Dust of the Desert

Welles Ritchie Robert

Description

New Yorker Grant Hickman is a civil engineer who is desperately seeking a change of pace. He decides to travel west to turn over a new leaf in the vast desert of the U.S. Southwest. Little does he know that this fateful decision will alter the course of his life in both good and bad ways.

Sujets

• Westerns
• Western (genre)
• Western

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776596737
• Langue: English

Extrait

DUST OF THE DESERT
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ROBERT WELLES RITCHIE
 
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Dust of the Desert First published in 1922 Epub ISBN 978-1-77659-673-7 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77659-674-4 © 2014 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Prologue Chapter I - What Happened on the Limited Chapter II - A Girl Named Benicia Chapter III - Doc Stooder Chapter IV - Colonel Urgo Repays Chapter V - The Garden of Solitude Chapter VI - Justice Chapter VII - The Chain Gang Chapter VIII - The Heart of Benicia Chapter IX - Gold and Pearls Chapter X - At the Casa O'Donoju Chapter XI - The Mark of el Rojo Chapter XII - Desert Secrets Chapter XIII - Crosscurrents Chapter XIV - Revelation Chapter XV - What Happened in the Night Chapter XVI - Accusation Chapter XVII - The Ordeal Chapter XVIII - The Desert Intervenes Chapter XIX - Thirst Chapter XX - The Coming of el Doctor Chapter XXI - Treasure Quest Chapter XXII - Altar Takes its Toll Chapter XXIII - Into the Furnace Chapter XXIV - Storm Chapter XXV - Treasure Trove
Prologue
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Roads of men thread the world. They thunder with a life flood. Theyare vibrant with a pulse of affairs. By land and water and air theylink to-day to to-morrow. But El Camino de los Muertos (the Road ofthe Dead Men) is a dim highway leading nowhere but back and back toforgotten yesterdays. Its faint sign-posts once were vivid in letteringof tears and blood. Its stages were measured by the sum of all humanhardihood. Faith, valour, reckless adventuring, thirst for gold, loveo' women—these the links in the measuring chain that marked its coursethrough a dead land. And black crosses formed of lava stones laid downin the sand; these abide over all the length of the Road of the DeadMen from Caborca to Yuma to cry to the white-hot sky of slain hopes andfaith betrayed in those buried years gone.
The priest-adventurers of New Spain first blazed this trail throughan unknown wilderness. Restless pioneers of the Society of Jesus andthe Order of St. Francis, men with the zeal to dare, pushed out fromthe northernmost limits of the Spanish settlements in a new world withtheir soldier guards and their Indian guides. They fought death ina land of thirst northward, ever northward. The cross fell from thehands of spent zealots at some waterhole where water was not, and otherhands followed to snatch up the sacred emblem and push it deeper intoPapagueria. North and west through El Infiernillo to the red waters ofthe Colorado where the Yumas had their reed huts. Thence on to the westthrough a land that stank of death until at last the end of the trailwas smothered in the soft green of Californian valleys—good ground forthe seed of Faith.
The overland trail of the padres became the single trail from Mexicoto gold when the madness of '49 called to all peoples. Then the Roadof the Dead Men took its toll by the score and doublescore. Then menfought for precious water at Tinajas Altas; many crosses of malapaismark the sands there. Bandits lurked at Tule Wells, ninety miles overblistering desert from the nearest water, to shoot men for the goldthey were bringing back from California. The Pock-Marked Woman, madwith thirst—so runs the legend—walked at nights with the Virgin inthe flats beyond Pitiquito and found water with celestial candlesburning all about the pool.
So passed the wraiths of the gold madness. A railroad was laid downfrom the Pacific eastward across the desert. What once was calledPapagueria had come to be known as Sonora, in Mexico, and Arizona inthe Republic of the North. The Road of the Dead Men at its Californiaend became a way through green and watered valleys where bungalowsmushroom overnight; along its course in southwestern Arizona andnorthern Sonora it lapsed to a faint trail from waterhole to waterholeof a heat scourged desert. To-day this forgotten remnant of a highroad of adventure and hot romance exists a streak in an incandescentinferno of sand and lava slag, wherein death is the omnipresent fact.Occasionally a prospector putters along its dreary stretches, chippingat ledge and rimrock. A Papago or a Cocopa creeps over caliche-stainedflats with baskets of salt from the Pinacate marshes near the Gulf.
That is all. The Dead Men hold their road inviolable. It is dust of thedesert.
That is all, did I say? No, the spirit of romance and the shape ofillusion have not completely passed from El Camino de los Muertos.Remains that tale which carries itself over a span of a century anda half, linking lives of the present to lives of men and women whosevery graves long since have passed from sight of folk. A tale strangelylike the desert trail along whose course its episodes of hot passionand swift action befell; for its beginnings are laid in a mirage of anelder day which we of the present can see but dimly, and its endingis beyond the horizon of to-day. Would you know the full story of theLost Mission de los Cuatros Evangelistas: how the baleful spell of itsgreen pearls of the Virgin worked upon the fortunes of the House ofO'Donoju and how the last of that house wrought expiation for the sinof a forbear through heroism and the fire of a great love—would youknow the full story, I say, you must see with me the substance of abeginning.
No more can one plump into the middle of this the last of the romancetales of the Road of the Dead Men than could one drop onto the Roaditself midway of its length.
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A King in Spain once followed a practice of careless munificence.Whenever one of his generals in the great wars appeared worthy ofreward His Majesty used to ink the ball of his thumb and with a grandand free gesture he would make a print somewhere on the map of Mexico,then called New Spain. Then the lucky general, taking this patent ofroyal favor across the seas with him, would hire surveyors to translatethe print of Philip's thumb into terms of square miles of domain. Thesesquare miles were his and his heirs' to govern like little kings, withjustice in their hands, the Church to give them countenance and Indiansby the hundreds to serve them under a modified code of slavery. Noman has lived since as did those magnificent possessors of Philip'sthumbprints.
The Rancho del Refugio in the little known reaches of Papagueria wasone of these fiefs of the king. Michael O'Donohue, a wild man of thered Irish who had fought English kings and queens under the banner ofSpain, had come by the grant originally and had taken a lady of Granadato the new world to bear him heirs worthy of their inheritance. MichaelO'Donohue became Don Miguel O'Donoju, lord of a desert principality anda power at the Viceroy's court in the City of Mexico. He establishedtwo rigid precedents to be followed by the house of O'Donoju: pride ofrace and jealous conservation of the family principality. It becamea rule of the O'Donoju that none of the clan marry outside the pureCastilian blood—Irish excepted if Irish could be found; and a rulethat, come what might, no O'Donoju pass title to so much as a foot ofthe Rancho del Refugio.
It was a day in April, the year 1780, that the clan O'Donoju cameto the Mission of the Four Evangelists to lend the dignity of theirpresence to the solemn service of re-dedication. More than that, DonPadraic O'Donoju, venerable head of the house and master of the CasaO'Donoju in the oasis named the Garden of Solitude, was come to witnessa personal triumph. For it had been his money that had gone to theFranciscan College to be used in the rebuilding of the frontier post ofGod after the Apaches had raided and burned it fifty years before. Andone of his own sons, Padre Felice, had been the architect and builderof the restored mission and was to continue the priest in charge. PadreFelice was fourth in a line of O'Donojus to take orders, one from eachgeneration since the establishment of the grant.
The O'Donojus—grandchildren, cousins and kin by marriage—had riddenfive days and upwards from various sections of the Rancho del Refugio,up and out through the Altar desert to this remote sanctuary of God inthe country of the Sand People. They came by the way called the Road ofthe Dead Men. Its asperities were softened by the quick desert springwhich tipped each thorny cactus cone with candelabra tufts of goldenand carmine flowers. The desert's usual heat was tempered by the snowsthat lay in unnamed mountains to the north.
They came in a lengthy caravan of horses and burros, with half nakedIndians to herd the goats and the yearling steers that were to bebarbecued for the secular feast to follow the religious rites; with ahalf-company of foot soldiers from the Presidio del Refugio to guardthe company against roving Apaches; Indian maids on mule back to servethe needs of their mistresses, regally mounted on ponies of the Cortezstrain; baggage porters, cooks, roustabouts. Fully a hundred of theclan O'Donoju and satellites on pilgrimage over the Road of the DeadMen.
All of the O'Donoju were there but one, El Rojo—the Red One. The "RedOne" was he because of the throw-back to the red Irish strain of hisfighting ancestor Don Miguel. Red with the pugnacious red of Donegalwas his hair; his cheeks had none of the sallow tan of the Spanishbut were dyed with the stain of Irish bog winds; his eyes were bluelamps of the devil. A fatherless grandson of old Don Padraic, El Rojohad played the wild youth in the City of Mexico with only occasionalvisits of penance to the Casa O'Donoju in the desert country of thenorth un