Foxfire (19 page)

Someday she would be freed, when Universal Law had exacted the just meed of punishment. The Law that neither prayer nor God could set aside, for the Law was part of God. This with increasing clarity she knew, in moments of communication when the blissful light thrilled through her veins, when for the space of a heart beat the Quest was ended, and the glimpse of Peace which may not be retained yet gave her strength to endure the relentless revolutions of the wheel.

She reached the baize door that led to the old servants' quarters, and opened it, and at once, through an unshuttered window, the afternoon sun came streaming. She turned back to the silent girl, and spoke with soft apology. “I did not mean to be so brusque with you, my dear. It's natural that you should be curious. But you must forgive a recluse her caprices, yes?”

“Of course,” said Amanda, mollified at once, for Calise's smile was warm with kindly charm. “I didn't mean to pry. You've been awfully good to me, listening to all my little fusses. I see why Dart's so fond of you.”

Calise leaned over and kissed the girl lightly on the forehead. “I return the compliment.... Now here is his room, and there is the trunk. I will leave you to go through it at your leisure. When you go you may use the back staircase and door.”

“I won't see you again?” cried Amanda, surprised to discover how much she longed to return to that simple room downstairs and to talk again to this lady who, despite the two small rebuffs and certain puzzling remarks, had yet given out a radiance and a feeling of quiet wisdom.

Calise hesitated. She was touched by the girl's appeal, but she longed for the privacy of her sanctum, and wished no interruption of the daily twilit hours of meditation and prayer. Nor did there seem anything further she could do for Amanda. As Calise thought this, a faint thrill ran along her nerves, an impression and a warning. Her eyes seemed drawn as though by a magnet to Dart's old steamer trunk. Evil for Amanda in the trunk? she thought,
c'est ridicule.
And yet her highly sensitized perceptions had telegraphed a message. Not any form of physical danger, not perhaps danger at all, but a center of confusion, a focus of discordant vibration.

“Perhaps you should leave the trunk for another day?” she said to Amanda. “Come down again with me now.”

“Oh, no thanks,” said the girl. “I've got to get that suit out now I'm here, and see if there's anything else useful.”

Ainsi-soit-il,
thought Calise. It is not for me to interfere. “Then come later,
chérie,”
she said. “If you still wish to speak with me....I will help you,” she added with a certain grave emphasis, “in any way I can.”

“Oh, yes,” said Amanda gratefully. But she did not go back to Calise that day.

When her hostess had gone, Amanda glanced without interest around the room; a typical servant's bedroom of the eighties, oilcloth and varnished wood, an iron cot, washstand and straight chairs. It must have suited Dart's scanty needs very well, she thought, smiling. She pulled the uncovered pillow off the cot, knelt on it, and opened the low trunk.

Inside there was a pile of jumbled clothes, the accumulation of any young man's life: a pair of moth-eaten Tuxedo pants, a turtle-necked sweater marked Phillips Andover Academy, a tennis racquet with broken strings, an arsenic-green knitted muffler with a note still pinned on it, “For dear little Jonathan from his Aunt Martha, Christmas 1919.” Dart had had an Aunt Martha in Boston, just as she still had an Aunt Amanda, nor had Aunt Martha been any more lavish with useful presents than Aunt Amanda, judging from the ghastly green muffler, thought Amanda, amused, and comforted, too, as reminder of Dart's Yankee half was always comforting.

She rummaged tenderly amongst the clothing and abstracted the blue suit. She held it up to the light. Not too bad, at least it looked as though it would still fit. Dart hadn't changed a pound since his college days. Then she discovered a fuzzy spot under one sleeve, she picked at it and it fell apart into a large moth hole. “Oh damn,” she said. Her knowledge of tailoring was sketchy, but she turned the coat over hunting for an extra bit of material which might be used as a patch. And as she stared down at the suit wondering how to salvage it, she had a sudden memory of her father's closet, crammed full of London-made suits.

How did it happen that the salvaging of a few yards of serge could have become so important? Amanda threw the blue suit on the bed, and continued a desultory search through the trunk.

There wasn't much else; a few dog-eared textbooks on mining, a pair of sneakers, some class pictures, a University of Arizona pennant, and in the corner of the trunk stuffed partly in a stiffened old raincoat there was a round brownish basket. An Indian basket of some sort, quite small and open at the top. It was a rather dirty fawn color with a zigzag blackish design woven through it. The kind of basket, it seemed to her, that you saw in all the Southwest souvenir shops, and which looked awful when you got them home.

There were several objects in the little basket, and she dumped them into her lap. There was a skin pouch with a drawstring, and inside it some yellow powder, there were four gray feathers, a piece of horn, a sinew on which were strung shells and beads, and a thin coppery disk. Some child's playthings, she thought. There were tiny pictures and tracings scratched on the disk. She studied them a moment without enlightenment, then turned the disk over, to see a paper pasted on the back and a note in Dart's hand, the writing less formed than it was now but still recognizable as his.

It said, “Map to the Lost Pueblo Encantado Mine. Given me by Tanosay 1921. But never search.”

Puzzled, she examined again the copper disk, then let it fall to her lap. She investigated the basket once more and found that there were several sheets of thin yellowed paper wedged on the bottom. These proved to be covered with writing in a different hand, and she read some sentences before she realized that they must have been written by Dart's father, Professor Dartland.

“Notes on the Pueblo Encantado”
said the heading, and next to it in penciled parenthesis “(might work up for magazine article some day).” Then the small sharp handwriting continued in ink. “There exists here in this Southwestern land an inordinate amount of myths and legends referring to so-called ‘Lost Mines' and buried treasure. I believe the majority of these lost mines to be as illusory and illusive as the various forms of ignis fatuus—(will-o'-the wisp, Jack o'lights, foxfire, etc.) which are popularly supposed to guide the gold seeker to the exact location.

“None the less, during years of enfeebled health and partial confinement to a desert home in Arizona, the study of these legends has furnished me with an agreeable hobby.

“The mass of fact, fancy, rumor and perennial hope which has attached itself to the more famous of the Lost Mines such as ‘Lost Dutchman,' ‘Tayopa,' ‘Lost Adams Diggings,' etc., is already so ponderous that one is restrained from adding to it any additional weight.

“There has, however, come to my notice under rather unusual circumstances the tale of still another and quite unknown lost mine which I venture to believe may present features of general interest. It is in a sense a prototype for the genre, including as it does the traditional trimmings, i.e., Early Spanish discovery, Apache hostility, complete inaccessibility, the reputed existence of a map, and, of course, a gold-bearing vein of incredible richness. These, it must be admitted, are standard ingredients, but others compounded in this legend are not. If, indeed, it
be
only a legend, I must confess to moments of credulity.

“The mine to which I refer is called ‘El Pueblo Encantado' (The Enchanted City) and was so named by a Franciscan friar circa 1798. He, as far as I have been able to ascertain, was the only white man ever to find it and survive. The Apaches, particularly the Coyotero tribe, have apparent knowledge of the mine, as we shall see later.

“Through the kindness of a colleague at the University of Mexico, I have been able to procure from their archives a copy of the Franciscan missionary's report, also that of his superior at the mission church of San Xavier del Bac near Tucson. The Ms. is in poor condition and some of the Spanish undecipherable, but the following is an approximate paraphrase.”

 

Amanda looked up from the notes, vaguely amused by the Professor's scholarly and cautious preamble. She thought of finishing them later sometime, but the sun was still high and there was no reason to start back yet, anyway. She settled more comfortably on the pillow, lit a cigarette, and continued.

 

“In the spring of 1798, two Franciscan missionaries, Fathers Gonzales and Rodriguez, set out North from San Xavier toward the Hopi country. They crossed the Salinas (Salt) River and thereafter lost their way in ‘very terrible mountains' many days north of Los Cuatros Hermanos (which I can only suppose to be the Four Peaks Mountain in the Mazatzal Range). They wandered for days in a malpais of volcanic country, starving and desperate for water which finally gave out completely.

“The narrative here is very unclear, but in some way they went through a doorway (portal) in a cliffside, and found themselves in a completely hidden box-canyon.

“High on the opposite side of the canyon they saw a ‘little city in stone' built in a cave, and near it a waterfall. The waterfall and a rabbit, which they shot, momentarily revived them. The next morning they investigated the cliff dwelling, which was, of course, deserted and seems to have inspired both men with a great and strange fear. They report that it glowed in the night ‘like an enchantment,' Father Gonzales, the survivor, says in the narrative. They persisted, however, and holding their crucifixes in front of them, they explored the dead city and the depths of a cave behind it. Here there were corpses (probably mummies—Father Gonzales says ‘Los Muertos'), and here also at the back of the cave they were stunned to see a wall of glittering gold.”

 

Amanda sat up straight, frowning down at the notes. She reread the last paragraphs and her breathing quickened. She tamped out her unfinished cigarette and bent closer to the Professor's increasingly cramped writing.

 

“The two padres thought at first that this golden wall was an evil hallucination, but they picked off some free gold with their fingernails and knives. They were then seized with a frenzy of jubilation
(frenési alborozado
) and sang a Te Deum in the cave, for the glory of the Church which would profit by these riches. One gathers that they had less sanctified emotions as well, for Father Gonzales finishes his account cryptically, ‘While we were in the cave by the wall of gold, the devil came and prompted us to violent thoughts of hideous attraction.'

“This is the end of the Gonzales narrative. The rest is added by his superior at the Mission. Father Gonzales was found alone in September four months later by friendly Pima Indians. He was wandering half crazed by the banks of the Salinas probably not far from the site of the present town of Mesa. They brought him back to the Mission where he dictated a coherent story as far as the above point, beyond which he could add little. His mind was obviously affected by his sufferings, and he died soon after. He did say in response to repeated questionings that Father Rodriguez, his companion, had been mysteriously killed near the ‘enchanted city' and as they were crossing the box-canyon. Shot by ‘an arrow from the skies.' And thereafter Gonzales had little recollection of how he got out of the mountains or down to the river, where the Pimas found him. But his pouch was filled with gold flakes and chunks of gold-bearing quartz richer than any yet discovered.

“Gonzales endeavored to make a map but it later proved to be of no use whatsoever, and two expeditions sent forth after his death never even found any of the markings which he said he had seen along the way, and both ended disastrously in the hands of hostile Indians.

“The Superior finished his own account by saying that were it not for the evidence of the gold brought back by the unfortunate missionary, one would think this tale of enchanted cities, glittering walls, and caves of the Dead was but the miserable phantasms of dementia, and that in fact even the evidence of the gold might have some more logical explanation.

“This cynicism from an eighteenth-century Spanish padre it would be well to emulate, and if I persist in the story of the Lost Pueblo Encantado, it is for the purpose of presenting further angles. These comprise archeology, geology, and the history of the Apache Indians and may therefore have a slightly more scientific turn.

“Perhaps I should first explain...”

 

That was all. The notes stopped. Amanda stood up, first dumping all the little objects back in the basket except the copper disk, this she held in one hand while she stood by the window and reread Professor Dartland's notes from beginning to end in the waning light.

Her heart beat fast, and she was suffused by a warm, delicious excitement. Dart would know the rest of the story, this copper disk almost proved that, for when Professor Dartland had said “reputed existence of a map” he did not then know of this disk so carefully labeled in Dart's firm boyish hand. Besides Professor Dartland had died in 1919, the disk was dated 1921. She examined the tracings on it again but they were nothing but a jumble of wavy lines, circles, and little triangles. She put the disk and notes carefully in the basket, flung the blue suit over her arm and ran down the hall to the back stairway. No thought now of calling again on Mrs. Cunningham, no thought of any delay. She was in a fever to see Dart and question him. She'd walk up to the mine, catch him as he came out, ride back home with him. She let herself out the back door and ran down the trail and through the ghost town, and up to the mine road. It was five o'clock and growing dusk; ordinarily the loneliness of the unfamiliar mountain road would have daunted her, but she climbed the mile at top speed, lugging the suit and the basket without noticing them, while her mind caressed with fascination the story of Father Gonzales' discovery.