saddle when a sharp clatter of small pebbles to his right broke the silence. His eyes jumped up the canyon wall to follow three dots of bounding dun-white against its sheer side—bighorn sheep skipping surely along no visible foothold.

When the sun was well in the sky—though naught but its reflected radiance penetrated the gorge—El Doctor, in the lead, signalled a halt. The place was a constricted apron or shelf in the cleft between rock walls whereon sparse galetta grass was growing. Reason for this tiny oasis of vegetation lay just beyond in the fact of a water-worn cistern in the lava—such a natural reservoir as the desert folk called a “tank,” a godsend when it still contains the wash from a last cloudburst. This one was bone-dry.

The party breakfasted meagrely, wood for their coffee fire being grubbed by the Indians painfully and after long search. There was little speech between them for they were tired; the night’s ride had been wearing. Moreover, even the Indians appeared to feel a malign presence bearing down upon them and forbidding desecration of the silence. For them, in especial for Coyote Belly, there was a very real and fear-compelling presence abroad. These mountains of Tjuktoak housed Iitoi, Elder Brother himself; the god of all things who, with a coyote and a black beetle, drifted four times round the earth in the time of the Flood and came to anchorage in this place. El Doctor Coyote Belly, driven by a great love to commit sacrilege, might well have heard the voice of Iitoi in the wind and felt his heart turn to water.

In truth, the aged Papago was having a battle with himself. Before he had gulped his coffee and tortillas the medicine man’s eyes were roaming fearsomely and he whimpered snatches of sacerdotal songs as he rummaged in the pack for a wicker basket. From it he took a wand stained red and with an eagle’s feather bound to one end, an arrow very handsomely feathered from the same bird, a string of glass beads and a bundle of cigarettes—presents for Elder Brother, who must be beguiled before being robbed.

The old man’s hands wavered to return the presents to the basket when Benicia hurried to him, sat down by his side and earnestly pleaded with him in his own tongue. Finally his resolution seemed to be brought to the sticking point. He started up the gorge alone and with his basket of trifles.

“Coyote Belly says he must go and sing to the god Iitoi before we are permitted to visit his house,” Benicia gravely explained to her white companions. “The poor man is desperately scared because we have come to rob Elder Brother.”

Seeing the look of puzzlement on the men’s faces she continued with that same grave respect as if speaking of a real presence. “This old man through the love he bore my father has consented to betray a secret the medicine men of his people have handed down for more than a hundred years. The treasure of the Lost Mission, he tells me, was dug up by Papago medicine men not long after the Mission was destroyed by the Apaches and brought to these mountains—to the cave of Elder Brother—”

“And it’s all here now?” Bim put in excitedly. The girl nodded.

“It has been as well hidden from those who sought it as if it were under the buried ruins of the mission,” she said; then simply: “While El Doctor is gone it is best that we get some sleep.”

Benicia stretched herself under the shade of a rock with a saddle blanket for pillow and slept. But neither of the white men could follow her precept; both were too sensible of the prickling of some unnameable essence of the strange and the unworldly—perhaps that very savagery of atmosphere which had prompted primitive Indians to designate Pinacate as the residence of their god. They were alone; big Quelele had quietly slipped away shortly after El Doctor without saying where he was going.

The men sat smoking while their eyes roved the prospect of burnt cliff and ragged parapet. The heat had whips; it drove them to burrow for lessening shade wherever angles of the rocks offered. A curious cast to the slice of sky visible above the caÑon walls first caught Bagley’s attention. He squinted up at it for a long moment of speculation.

“If it wasn’t so early in the summer I’d say a thunderhead was fixin’ up to give us a big razoo,” he ventured. Grant looked up and noted that the blue had turned to a heavy saffron tint as if the sun were shining through a stratum of light sand; such a tint he’d seen before the great windstorm on the day of Don Padraic’s burial.

“If I could only look over the top of the wall yonder to west’ard,” Bim grumbled uneasily. “These cloudbursts always come from direction of the Gulf. We’re not very well put right here in the channel of all the wash down from up top-side. Those horses now—”

He walked uneasily about the narrow confines of the shelf, scanning the upshoots of rock for possible ways out. Then he seemed to dismiss possibility of trouble from his mind and returned to where Grant was sitting.

An hour passed. Perhaps they were dozing when the rattle of a shower of rock down the caÑon side galvanized both. Up there they saw the figure of big Quelele. Like a wild goat he was leaping from foothold to foothold downward; he was in mad haste.

The big Indian risked his neck a dozen times before he came panting up to the watchers. He waved to the brink of the cliff.

“I been on top—watching—I see long way off—Urgo—rurales. They come—fast!”