downs me——
“You’re showin’ sense, now,” said the lady. “Want to try it or not?”
He rose in the car and attempted a bow in his showy and pitiful manner. In this bow, however, was an element of grace, the more pronounced by its sharp contrast to his gaunt, sombre aspect.
“Madam, I am deeply sensible of the compliment you pay me. Yet, in picking from the gutter a drunken failure, are you wise? I am entirely ignorant of prospecting and——”
“Don’t worry none. Ye’ll learn that quick enough.”
Again Thaddeus bowed. “But, madam, I understand that prospectors go off into the desert places and live. In justice to yourself, do you not think that your enemies might seize viciously upon the least excuse for misinterpretation of character——”
For the first time Shea saw Mehitabel Crump gripped in anger. He paused, aghast.
Her gigantic form quivered with rage then stiffened into towering wrath. Her tanned, age-touched features suddenly hardened into sentient bronze from which her blue eyes blazed forth terribly, jewelled indices of an indomitable and quick-flaming spirit within.
“Thady Shea, it’s well for you them words come from an honest heart,” said she, with a slow and grim emphasis. “They ain’t no one goin’ to say a word agin’ me, except them for what I don’t give a tinker’s dam; and if one o’ them dasts to say it in my hearin’, chain lightnin’ is goin’ to strike quick and sudden! This here territory—state, I mean—knows Mehitabel Crump and has knowed her for some years back. Paste that in your hat, Thady Shea!”
As some dread lioness hears in dreams the horns and shouts of hunters, and starting erect with bristling front mutters her low and terrible growl of challenge, so Mehitabel Crump defiantly faced Thaddeus.
He, poor soul, inwardly cursed his too-nimble tongue, and shrank visibly from the spectacle of wrath. Before the hurt and amazed eyes of him Mrs. Crump suddenly abandoned her righteous attitude. Having palpably overawed him, she now felt ashamed of herself.
“There, buck up,” she brusquely ordered.
“Tell me, now! If I answer for it that ye stay sober a couple o’ weeks or so, will ye make the fight?”
“Yes.” Hope fought against despair in Shea’s voice; he knew his own weakness well.
“All right. Let’s go, then!”
“We’re going to Santa Fé?”
Mrs. Crump advanced to the front of the flivver, and seized the crank. Then she paused, her blue eyes striking up over the radiator at Shea.
“No, I ain’t goin’ to Santy Fé; neither are you! We’re goin’ to the most man-forsaken spot they is in all the world, I reckon. We got grub, and everything else can wait a couple o’ weeks or so. Accordin’ to the Good Book, Providence was mighty rushed about creation, but I ain’t in no special hurry about makin’ a man of you——”
Her words were drowned in the engine’s roar. Thaddeus Roscius Shea made himself as small as possible; Mrs. Crump crowded in under the wheel, the car swaying to her weight, and they leaped forward.
In silence she drove, pushing the flivver with a speed and abandon which left Shea clinging desperately to his seat. Twenty minutes later an intersecting road made its appearance; Mrs. Crump left the highway and followed this road due north for a couple of miles. There, coming to an east-and-west road which was decidedly rough, she headed west.
“This here’s the trail to Cochiti pueblo,” she announced, enigmatically.
Four miles of this, and she struck an even worse road that headed northwest. Shea’s eyes opened as they progressed. Never in all his life had he encountered such grotesque country as this which now lay on every hand as though evoked by magic—utter desolation of huge rock masses, blistered and calcined by ancient fires, eroded into strange spires and pinnacles of weird formation. To the north towered Dome Rock with its adjacent crater. No sign of life was anywhere in evidence.
Shea was helplessly gripped by the personality of the woman beside him. Mentally he was overborne and awed; physically he was sick—not ill, but downright sick, possibly due to the sparse gulps of liquor which he had downed, possibly to the glaring sun. He cared not whether he lived or died. He felt that this day had brought him to the end of his rope, and that nothing more could matter.
“Getting into the lava beds,” observed Mrs. Crump, cheerfully. Shea understood her words only dimly. “This here Henry sure does go pokin’ where you’d think nothin’ short of a mule could live! The trail peters out a bit farther, then we got to hoof it over to the Rio Grande and make camp.”
Poor Shea shivered. The frightful desolation of the scene horrified him. He had never been an outdoor man. His had ever been the weakness, the dependency of the sheltered and civilized being. Contact with this strangely primitive woman frightened him. He felt like babbling in his terror, begging to be taken back and allowed to resume his place among the swine. Here was something new, awful, incredible! But he held his peace.
Had he been able to look a few miles ahead; had he foreseen what lay before him in that camp in White Rock Cañon, a place which in grandeur and inaccessibility rivalled the great cañon of the Colorado; had he known that he was about to tread a trail which few white men had ever followed—in short, had he understood what Mehitabel Crump’s plan held in store for him, he would at that moment have yielded up the ghost, cheerfully!
At last, reaching a sheer incline where boulders larger than the car itself filled all the trail and rendered further progress impossible, Mrs. Crump killed her engine and set her brakes hard.
“I guess Henry can lay here all his life and never be stole,” she said, with a sigh of relaxation. “Well, Thady, here we are! D’you know what? It ain’t lack of ambition that makes folks mis’able and unsatisfied; it’s lack o’ purpose. Now, I aim to teach ye some purpose, Thady. Look at me! I been prospectin’ all my life, and still goin’ strong, just because I got a definite object ahead—to strike it rich somewheres!
“Well, climb down. We got to rig up some grub into packs, hoof it to the nearest canoncito, and reach the Rio Grande. It’s less’n two mile in a straight line to water, but twenty ’fore we gets there, if we gets there a-tall. Come on, limber up!”
Thaddeus Roscius Shea groaned inaudibly—but limbered up.
CHAPTER III—CORAVEL TIO ENJOYS A BUSY MORNING
Coravel Tio sold curios in the old town of Santa Fé. He also sold antiques, real and fraudulent; he had a wholesale business in Indian wares that extended over the whole land.
Coravel Tio was one of the few Americans who could trace their ancestry in an unbroken line for three hundred years. It was almost exactly three hundred years since the ancestor of Coravel Tio had come to Santa Fé as a conquistador. Coravel Tio was wont to boast of this, an easily proven fact; and, boasting, he had sold the conquistador’s battered old armour at least fifty times.
When the boasts of Coravel Tio were questioned, he would admit with
