The Mesa Trail Part 3

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 att.i.tude. 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 Fe?"

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 Fe; 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 ma.s.ses, 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 spa.r.s.e 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 Canon, a place which in grandeur and inaccessibility rivalled the great canon 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 Fe. 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 Fe 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 a chuckle that he was a philosopher; and do not all philosophers live by lying, senor? There was great truth in him when he was not selling his ancestor's armour to tourists-and even then, if he happened to like the looks of the tourist, he would gently insinuate that as a business man he sold fraudulent wares and lied n.o.bly about them, but that in private he was a philosopher. And the tourists, liking this quaintly nave speech, bought the more.

It was a big, dark, quiet shop, full of Indian goods and weapons, antique furniture that would have made Chippendale's eyes water, ivories, old paintings, ma.n.u.scripts from ancient missions. A good half of Coravel Tio's shop was not for sale at any price. Neither, said men, was Coravel Tio.

He was a soft-spoken little man, quiet, of strange smiles and strange silences. His was the art of making silence into a reproof, an a.s.sent, a curse. The world of Santa Fe moved about Uncle Coravel and heeded him not, shouldered him aside; and Coravel Tio, knowing his fathers to have been conquistadores, smiled gently at the world. His name was usually dismissed with a shrug-in effect, a huge tribute to him. Talleyrand would have given his soul to have been accorded such treatment from the diplomats of Europe; it would have rendered him invincible.

One of those rare men was Coravel Tio whose faculties, masked by childish gentleness, grow more terribly keen with every pa.s.sing year.

His brain was like a seething volcano-a volcano which seems to be extinct and cold and impotent, yet which holds unguessed fires somewhere deep within itself.

Upon a day, some time following the meeting of Mehitabel Crump with Thady Shea, this Coravel Tio was standing in talk with one Cota, a native member of the legislature then in session.

"But, senor!" was volubly protesting the legislator, with excitement.

"They say the majority is a.s.sured, that the bill already drawn, that the capital is to be moved to Albuquerque at this very session!"

"I know," said Coravel, pa.s.sively, his dark eyes gently mournful.

"You know? But what-what is to be done? Shall those down-state people take away our capital? We must prevent it! We must do something! It's this man Mackintavers who is at the bottom of it, I suppose--"

Coravel Tio fingered a blanket which topped a pile beside him-a gaudy red blanket. He regarded it with curious eyes.

"I fear this is not genuine-it does not have the old Spanish uniform red," he murmured, as though inwardly he were thinking only of his wares. Then suddenly his eyes lifted to the other man, and he smiled. In his smile was a piercing hint of mockery like a half-sheathed sword; before that smile Cota stammered and fell silent.

"Oh, senor, this matter of the capital!" answered Coravel Tio, softly.

"Why, for many, many years men have said that the capital is to be moved to Albuquerque; yet it has not been moved! Nor will it be moved. And, Senor Cota, let me whisper something to you! I hear that you have bought a new automobile. That is very nice, very nice! But, senor, if by any chance you are misled into voting for that bill, it would be a very sad event in your life; a most unhappy event, I a.s.sure you! Senor, customers await me. _Adios._"

As the legislator left the shop, he furtively crossed himself, wonder and fear struggling in his pallid features.

The merchant now turned to his waiting customers. Of these, one was a Pueblo, a Cochiti man as the fashion of his high white moccasins and barbaric apparel testified to a knowing eye. The others were two white men who together approached the curio dealer. Coravel Tio stepped to a show case filled with onyx and other old carvings, and across this faced the two men with an uplift of his brows, a silent questioning.

"You're Mr. Coravel-Coravel Tio?" queried one of the two. The dealer merely smiled and nodded, in his birdlike fashion. "Can we see you in private?"

"I have no privacy," said Coravel Tio. "This is my shop. You may speak freely."

"Huh!" grunted the other, surveying him in obvious hesitation. "Well, I dunno. Me and my partner here have been workin' down to Magdalena, and we had a sc.r.a.p with some fellers and laid 'em out. Right after that, a native by the name of Baca tipped us off that they was Mackintavers'

men, and we'd better light out in a hurry. He give us a loan and said to tell you about it, so we lit out here."

Coravel Tio seemed greatly puzzled by this tale.

"My dear sir," he returned, slowly, "I am a curio dealer. I do not know why you were sent to me. Do you?"

"h.e.l.l, no!" The miner stared at him disgustedly. "Must ha' been some mistake."