“Prime cathartic for the mind,” grunted the Doc, and he tuned his engine for the trip.
They were off down the cañon and into the yellow basin of El Infiernillo. Guadalupe, riding for the first time in the white man’s smell-wagon, gripped his seat with the delicious fear of a child on a merry-go-round. He watched the movements of the doctor’s foot on the gear-shift, marvelling that the beast concealed in pipes and rods answered each downward thrust with a roar. Earth spun under him as if Elder Brother himself, master of all createdthings, had a hold on it and were pulling it all one way.
Down and down into the untracked miles of Altar. A single iron post on a hill marking the Line. The sierra of Pinacate cinder-red in the south for a beacon. Right and left sheet iron ranges with stipples of rust where thecamisagrew. Mirage quivering into nothingness just as its false waters were ready to be parted by the car’s wheels.
They came upon an east-and-west track in the sand—the Road of the Dead Men—and turned westward upon it. Away off to the north and east a spiral dust cloud walked across the wastes along the skirts of the mountains. Guadalupe pointed to it with an ejaculation in his own tongue. A sign—a sign! There was the place of the mission!
The Doc felt his internals quiver in expectation. Prickles of excitement played in fingers that gripped the wheel. Automatically he began to hum an ancient bar-room ditty.
The Papago indicated where he should turn off the road in the direction of a great gap in the mountains, into which the desert flowed as a sea. Here the mesquite lifted from its crouch and flourished in a five-foot growth—true index of hidden waters. The car madehard going, what with brittle twigs that caught at its tires and thechollacreeping like a spined snake to threaten punctures. At his guide’s word Doc Stooder stopped. Both scrambled out.
Before moving a step the Doc must have a ceremonial drink, a preliminary he did not deem necessary to share with Guadalupe. The man’s big hands trembled as he raised the bottle to his lips; his eyes were shining with gold lust.
Guadalupe stood for several minutes slowly swinging his head from landmark to landmark, his eyes following calculated lines through the scrub. Then he commenced a slow pacing through the close-set aisles of the greasewood and cactus, bearing in a wide circle. He peered into the core of each shrub, kicked at every naked stub of root and branch appearing above the surface. The Doc, cursing and humming alternately, was right at his shoulder.
An hour passed—two. The sun, now high, burned mercilessly. Still Guadalupe pursued a narrowing circle through the scrub. Of a sudden the Indian gurgled and dropped to his knees beside a salt-bush. He whipped out his knife and began hacking at the tough stubs of branches near the soil. The Doc, slavering in his excitement, dropped beside him and lookedinto the heart of the salt-bush. He saw nothing but a rounded slab of rock.
Guadalupe finished his knife work and started to dig with his hands. Terrier-like he pawed a hole away from what Stooder had taken for a rock. The smooth black surface began to curve outward in a form too symmetrical for nature’s work; it was rounded and gradually flaring.
Guadalupe dug on. Blood pounded in the Doc’s ears. Snatches of song trickled from his lips.
Suddenly patience exploded. Stooder pushed the Papago to his haunches and threw his own body full length into the hole dug. His arms embraced a flaring shape of metal. His eyes fell upon faint ridges and lines, like lettering. He spat upon the spot and rubbed it clean of clinging soil.
Gloria Dei et Mund——Phillipus RexAnno Dom.——XXIV
“The bell! The mission bell!” screamed the Doc.
An hour after the sun had set on the day of Colonel Urgo’s humiliation at the Casa O’Donoju, Quelele tooled his car into the avenue of palms at the end of the long return journey from Magdalena, on the railroad. With him were his master, Don Padraic, and an American stranger, Bim Bagley of Arizora.
Fate had played capriciously with Bim. When he set out from Arizora on the quest of his pal Grant Hickman it was only on the bare report that the man was seriously wounded and under the care of El Doctor Coyote Belly at Babinioqui, south of the Line. Near the end of his journey his car had wrecked itself beyond repair hard by Magdalena; a mule had been requisitioned to carry him over the mountains to the home of the medicine man; once there he was as far from the end of his quest as ever.
For grey old Coyote Belly lied unblinkingly. He knew nothing of a wounded man. Persuasion of words nor the chink of silver dollarsavailed to budge him from a trust he conceived to be joined between himself and the master of the Casa O’Donoju.
The hours following the scene in the patio and the sudden gust of action concluding the visit of Hamilcar Urgo had been trying ones for Grant. Spent as he was by the struggle with the Spaniard, he had suffered himself to be half-carried to his room by the Indian servants. Benicia, accompanying him to the door, had permitted her hand to rest in his at farewell; a clasp tried to tell what the storm in her soul denied speech. The girl’s face was etched by suffering; sacrificed pride and a shadow of some deep fear lay heavy in her eyes and the drawn lines about her mouth. The wound made by her spiteful suitor was deeper than Grant could conceive.
Alone on his bed he conned over the tale Urgo had told. Unfamiliar as he was with the Latin temperament, the belief of the romance peoples in the very reality of inherited curse and whips of Nemesis pursuing innocent generations, yet the raw tragedy of the story fired his imagination. He tried to put himself in the place of the girl he loved with all her pride of race and family; to feel with her the stripes of scorn the despicable Urgo had laid on. ElRojo’s desecration of the mission sanctuary by an act of blood; his flight into the desert with the pearls of the Virgin and a girl, “who was wife to him without priest or book”; the blotting of the mission from sight of man; all this cycle of tragedy of the dim past linked to a gloriously vital creature of the present by the chance colour of her hair. The thing was monstrously absurd! And yet—
A knock at the door and Don Padraic entered. He turned to beckon some one behind him. In the candlelight Grant saw the head of a giant stoop to avoid the lintel.
“Bim Bagley!”
The desert man crossed to the bed by a single wide step and threw both arms about Grant in a bear hug.
“You dam’d old snoozer. You dam’d old snoozer!” was all Bim could give in greeting. Don Padraic stepped outside and closed the door on the reunion. Bim let his friend’s body lightly down on the pillows and sat back to grin into Grant’s eyes.
“I sure been burnin’ the ground all over North Sonora on your trail,” he rumbled. “You’re the original little Mexican jumping bean.”
“Jumped right into a flock of trouble, oldside partner, with more right beyond the front line waiting for me. The reserves seem to have come up just the right time.” Grant gave his pal’s great paw a squeeze. Bim roared assurance:
“Reserves got all bogged down through failure in liaison—just like the days of the Big Show. But they’re with you now from hell to breakfast, young fellah; an’ I think I know the name of the outfit we got to trim. Name’s Hamilcar Urgo, huh?” His buoyant spirit was wine to Grant; the very animal force of him seemed to fill the old room.
“Ran acrost that li’l sidewinder this afternoon when the old Don was bringing me up here from Magdalena. Just our two cars on the road. He pulls up when we’re makin’ to pass him—face on him just as pleasant as a polecat’s. Your friend the Don passes the time of day courteous as you please.
“‘I had the honour to visit your daughter this day,’ whinnies this Urgo gazabo; of course he speaks in Spanish, which is nuts for me. ‘And I discover she is entertaining a convict who escaped from a chain gang.’” Bim grinned. “I take it that convict is my li’l friend from Noo Yawk.”
Grant nodded. The other wagged his head in a grotesque mockery of grief.
“‘My daughter and I are entertaining an American gentleman who was wounded on the Hermosillo road,’ your Don answers, civil enough. ‘While he is a guest in our house we naturally ask no questions.’
“‘Then,’ snaps this Urgo boy, ‘I must inform you that for harbouring an escaped criminal you are responsible before the law. The rurales will visit your house and it is for me to say whether they take you as well as the gringo convict.’”
Grant started. Here was a phase of the situation he had not guessed: that his courteous host might be made to suffer for Urgo’s rage and jealousy.
Eagerly, “What did Don Padraic say to that?”
“He says something to the effect that the laws of hospitality were above any this-here Urgo might care to dig up, the same I call being mighty white of your Don Whosis with the Irish twist to his name.” Bim broke off to shoot a quizzical look into his friend’s eyes. “Say, brother, what you been doin’ to this little black-an’-tan stingin’ lizard to make himride your trail so hard? You a tenderfoot an’ riding your herd across the fence line of the biggest little man in the whole Sonora government!”
Grant grinned childishly. “Well, I threw him out of the front door here this afternoon for one thing and—”
Admiration beamed from every wind wrinkle about the Arizonan’s eyes. “Sho! You did that? Now I call that steppin’ some for a man with a bullet through him. I thought from the gen’ral slant to Señor Urgo’s manner when he met up with us some one’d been working on his frame somewhere. He just sweat T.N.T. But why did you crawl him?”
“He insulted Señorita O’Donoju,” was Grant’s answer. Bim lowered the lid of one eye owlishly and his gaunt face was pulled down to a comic aspect of concern.
“Uh-huh; now I begin to get the drift. Old Doc Stooder was right when he says there’s the shoo-shoo of a skirt somewheres in your big disappearing act. Boy—boy! I had you figgered for the orig’nal old hermit coyote who travels the meat trail alone. No wonder li’l Urgo’s all coiled up for the strike, you aimin’ to run him out on his girl.”
Before Grant could head off his friend on atopic that brought sudden embarrassment to him ’Cepcion and a second servant entered with a spread table. Bim tucked pillows under his friend’s shoulders with clumsy tenderness, then in mellow candlelight they ate and talked. Both were bursting with questions to be asked, but Bim claimed the right of priority by virtue of his ten days’ blind search through the country south of the Line. At his demand Grant gave him the whole story of his feud with Colonel Urgo, from the meeting at El Paso down to the afternoon’s events in the patio. Lively play of sympathies about the Arizonan’s features followed the narrative of the dreadful march in the chain gang and Grant’s burst for freedom under the rifles of the rurales. The little his friend left unsaid Bim was shrewd enough to supply; he guessed the story of Grant’s thraldom under the witchery of the desert girl and found it good.
When the man on the pillows began recital of what had occurred just a few hours before—Urgo’s savage assault on a girl’s pride through the story of El Rojo’s impiety—the big man by the bed stiffened in intensified interest. He heard Grant through with scarce concealed impatience.
“But, man, that was the Mission of the FourEvangelists Urgo was telling of!” explosively from Bim. Grant nodded confirmation.
“Why, that’s the Doc’s big proposition—our proposition!”
Grant looked his puzzlement. The other’s excitement swirled him on:
“That proves what the Doc’s Papago told him. Pearls buried there. An’ gold—lots of gold, the Papago says. I had a sneaking hunch all the time it might be one of Stooder’s wild dreams, but this story proves we’re on the right track.”
“Do you mean—?”
“Sure! That’s what I brought you out from the East for—to help us uncover this Lost Mission, as folks in Arizona call it. Doc Stooder’s such a cagey old monkey he wouldn’t let me put on paper just what I wanted you to whack in on. Now you got it all—the pure quill. Isn’t it a whale of a proposition!”
Though Grant’s surface perception had grasped the full import of his friend’s words some sub-strata of mind, or of heart, stubbornly refused to be convinced that he had heard aright. He groped for words:
“You say you brought me out here to help you uncover pearls and gold that belong to the Church?”
“Why not?” A subtle note of pugnacity in the other’s speech. “The stuff’s been lyin’ buried for a hundred an’ fifty years more or less. The priests’ve never lifted a finger to find it, though slews of prospectors have rooted round trying to uncover this cache.”
“But the old O’Donojus built this church and endowed it with that very treasure you want to dig for,” Grant persisted. “What about their rights?”
He did not hear Bim’s arguments. Instead he was conning over the story of the bane of the house of O’Donoju. Before his eyes was the face of the girl he loved, as he had last seen it, deeply graven with tragedy.
Grant’s hand went out in a comrade’s clasp. “Bim, old man, count me out on this thing. I couldn’t consider it for a minute.”
“Don Padraic’s compliments, and he awaits the pleasure of his guests’ company in the music room if the sick señor feels able.” It was ’Cepcion’s soft patois that interrupted Bim Bagley’s explosion of pained surprise in mid-flight. Grant gave him a smile which interpreted the diversion as something to his friend’s advantage and, leaning on Bim’s shoulder, followed the servant to the great room in the centre of the house.
A fire burned in the cavernous fireplace, for spring nights in Altar have a chill; candles in dull silver wall sconces tempered the red light. The vast room was so peopled with dancing shadows from the antique furnishings that the tall man in white and the girl who advanced to greet the guests appeared to be moving in a company of hooded monks.
“’Nicia, Señor Bagley, the friend of our friend.” Don Padraic bowed to Bim, who crooked his lank body with surprising grace.
“And I am a friend of you two,” came Bim’s forthright answer, “since you have treated Grant Hickman so kindly. He is the salt of the earth.”
Don Padraic indicated seats before the andirons. Benicia chose a low settle by the side of the great winged chair where her father seated himself. Grant saw shadows beneath her eyes where the firelight played upon her features, almost waxen in uncertain light. The glint of copper in the piled-up mass of her hair was like summer lightning in clouds. Their eyes met, and Grant was disappointed in the hope he might still find the soul of the girl revealed there as it had been that afternoon in the unguarded moment when Benicia gave him wordless thanks. He guessed she had told Don Padraic of the incident in the patio and that what had passed between father and daughter thereafter had been a drain on the emotions of both.
Don Padraic turned to Grant with more than perfunctory concern in speech and glance. “Your health, señor? I fear that certain events of the day, of which my daughter has told me—”
“Please!” Grant was quick to interrupt. “I am feeling fit as I could be, thanks to the careful nursing I have had in your house.”
The thing that had been left unspoken by both weighed like an unlaid spirit on the silence that followed. Each of the four before the fire had little thought save for the chapter of circumstance left unconcluded by one who had departed the Garden a few hours before, swollen with the venom of outraged pride. It was Don Padraic who brushed aside reserve:
“Señor Hickman, I may speak before your friend, who must share your confidence. He will pardon my bringing personal affairs before him. I can not postpone my thanks—my very sincere thanks—for what you did this afternoon. My daughter was defenceless.”
“And I—” Benicia began, but Grant quickly put in:
“Will you not consider that I was really serving my own private ends—a score to be evened between Colonel Urgo and myself?”
Bim covered a reminiscent grin with a broad palm as Grant hurried on, eager to withhold from the girl opportunity to speak her thanks.
“When I was brought here I thought it best to keep silent on the matter of my own private grudge against this man. But now that it appears we all have common cause against him I think I may speak. Urgo himself was responsible for my being shot.”
He saw Benicia’s eyes grow wide, read the surprise that parted her lips in a breathed exclamation. He thought he saw, too, just the flash of something no eyes but his own could understand, and he was glad. Briefly he sketched the incident of the gambling palace in Sonizona, his encounter with Urgo in the office of the jail, the march with the chain gang.
“And so,” Grant concluded, “Colonel Urgo found a dead man come to life when he saw me in the patio to-day. When Señorita O’Donoju was out of hearing for a moment I could not resist a shot which left our friend guessing whether or not I had told you, señor, how I came by my wound.”
“Ah, yes,” from Benicia in a hushed voice. “I knew the minute I returned there had been something between you. Urgo was like a cornered animal.”
“And so he turned on you,” Grant could not help saying. “If only I could have guessed beforehand his attack—”
Again silence fell. Grant was alive to the play of unspoken thought between father and daughter; these two alone in the immensity of the desert and facing unsupported the craft of an implacable enemy. He sensed the battlebetween their pride and their desperate need for an ally: the one impulse dictating that what was the secret affair of the House of O’Donoju must remain strictly its own secret, the other moving them to confide in him, who unwittingly had been drawn into the struggle. Gladly would he have offered himself as a champion; but he must await their initiative. Suddenly Grant recalled what Bim had told him of Urgo’s threat at the meeting with Don Padraic on the desert road: how the head of the Casa O’Donoju would be held responsible for harbouring an escaped convict. There was no blinking his duty in this direction.
“My friend tells me, Don Padraic, that Colonel Urgo threatens your arrest as well as my own; that you will be held responsible for concealing a fugitive from justice. That cannot be, of course. To-morrow, if Quelele can take Bagley and myself in the car—”
“No!” Benicia’s denial came peremptorily and with a hint of passion which gave Grant a sting of surprise. “No, señor, we do not turn wounded men into the desert—particularly a friend who has served us as you have done.”
Again Grant saw in the firelit pools of her eyes just an instant’s revelation of depths he yearned to plumb—the aspect of a beginninglove hardly knowing itself as such. He scarcely heard the voice of Don Padraic seconding his daughter’s protest.
“The hospitality of the Casa O’Donoju,” he was saying, “can hardly recognize such silly threats. Colonel Urgo’s hope was that we would send you back over the Road of the Dead Men to Caborca or Magdalena where, naturally, you would be made a prisoner. Please dismiss from your mind any idea of our permitting ourselves to play into this man’s hands.”
Bim Bagley ventured to break his silence: “Grant here and I have important business together up over the Line. We ought to be moving soon’s we can.” The white-haired don turned to Bim with a gracious spreading of the hands.
“When Señor Hickman feels able to make the journey Quelele will take him and yourself, Señor Bagley, to westward. There is a way through El Infiernillo up to the Arizona town of Cuprico. By so going you will avoid any trap Urgo might lay. But you will not hurry Señor Hickman’s going”—Don Padraic interjected reservation—“and you, Señor Bagley, surely can remain with us until then.”
The direct Bagley, finding himself thwarted by the don’s suavity, sent a sheepish grinGrant’s way in token of his defeat and maintained silence. Don Padraic, to dismiss the subject his reticence had reluctantly introduced, struck a gong to summon a servant. Soon a decanter of sherry was glowing golden in the firelight and cigarettes were burning. The master of the Casa O’Donoju artfully led Bim into talk of cattle, always currency of conversation in the Southwest. Grant drew his chair closer to Benicia’s.
“You startled me with that ‘No’ of yours to my proposal to leave the Garden of Solitude at once,” he said with a boldness he did not wholly feel. “Being a little deaf, I am not sure I heard all the reasons you gave why I should not go.”
“What you failed to hear me say my father supplied,” the girl quickly parried, giving him her steady gaze. He was not to be so easily side-tracked. What had begun in boldness swept him on in passionate sincerity:
“There are many excellent reasons why I should be somewhere else than here this time to-morrow night; but there is one very compelling reason why I welcome every added hour here in the Garden. May I tell you that reason?”
“If you think I should know.” The wordscame simply. He, looking down into the hint of features the firelight grudgingly gave him, saw there the frank camaraderie of a candid spirit: the soul that was Benicia O’Donoju, unsullied of artifice or the vain trickeries of the woman desired. “If you think I should know”—call of comrade to comrade. The desert girl scorning subtleties and inventions; knowing what her words would prompt yet wishing them to be said.
“It is that I love you, Benicia, and that I cannot leave you, loving you so, when I know you are in danger.” Grant gave her his heart’s pledge in simple directness. Though the girl was not unprepared for his avowal, the call in his words, elemental as the sweep of precious rain over the thirsting desert, set quivering chords of her being never before stirred. He saw the trembling of her lips; her curving lashes trembled and were jewelled with little drops. She turned her gaze into the fire for a long minute. Grant heard vaguely the voice of Bim Bagley expounding some theme of cattle ticks. His heart was on the rack.
“Grant—good friend—” Her voice broke, then valiantly found itself. “You heard from Urgo the story of our house—of the Red One and his crime against God—”
“The hound!” he muttered. Benicia groped on:
“My father—no one ever told me that story because—because—” Grant saw one hand steal up to touch with a gesture almost abhorrent the low wave of red over her brow—“I bear the sign, you see.”
He put out his hand to stay her, for the dregs of suffering were working a slow torture upon her; the face of the girl he loved had become like some sculptor’s study of the spirit of fatalism. He could not check her.
“My father when he returned to-day and I told him—my father said the story was true as Urgo told it. Once in every second generation—this sign of El Rojo, murderer and violator of the sanctuary—”
“But, Benicia, surely you don’t believe this fairy story!” Grant packed into his low words all the willing of a spirit fighting for precious possession. He felt that every word the girl spoke was pushing her farther from him.
“Ah, Grant, we desert people believe easily because the truth is not hidden. Itistrue; my good grey father knew that I knew it to be true and did not seek to deceive me when I asked him. The O’Donoju with this”—again the shrinking touch of fingers to the dull-burningstripe on her forehead—“cannot give love, for with love goes unhappiness—and death.”
She broke off suddenly, rose and hurried into the shadows beyond the range of firelight. Grant heard a door latch at the far end of the room click to.
Somewhere in the darkness of the ancient house a deep-toned bell tolled the hour of two. The sound came to Grant, broad awake in his room, as if from a great distance—tocsin strokes against the bowl of the desert sky. Four times in his sleepless vigil he had heard that bell measuring night watches, and each successive hour struck seemed the period to a century.
He had gone to bed with a heavy ache following his words with Benicia and her abrupt termination of his pleading. On his first review of the girl’s abnegation of the love she could not conceal the whole thing had seemed fantastic, almost childish in its essence of witch-bane and belief in blighting curse. How could this virile creature of a fine and cultured mind conceive herself the heritor of a weight of guilt carried down from some ancestor in the dim past? There was the superstition of the evil eye among ignorant peasants of the Latin countries, to be sure; but for a girl of Benicia’s intelligenceto be enslaved by such mumbo-jumbo as Urgo had voiced—ridiculous!
Such was Grant’s first review. Weighed from every angle and conceding the girl he loved every mitigation of jangled nerves, nevertheless the man of the cities could find naught but lamentable folly in it all. The first striking of the distant bell found him rebellious.
From where he lay he could look through a grated window up to the heavens: a square of dappled infinity. Insensibly his eyes began singling out the stars, measuring the gulf between this and that steady-burning point of light. Somewhere outside a desert owl timed the pulse of the night with an insistent call, unvarying, unwearying. The man on the bed found himself tallying the blood beats to his brain by this ghostly metronome. Beat—beat!—passing seconds of mortality for the man Grant Hickman. Beat—beat!—How puny a thing, how inconsequential the life of a man when calipered by the time measure of those burning suns up yonder!
He rallied himself, for such drifting into the subjective was a new and puzzling experience for a practical man. But minute by minute the spirit of the desert, which is the spirit of chaos become ponderable, stole over him, chaining hisimagination to things felt but not seen of men. A chill of the untoward and the unreal swept over him. He seemed to be braced nervously for some blow out of the void. His imagination played with a dim figure, the shape of El Rojo of the red hair riding—riding through the dark on his eternal mission of damnation.
The clock struck three and at the instant of the third stroke a shadow like a bat’s wing flitted across the bars of the window through which the eyes of the wakeful man had been roaming. A sharp tinkle of steel on stone split the silence of the chamber. Grant was galvanized into a leap from the bed. He stood shaking. Silence. Silence absolute as the grave after that single sharp ring of steel on stone.
He looked up at the window where the flitting passage of the bat’s wing had showed. Just the clear-burning stars there. The dim recesses of the room revealed no bulk of an intruder. Was this but the trick of overwrought nerves?
Grant fumbled for his matches and brought a light to the candle wick. By the waxing yellow glow he peered round the chamber. A flicker of white reflection caught his eye and he almost leaped to a spot on the floor directly beneath the window.
A dagger lay there. It was that curiously wrought affair of dulled silver haft and double-edged blade which he had noted before as part of the rosette of ancient knives and short swords clamped against the high wainscoting above the window for a wall decoration—the weapons Don Padraic had pointed to with the pride of a collector that first day the wounded guest was brought in from the desert.
But how could this dagger have slipped from its sheath with no hand to disturb it? Grant stooped to pick it up.
He had the haft in his grip for a quarter-second, then dropped the thing and leaped back as if from an asp. Something gummed the palm of his hand. Something showed dull black against the dim flicker of the blade. With a gasp he knelt and brought the candle closer.
Blood there on the blade! Blood on his hand!
He stood frozen while the pumping of his heart volleyed thunder against his ear drums. Murder cried aloud from that stained thing of silver and steel on the floor. Somewhere in this rambling old pile—somewhere in the silence a swift stroke that had snuffed out a life, and then the murderer, fleeing, had flung this weapon through the window. He had flung it almostat the feet of the only one in the whole house who was not sleeping.
Alarm! He must give the alarm while yet the murderer was near the scene! Spur to action followed swiftly upon Grant’s momentary numbness. He threw a dressing robe over him and ran through the door of his chamber giving onto the arcade about the patio. Just over the low balustrade lay the little jungle of flowering things, and on the opposite side, he remembered, hung the great Javanese gong Benicia used to summon the servants to the patio. Grant leaped the low balustrade and stumbled crashing through the geraniums and giant fuchsias toward the dim moon of metal he saw in the shadows of an arch.
He came to the gong, groped for the padded mace hanging over it. The patio roared with its released thunders.
Muffled shouts. Banging of doors. Lights. A white figure came blundering through the arcade; it was Bim Bagley.
“Some one’s been murdered!” Grant greeted him. “A dagger—through my window!”
Came others—servants with blankets clutched around them. Bim directed them to run to the great door in the outer wall and catch any skulker they might find in the gardens beyondthe house. Only dimly aware himself of something untoward, the big man could give no more specific directions.
Then Benicia, bare-footed, her hair fallen down over a blue robe she drew together across her breast. Grant started towards her.
“Where is father?” she cried in a woman’s divination, and Grant noted Don Padraic’s absence. He saw the girl make a quick step for a closed door behind her. Unreasoned instinct prompted him to put himself before the door, denying her.
“No; let me,” he commanded. She made a swaying step towards Grant but was met by the door swiftly closing in her face. Inside the chamber, he turned the key in the lock and struck a match to grope for a candle wick.
In the pallid flicker he saw the figure of Don Padraic on his high bed. A dagger wound was in his breast.
And the girl outside the locked door stood very still. Her eyes, wide with horror, were fixed upon the spot where she had seen Grant put his hand in pushing open the door.
Three small smears of blood there.
Grant was stunned. The vision of the figure with the fine patrician face there on the bed—in the breast the savage mark of violence—seemed but a part with the disordered fancies of recent hours. Beating of Benicia’s hands on the locked door and the faint sound of her calls aroused him. He stepped to the bedside and felt for a pulse, listened for a breath. There was none.
Murder had been done swiftly and surely—and done with the ancient dagger from the weapon cluster on the wall of his own room. In the stunning discovery he had just made Grant did not find any grim correlation between these two circumstances. He pulled up a coverlet to conceal ugly stains, then stepped to the door and unlocked it.
Benicia was waiting there. The eyes meeting his were blazing horror. Almost Grant read in them unthinkable accusation. He put out his hands to support her, for she was swaying in her effort over the doorstep.
“No—no!” Benicia shuddered and drew away from him as though he were a man unclean. Mystified, Grant stepped aside to let her pass. He saw her run to the side of the high bed and kneel there. Her hands went out blindly to grope for the still features on the pillow. They played uncertainly over them, then rested on the heavy mane of hair. Her fingers repeated little smoothing gestures. A breathless faltering of love phrases in the Spanish came from her lips. Grant, seeing that the girl retained mastery over herself, tiptoed from the chamber; it was not meet that he should be witness to a soul’s acceptance of the bitter fact of death.
He blundered into Bim coming back to the patio from his excursion at the head of servants beyond the great front door and told him what had happened; of the dagger dropped through the window and the murder. The big Arizonan reared back as if roweled.
“My God, man, that leaves the girl alone here in this jumping-off place!—With that snake Urgo in the offing. Boy, it’s up to us to help her out!”
Grant gripped his pal’s hand with a low, “I knew I could count on you, old scout.”
The dry patter of sandals came down the arcadefrom a knot of lights where some of the servants had gathered in indecision waiting to be given orders. Grant recognized ’Cepcion in the mountainous figure approaching and was recalled to the necessities of the moment.
“Tell her, Bim, what has happened and send her to her mistress. Then we must get out men to circle the Garden and prevent any person’s getting away.”
Bagley strode to meet the major domo and rattled swift Spanish at her. The waddling Indian woman quivered and lifted her fat arms above her head. A dreadful wavering cry came from her lips. Instantly the cry was taken up by the servants at the far end of the patio—a bone-chilling, animal noise which climbed slowly to the highest register and ended in a yelp. At the sound Grant’s blood went cold. This Indian death howl was the cry of the desert kind, calling the despair of creatures chained to a land of drought and ever-present death.
To escape it he went with Bim out of the great door to the unwalled spaces where the avenue of palms stood sentinels against the night. Beyond the bridge over the oasis stream lay the clutter of huts that was the Papago village, a fief under the overlordship of the manorhouse. Not a light showed among the thirty or forty beehive shapes when the two men started to walk under the palms; but suddenly a cry arose from the midst of the village answering that coming down the night wind from the mourners in the great house. Rumour of death had outstripped the two who walked.
The single cry from the village instantly grew in volume. Treble voices of squaws lifted the abomination of noise to the saw edge of a screech; men’s harsher notes rumbled and boomed intolerably. All the night was made bedlam.
Lights were winking through the chinks of the jacals when Grant and Bim came to the outskirts of the village. There was confusion of forms skittering about from hut to hut. Bim seized upon one man and demanded to know the whereabouts of Quelele, head man of the village. The big Indian soon stood before them with a gesture of hand to breast indicating they were to command him.
“Somebody has killed your master,” Bim told him. “Get out men on horses to circle the Garden and go out along the road both ways. Cover every foot and bring in anybody you may find.”
Quelele sped with hoarse shouts down thevillage’s single street; a dozen men joined him in a race for the corrals.
“There’s no way for the murderer to get out and live except along the road,” was Bim’s comment as they turned to retrace their steps to the house. “If he took to the mountains even with a horse he couldn’t last a day; they’re straight up and down.”
They had not gone fifty yards from the Papago village when a new sound punctuated the death cry, now settled to a monotonous chant promising hours’ duration. It was thebum-bum-bumof the water-drum—gigantic gourds floated, cut side down, in a tub of water and drubbed with sticks. That noise was accompanied by the locust-like slither and rattle of the rasping sticks, another primitive tempo-setting instrument of the Southwestern natives.
The death howl began to catch its measure by the boom and screak of these two instruments. A noise to beat against the inside of men’s skulls and set the bone of them in rhythm. Savage as the peaks of Altar, unremitting as the drive of wind-blown sand against granite.
Bum-chut-chut-chut!Sob of a land in chains.
“Oh, tell them to cut it!” Grant’s frayed nerves cried out protest. The other merelygave a wave of his hand comprehending resignation.
“Might as well tell the wind to stop. This’ll keep up for three days—this ding-dong business. It’s custom, old son.”
As they drew near to the house of death again Grant caught his mind harking back to that moment when he had come from Don Padraic’s chamber to confront the girl’s wild eyes—eyes with almost the unthinkable look of accusation in them. That aspect of her eyes dumbfounded him, left him groping for an explanation.
Once at the house, Grant took his friend to his chamber and showed him the knife where it lay on the floor as he had dropped it. The big Arizonan stooped over with the candle near the grisly thing—his hawk’s nose and salient cheekbones were outlined against the candle flame like the raised head of some emperor on a Roman coin—and very gingerly he turned the dagger over.
“Finger prints here on the haft,” he grunted.
“Yes, mine,” Grant put in. “I picked it up at first without knowing—without reckoning there might be—” He broke off to pour waterinto the quaint old willow-ware bowl which stood with its ewer on a stand in a corner, then he scrubbed his hands vigorously. A great relief came to him with this act of purification.
“Yours—yes, and probably somebody else’s,” Bim was mumbling his thoughts aloud. He stood erect once more and measured the height of the barred window over the lintel of which was fixed the rosette of arms. “Hum. I simply don’t figger why the man who wanted to kill the old don came to the outside of this room, clum up the wall an’ reached in through those bars there to take one of these old knives. Can’t see why all that fuss—more particular, why he snuck back here an’ tossed the knife through the bars after his bloody work.”
“Perhaps he wanted it to appear I am the murderer,” Grant hazarded doubtfully.
“You!” Bim looked up with a wry smile. “Why should you want to kill off that fine old man?—What motive?”
“What motive for anybody here in the house or in the Papago village outside for that matter?” Grant voiced his perplexity. “Don Padraic was thepadroneof every Indian from the Gulf to Arizora. From what his daughter tells me there’s not a Papago on the place here whowouldn’t gladly have died in his place. The whole thing’s too deep for me.”
They left the dim chamber with its relic of violence still lying on the floor and walked out into the perfumed patio. It was the hour when first heralds of dawn were coursing across the sky. Grant looked up to the dimming stars and read there the same message that had come to him the hours before swift stroke of tragedy: the fragility of that spider web man spins into the gulf of infinite time. And the oneness of this unlimned stretch of vacancy called the Desert of Altar with that ethereal desert of stars. How infinitesimal in the face of either the soul of man, its hopes!
A great sense of impotence weighed down on Grant. His thoughts dwelt with the girl he loved, sore stricken by this cowardly blow in the dark, bereft of one who had been soul of her soul. Now, the last of her name, alone in this bleak wilderness with none to fend for her against the wiles of Urgo except the child-like Indians: what a situation for Benicia to face! The man yearned to go to where she knelt alone with her dead, to take her in his arms and give her pledge of his love and protection. Yet that was not meet. The gulf of Benicia’s grief denied him.
Bim brought Grant out of his reverie with, “It’s my hunch we won’t have to look far to find the man behind this bad business.”
“You mean—?”
“That same—Hamilcar Urgo,” was Bim’s positive assertion. Grant objected:
“But you passed him well on the way to Magdalena this afternoon. It’s not likely he’d risk coming back in his car to attempt porch-climbing and murder. That’s not in his line.”
“Sure not! But one of these Indians around here who knows the lay of the house—somebody who savvyed, for instance, about those old knives on your wall—a hundred silver pesos from Urgo’s pocket—”
Grant’s mind was in no state to analyze subtleties of villainy. “I can’t see what Urgo could possibly gain by killing Don Padraic unless there’s a great deal behind his relations with Benicia’s father you and I don’t know.”
The fat shape of ’Cepcion waddled down the nearby arcade in the direction of the room wherein Benicia had locked herself. Bim’s eyes idly followed her as he pressed his argument:
“Maybe so—maybe not. But figger the thing thisaway: Urgo’s dead set on marryin’ this high-spirited señorita—if you’ll excuse metrompin’ on a tender subject, old hoss—an’ he reckons they’s two folks who don’t encourage those ideas to the limit—her father and yourself. Yourself he tries to get on suspicion and because you riled him on the train like you say. Now he does for the father an’ counts he has the girl for the taking, she having no kith or kin to come up in support, as you might say.”
The dawn reddened and still the two men in the patio fruitlessly pursued speculation. A sudden step crunched the gravel behind them. Both leaped at the sound, so taut were their nerves. They turned to see Benicia standing in the half light with the misty banks of geraniums for a background. With her were the giant Papago Quelele and two other Indians. They carried loops of hair ropes.
“Señor Hickman”—the girl’s voice was deadly cold—“Señor Hickman, my servant ’Cepcion has just brought to me the dagger she found in your room. The dagger is stained with my father’s blood, señor. There are prints of fingers on the haft of that dagger, Señor Hickman.”
Grant caught the poisonous edge of hatred in the voice, read the bitter accusation in her eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but Benicia checked him.
“I saw you leave those prints of my father’s blood on the door of his chamber, señor. Before my very eyes, señor! Just now when ’Cepcion brings me the dagger she finds in your room I compare the print of fingers on its haft with the print on the door. They are the same. What have you to say, Señor Hickman?”
“Say!” Bim Bagley’s voice snapped like a whip lash. “Are you accusing Grant Hickman here of murder?” Benicia never even cast a glance at him. She repeated:
“What have you to say to this, Señor Hickman?” Grant answered levelly, “Enough already has been said, Señorita O’Donoju.” Benicia signalled to Quelele and he advanced with the ropes.
With the lithe spring of a cat Bim put himself between Grant and the advancing Indian. His face had gone dead white and his eyes were coals blown upon by the wind of anger.
“None of that! Get back there—you!” Bim’s voice was scarcely audible but his pose of furious battling on the hair-trigger of release was sufficiently vocal to awe the Papago giant into a backward stumble. Then to Benicia:
“Young woman, you’re making the mistake of your life. I’m a’mighty sorry for you, an’ you are going to be right regretful yourself when you have time to think.” Grant made a step forward to lay a checking hand on his friend’s arm. He would have spoken but the girl interrupted.
“My father’s blood on this man’s hands!—the dagger from the wall of his chamber—” Of a sudden the last shred of restraint shehad battled to impose upon herself gave way and a flood came under propulsion of hysteria. Out fluttered her hands to point the object of her execration.
“You—I do not know you! Just a chance meeting between us and we part. Then fate brings you to this house wounded—snatched from death. An escaped convict from a chain gang—you yourself admitted as much just last night. With good reason my cousin, Colonel Urgo, must have caused your arrest. Why should I not believe you capable of killing my father? Why not when the signs of his very blood cry out against you!”
“Señorita O’Donoju—” Grant’s effort to check her was fruitless, for she had whirled upon Bagley: “And you! Unknown to my father—unknown to me. He brought you here on your own representation. You said you were hunting for your friend to whom we had offered our hospitality. Can you deny that both of you discovered opportunity here to kill—and then to rob?”
The storm that had swept the girl through this welter of imaginings, illogical, frenetic, took heavy toll of her physical reserves. Now she stood trembling, white-faced in the spreading dawn, pitiful. Her small hands wereclenched into fists across her breast. Flutterings of uncontrolled nerves made the flesh of her temples pulsate. Grant, for all the crushing horror of these moments, felt pity pushing through the numbness Benicia’s accusation had wrought. Never had he seen a woman so tortured by the devils of hysteria; he was appalled. He spoke to her gently:
“If you will permit me to go to my room while you make further investigations I will answer any questions they may suggest. It must be plain to you, Señorita O’Donoju, that I cannot escape from this place.”
The girl gave him a dazed look as if she hardly comprehended what he said, then she slowly nodded and, beckoning the Indians to follow, she turned and disappeared beyond the patio’s green. Bim threw an arm over his pal’s shoulder and accompanied him to his room. At the door he whirled Grant about with a strong grip of both his hands and gave him a grin more eloquent than any sermon on fortitude.
“When the she-ones get to stampedin’, old pal, they sure have us helpless men winging. Now go in there and get a sleep while I take a look round below your window and elsewheres.”
Bim’s easy injunction to sleep was not so easily followed by the man who was a self-appointedprisoner. On his bed Grant tossed in a fever of mingled blind speculation and outraged pride. Strive though he might to palliate Benicia’s charge against him on the score of the girl’s complete prostration through the night’s tragedy, the quick and fiery blood in her that was inheritance from Spanish forebears, yet always he came against the same ugly fact: one whom he loved with all the passion in him and whose return of love he had dared hope to win had accused him of murder out of hand.
Yet how could he prove his innocence? Of a sudden that thought plumped down on him with the burst of a high explosive shell.
Benicia’s accusation had appeared monstrous, yes. But, look upon the facts through her eyes—so a curiously impersonal phase of mind prompted; what were those facts as they appeared to the girl? A man who was first a chance acquaintance in a train and then, by a trick of fate, a guest in the house, rouses the household at three o’clock in the morning by sounding an alarm in the patio. He calls “Murder!” though he does not say who has been murdered, he has not apparently discovered the body of Don Padraic in his chamber.
This man—this waif brought in from the desert—prevents the daughter’s going in to theroom of death until first he has entered that room and locked the door behind him. He leaves the marks of his fingers in blood upon the outside of that door. Then he and his friend—“call him confederate” was Grant’s cynical amendment—organize a hue and cry outside of the house. While this is in progress a servant finds in the guest’s room a dagger; instead of being in its usual place amid the rack of weapons on the wall this dagger lies on the floor as if hastily thrown there by one who had no proper time for its concealment. The dagger is blood stained and on its haft are the same finger prints as those on the door of the dead don’s chamber.
There was the record. How refute it?
Say that while lying awake he saw a hand appear at the bars of his window and heard the tinkle of a knife dropped within? Why, if he was so vigilant at three o’clock in the morning, had he not seen that hand of a murderer steal in to abstract the weapon before the deed? And whose hand was it? Did not the burden of proof that it was not his own which took the dagger from the wall rest solely upon Grant Hickman?
Another’s finger prints on that bloodied haft besides his own? Perhaps. But it needed theinstruments of precision of a detective central office to juggle with such minutiæ as the whorls and spirals in a finger print, and they most certainly were lacking at the Casa O’Donoju. Graver difficulty still, there were a hundred and more Indians in the oasis; how gather them all together and take the prints of their fingers?
The more his mind roved amid hypotheses the closer about him seemed drawn the meshes of circumstance. As the sun of a new day painted a glory beyond the bars of his window Grant Hickman felt himself as helpless as that Tomlinson of the Kipling story who plunged headlong through the space between all the suns of infinity.
He must have slipped into the sleep of exhaustion, for it was near noon when a knock on his door roused him. At his bidding ’Cepcion opened to illustrate a command in Spanish with a backward jerk of her head. Grant arose and followed her through a corridor to the patio. Benicia was standing there in an attitude of awaiting him, a little beyond her was Bim, his face wreathed with a heartening smile.
The girl received him with bleak eyes. “You will please follow me, señor,” was all she said. Then she led the way, the two men a step behind her, out of the still house and down the avenueof palms towards the Papago village. From time to time a turn in the path gave Grant a glimpse of Benicia’s face. It was a changed woman he saw.
Gone was the vital spirit of joy of living which always gave the girl her character of Eurydice in khaki; gone, too, that softness of grain born of happiness undisturbed, of life amid the elemental things of nature. This Benicia was a cold fury moving to judgment. The call of her Spanish blood from centuries past—call for vengeance and blood-sacrifice—had possessed her. It was as if some mocking cartoonist had run a brush over the features of Innocence in portraiture, giving an upward twist of cruelty to lips, the glint of blood lust in eyes.
They came to the Indian village, all hushed in anticipation of some prodigy. Only the frog-croaking of the water drums and the dry clicking of the rasping sticks betokened a continuance of the mourning ritual. All the retainers of the Casa O’Donoju, farmers, cattle handlers, house servants, men, squaws and half-naked children, were assembled in the rudely-defined street that led between rows of reed and mud-capped huts. Two only were seated apart: the man who bobbled the drummingsticks over the turtle-back halves of the gourds and an ancient who manipulated the rasping sticks. On every bronze-black face showed the strain of awaiting an untoward event.
When Benicia appeared some elderly squaws started afresh the lugubrious death howl, but a gesture from the girl silenced them. She beckoned Quelele to her and spoke some rapid words in the Papago tongue. He in turn passed the orders to two men, who ran into one of the nearby huts to reappear staggering under the weight of a great metal kettle, such as might be used for soap boiling, carried between them. Quelele laid two heavy flat stones in the middle of the street; the kettle carriers deposited their burden, rim down on the rocks. A space of two inches or more showed between the kettle rim and the hard adobe.
Still the hollowbum-bum-bumof the water-drum, whisper and cluck of the notched sticks. A very old man, the skin of whose naked legs was grey and tough as elephant hide, had attached ceremonial circlets of dried yucca pods about his ankles in a cuff extending almost to the knees. He took his stand by the instrumentalists and his feet moved in a shuffle in time to the drum beats. The pods emitted drywhispers. The rapt look of a seer was on his leathern features.
The kettle in place, Quelele himself went to a small pen ofocatillasticks on the outskirts of the village and brought therefrom a young rooster. The fowl’s head bobbed nervously and his small eyes glinted as he was carried on the big Indian’s arm through the throng. Two helpers lifted the edge of the soap kettle while Quelele thrust the cock underneath. A faint clucking came muffled from the iron prison. The bird thrust his head out here and there from beneath the rim, seeking egress.
Now Benicia took from ’Cepcion something she had carried wrapped about in a handkerchief and carried it to the kettle top. She let fall the handkerchief and with a slight gesture focused the eyes of all upon the stained dagger. A sigh like the swish of a scythe in long grass swept through the crowd as the girl balanced the knife on the exact top of the dome of fire-smudged metal. The ancient with the yucca rattles did a sacrificial step which caused a sharp alarm like that of the desert sidewinder’s warning.
Grant and Bim, still unaware of the significance of all this preparation, sensed the growing tensity of emotions all about them. ThePapagoes, like all their kind, more than ready to invest with ritual any untoward incident of life, saw in the white girl’s preparations—particularly in the offering of the knife upon this rude altar—formulæ of an appeal to decision of powers beyond human comprehension. Perhaps the elders, remembering tales of ancient custom, recognized the preliminaries and welcomed a revival among the unregenerate younger men of a direct appeal to Elder Brother. If big Quelele knew better he had kept his tongue still.
Benicia’s features had never relaxed their cold intentness during the preparations. There was even, to Grant’s troubled scrutiny, some element of the barbaric there. A look like that on the stone visage of an Aztec goddess, implacable, without mortal instincts. She took her stand by the kettle and spoke rapidly to the Papagoes, pointing to the knife, then lifting her finger to mark the place of the sun in the white sky.
Abruptly she finished, stooped and touched one finger to the bottom of the kettle. It came away blackened by soot. Then she turned to Grant. “It is the test of God,” she said in a dulled voice. “My people have used it in times past when they were perplexed as I am. Allhere including you, Señor Hickman, and you, Señor Bagley, will endure this test even as I just have done. Put your fingers to the kettle and show them to all, blackened. God will speak through the mouth of the imprisoned cock when the guilty man touches the iron.”
Grant gave the girl a steady look, then without a word he stepped to the blackened dome, swept the fingers of his right hand across it and held them aloft. Benicia was looking away when Grant stepped back beside her; he saw a convulsive movement of her throat—no other sign. Then big Bim dared the oracle with an easy grace. A shuddering intake of breath from the Indians as each man underwent trial.
Quelele now gave an order which brought all the men of the village and great-house into line of which he was the head. Even the musicians were replaced by squaws who did not permit the drubbing and squeaking to diminish. The faces of all wore the set look of hypnosis—eyes white and staring, muscles twittering in cheeks, tongues licking out over dried lips.
Thrut-t-t-t-t!An extra flourish of the rasping sticks and a thunder of the water drums as Quelele started the line forward toward the kettle. The big Indian moved with a mincing sidewise step reminiscent of some deer-dance ofhis people at the festival ofsahuaro. His arms were held rigidly crooked at elbows and fingers splayed. The great moon face was contorted into a lolling mask. He sweat with fear.
Twice the lightning-like bobbing out and back of the imprisoned cock’s head as Quelele approached. “Ai-ie!” a squaw screamed in a frenzy.
The leader touched the kettle, held up his blackened finger for those in line behind him to see, then broke from line and stood at a little distance from Benicia and the two white men.
Second in line was the ancient with the yucca rattles on his legs. Coming to the kettle, he stood rigid, tilted his old eyes to the blinding sun. A shiver ran down his body which caused every dry pod of his anklets to emit a whisper. He whirled once, dipped and swept a finger through the soot. “Njo oovik(Bird speaking),” he cried, and there was foam on his lips.
But the bird did not speak, and the line came slowly on. The spell of the weird had Grant bound. The rational in him tried to prompt that all this was but a shrewd application of the new psychological method of crime detection as utilized by primitive peoples before ever the science of the mind was thought of;but his imagination strained to hear the crowing of the cock when the finger of guilt was laid upon the iron shell. Mutter of the drums, shuffle of dancing feet, guttural calls and imprecations: these things had swept away all prim gauds and dressings of a mind counting itself superior and he was swept back to kinship with the wild, its children. Again the desert moved to bring him under its subjection.
“Lookit that fellah!” It was Bim who gripped Grant’s arm and pointed to the advancing line. One of the younger bucks had dodged out of his place and fallen back three numbers.
On came the men facing trial by ordeal. Now and again the imprisoned cock thrust his head out with snake-like darting, and the individual who was poised over the kettle hiccoughed fear. The young man who had dodged back tried the trick again when he was near the kettle; but the one behind him held him by the shoulders and forced him on.
The dodger came to the place of test, hesitated, made a downward sweep of his hand and stumbled past. Big Quelele suddenly leaped at him and gripped his right hand. No smudge of soot on the fingers.
“Hai—ee!” Quelele called, and the line stood still. He wrenched the young man’s hand high above his head and showed the fingers clean. “Hai—ee!” chorused fifty voices. Quelele started to drag the wretch back to the kettle.
Then his victim went to his knees—to his face in the dust. He rolled and kicked, screaming. Still Quelele dragged him nearer the kettle, his right hand firmly gripped in the vise of his own two, forefinger extended to take the print of soot and draw the cock’s crow.
“I did it! I did it!” the wretched creature blubbered. Quelele dropped him as if he were a poisonous lizard. The crowd pushed forward menacingly. The murderer fumbled in his trousers pocket and brought out a shining silver peso, which he threw from him with a gesture of horror. Quelele picked it up and turned it over in his palm, his brow heavily knotted. He passed it to Benicia.
The girl turned the coin over to the reverse, whereon the spread eagle grips a snake and a cactus branch in his talons. A deep knife cut was scored through the neck of the eagle.
The wretch in the dust saw she had noted the mutilation and cried out to her in pleading, “The sign, mistress! The sign! The soldier-señor Urgo tells me many months ago when Ireceive the sign I shall kill or my brother, who is in his prison, will be shot!”
“And he gave you this—” the girl began.
“Yesterday, mistress. He passes me in his thunder-wagon and tosses me this peso. ‘Find the knife in the room of the wounded gringo señor,’ he commands. ‘Use no other.’”
Benicia nodded to Quelele, who made a sign to others. They brought a hair rope and trussed the murderer hands to feet. His lips were mute. Stamp of fate was on his grey features. He knew his punishment: to be taken to the burning lava fields of Pinacate, where the dead volcanoes are, there to be left without gun or canteen; no man would see him again. Such was the Papago custom decreed for murderers from beforetime.
She who had ordained this trial by ordeal had turned away, once the wretch’s confession had been heard. The soul of the girl now stood its own trial in turn; faced by the guilt of false suspicion, by the wounds wrought of bitter accusation, it must needs purge itself. Yes, even though the spirit of Benicia O’Donoju was not one easily to humble itself. A long minute she fought with herself and finally turned gropingly to make her hard penance before Grant.
Then she saw the figure of the man whose debtor in honour she was striding with his companion towards the avenue of palms leading to the house. The distance between them seemed suddenly the breadth of the world.