Then, turning to Bud, she fiercely demanded of him: "What have you been saying to her?"

"Nothin'," he replied, as he left the house.

"Oh, mother, mother!" wailed Echo. "Jack--I have sent him away."

"Sent him away," repeated the startled Mrs. Allen.

"Yes," a.s.sured Echo.

"You don't mean to say he is guilty--you don't mean--"

"No, no!" interrupted Echo. "Oh, I never thought of that--he must come back--call Dad, call Slim."

Echo had forgotten Jack's promise to Slim. He, too, in his period of stress had overlooked the fact that he was a suspected murderer. Now he had fled. He must be brought back to clear his good name.

Mrs. Allen called her husband and the Sheriff into the room.

"What's the row?" shouted the Sheriff.

"Jack's gone," cried Mrs. Allen.

In amazement the two men could only repeat the news, "Gone!"

"Gone where?" crisply demanded the Sheriff.

"Don't stand there starin'; do something," scolded Mrs. Allen.

"He gave me his word to stay and face this thing out," shouted the bewildered Slim.

"It's all my fault. I sent him away." Echo seized Slim's hand as she spoke.

"You sent him away?"

She fell on her knees before him. Lifting her hands as in prayer, she implored: "I never thought of his promise to you. He never thought of it. Go find him--bring him back to me!"

"Bring him back?" howled the excited Sheriff, his eyes bulging, his cheeks swelling, his red hair bristling, and his voice ringing in its highest key. "Bring him back? You just bet I will. That's why I'm sheriff of Pinal County."

Slim whirled out of the door as if propelled by a gigantic blast. Echo fell fainting at her mother's feet.

CHAPTER XII

The Land of Dead Things

Forth to the land of dead things, through the cities that are forgotten, fared d.i.c.k Lane. Tricked by his friend, with the woman he loved lost to him, he wandered onward.

Automatically he took up again his quest for buried treasure. That which in the flush of youthful enthusiasm and roseate prospects of life and love had seized him as a pa.s.sion was now a settled habit. And fortunately so, for it kept him from going mad. He had no thought of gain--only the achievement of a purpose, a monomania.

With this impulse was conjoined a more volitional motive--he wished to revenge himself upon the Apaches, and chiefly upon the renegade McKee, whom he supposed still to be with them. Somehow he blamed him, rather than Jack Payson, as being the chief cause of his miseries. "If he had not stolen the buried gold, I would have returned in time," he muttered. "He is at the bottom of all this. As I walked away from Jack in the garden, I felt as if it was McKee that was following me with his black, snaky eyes."

Accordingly, d.i.c.k directed his way to a region reputed to be both rich in buried treasure and infested by hostile Indians.

The fable of the Quivira, the golden city marked now by the ruins of the Piro pueblo of Tabiri, south of the salt-deposits of the Manzano, is still potent in Arizona and New Mexico to lure the treasure-seeker.

Three hundred and fifty years ago it inspired a march across the plains that dwarfs the famous march of the Greeks to the sea. It led to the exploration of the Southwest and California before the Anglo-Saxon settlers had penetrated half a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.

The cities are forgotten to-day. The tribe which gave it a name proved to be utter barbarians, eaters of raw meat, clad only in skins, without gold, knowing nothing of the arts; Teton nomads, wandering through Kansas. Yet each decade since witnesses a revival of a wonderful story of the buried treasures of the Grand Quivira.

The myth originated in New Mexico in 1540. Antonio de Mendoza was the viceroy of New Spain. Having practically conquered the New World, the adventurers who formed his court, having no fighting to do with common enemies, began to hack each other. Opportunely for the viceroy, Fra Marcos discovered New Mexico and Arizona. Gathering the doughty swordsmen together, Mendoza turned them over to the brilliant soldier and explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, with strict orders to get them as far from the viceroy as he could, and then lose them.

Coronado and his band were the first to see the Grand Canon of the Colorado. In the latter weeks of 1540 they were in the town of Tiguex.

As they were less welcome than the modern tourists, who are now preyed upon where these preyed, the natives sent them on to the pueblo of the Pecos. Mendoza had sent Coronado into New Mexico on the strength of the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of the myth of the "Seven Cities of Cibola." The fabled cities of gold proved to be peaceful settlements. Coronado attempted to lose his cut-throats by having them settle in the country. A plains Indian, captive among the Pecos, changed his plans, and led him to undertake his wonderful march. The Pecos wished to get rid of the guests, so they concocted a marvelous story of buried treasures, and made the poor captive father it. To the gold-chasers the captive was known as "The Turk," his head being shaven and adorned only with a scalp-lock, a custom noticeable because of its variance from that of the long-haired Pueblos.

"The Turk" told of a tribe of plainsmen who had a great store of the yellow substance. They were called the Quivira. He would lead them to the ancient Rockefellers. Coronado put him at the head of his band, and followed him eastward over the plains. For months they plodded after him, the Indian trying to lose Coronado, and that valiant warrior endeavoring to obey orders to "shake" his band. About the middle of what is now the Indian Territory, Coronado began to suspect that "The Turk" was selling him a gold brick instead of a bonanza. Landmarks began to look strangely alike. "The Turk," as he afterward confessed, was leading them in a circle. Coronado sent the most of his band back to the Mexican border, retaining about thirty followers. With the help of heated bayonets and sundry proddings, he then impressed upon "The Turk" that it was about time for him to find the Quiviras, or prepare to go to the happy hunting-grounds of his ancestors. After many hardships, "The Turk" located the tribe they were seeking near the present site of Kansas City. All that Coronado found in the way of metal was a bit of copper worn by a war-chief. Not only was the bubble burst, but the bursting was so feeble that Coronado was disgusted. He beheaded the guide with his own hands as a small measure of vengeance.

With his followers he retraced his weary road to Tiguex. The lesson lasted for half a century, when the myth, brighter, more alluring than ever, arose and led others on to thirsty deaths in the bad lands and deserts of the Southwest.

It was to the modern version that Lane had succ.u.mbed. From the Sweet.w.a.ter he roved to the south of Albuquerque, where the narrow valley of the Rio Grande is rimmed on the east by an arid plateau twenty miles wide; and this is, in turn, walled in by a long cordillera. Through the pa.s.ses, over the summit, Lane climbed, descending through the pineries, park-like in their grandeur and immensity, to the bare, brown plains which stretch eastward to the rising sun. In the midst of the desert lies a chain of salines, accursed lakes of Tigua folk-lore. Beyond them the plain melts and rebuilds itself in the shimmering sun.

To the south and southeast spectral peaks tower to the clouds.

Northward the blue shadows of the Sante Fe fall upon the pine-clad foot-hills.

Along the lower slopes of the Manzano are the ruins of the ancient pueblos. Abo and Cuarac are mounds of fallen buildings and desert-blown sand. Solemn in their grandeur, they dominate the lonely landscape in a land of adobe shacks.

Thirty miles from Cuarac, to the southeast, lies Tabiri, the "Grand Quivira." Huddled on the projecting slopes of the rounded ridges, access to it is a weary, dreary march. The nearest water is forty miles away. Toiling through sand ankle-deep, the traveler plods across the edge of the plains, through troughlike valleys, and up the wooded slope of the Mesa de los Jumanos. A mile to the south a whale-back ridge springs from the valley, nosing northward.

No sound breaks the stillness of the day. From the higher ridges the eye falls upon the pallid ghost of the city. Blotches of juniper relieve the monotony of the brown, lifeless gra.s.s. Grays fade into leaden hues, to be absorbed in the ashy, indeterminate colors of the sun-soaked plains. No fitter setting for a superst.i.tion could be found. Once a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, the topography of ridge gave it an unusual shape. Ruins of three four-story terrace houses face one another across narrow alleys. Six circular cisterns yawn amid mounds of fallen walls. At the center of the southerly blocks towers a gray quadrangular wall, the last of a large building.

At the western terminus of the village, where the slope falls away to the valley, is a gigantic ruin. Its walls are thirty feet high and six feet thick. The roof has fallen, and the topmost layers of the bluish-gray limestone are ragged and time-worn.

The building had a frontage of two hundred and two feet, and its greatest depth was one hundred thirty-one feet. Flat-faced prisms, firmly laid in adobe mortar, are placed at irregular intervals in the walls.

The northern part of the ruin is one great cross-shaped room, thirty-eight feet wide and one hundred and thirty-one feet long. A gate fifteen feet wide and eleven feet high opens to the eastward. A mighty timber forms an arch supporting fifteen feet of solid masonry.

South of this is a great chamber cut up into smaller rooms, with long halls, with walls twenty feet in height. In one of the rooms is a fireplace, and over the doorways are carved wood lintels. An entrance from the south is given through a s.p.a.cious antechamber. The rafters, hauled fifteen miles, must have weighed a ton.

Here lies the Colchis of the modern Argonaut. At first the Mexican pried through the debris-choked rooms, or feebly tunneled under the walls. With the coming of the white races and the drill, holes have been sunk into the original bed-rock. To the simple stories of the natives, fable-bearers have added maps, dying confessions, and discovered ciphers.

This ruin, which has caused so many heart-breaks and disappointments, are but the fragments of an old mission founded by Francisco de Atevedo in 1628. Tabiri was to be the central mission of Abo and Cuarac. The absence of water leads the modern explorer to believe that when the town was deserted the spring was killed. The gentle fathers who built the church supervised the construction of a water-works. On a higher ride are three crudely made reservoirs, with ditches leading to the village. The Piros had no animals save a few sheep, and the water supply was needed only for domestic uses, as the precipitation furnished moisture for small crops of beans and corn.

All these towns were wiped out by the Apaches, the red plague of the desert. First they attacked the outlying forts of the Salines, once supposed to be well-watered, teeming with game, and fruitful.

Tradition again takes the place of unrecorded history, and tells that the sweet waters were turned to salt, in punishment of the wife of one of the dwellers in the city, who proved faithless. In 1675 the last vestige of aboriginal life was wiped out. For a century the Apaches held undisputed control of the country; then the Mexican pioneer crept in. His children are now scattered over the border. The American ranchman and gold-seeker followed, twisting the stories of a Christian conquest into strange tales of the seekers of buried treasures.

Through this land d.i.c.k had wandered, finding his search but a rainbow quest. But he kept on by dull inertia, wandering westward to Tularosa, then down to Fort Grant, and toward the Lava Beds of southwestern Arizona. In all that arid land there was nothing so withered as his soul.

Jack, well mounted, with a pack-mule carrying supplies, had picked up d.i.c.k's trail, after it left Tularosa, from a scout out of Fort Grant.

Slim Hoover headed for Fort Grant in his search for Jack. Although the ranchman had only a brief start of him, Slim lost the track at the river ford. Knowing d.i.c.k had gone into the desert, Jack headed eastward, while Slim, supposing that Jack was breaking for the border to escape into a foreign country turned southward.

From the scout who had met Jack and d.i.c.k, the Sheriff learned that the two men were headed for the Lava Beds, which were occupied by hostile Apaches.

Detachments of the 3d Cavalry were stationed at the fort, with Colonel Hardie in command of the famous F troop, a band of Indian fighters never equaled. In turn, they chased Cochise, Victoria, and Geronimo with their Apache warriors up and down and across the Rio Grande. Hard pressed, each chieftain, in turn, would flee with his band first to the Lava Beds, and then across the border into Mexico, where the United States soldiers could not follow. Hardie fooled Victoria, however.