Six days after Quelele the Papago set out on his mission of mercy from the Casa O’Donoju he returned to the oasis. It was in the first flush of dawn that the shuf-shuf of the little car roused master and servants; Quelele had travelled all night and at a pace to conserve the strength of the wounded man, who lay on thick straw in the box body. All night without lights save the thickly strewn lamps in the firmament, wending hither and thither through the scrub where half-guessed lines in the sand marked the Road of the Dead Men—a journey weird enough.

For Grant Hickman it was but part of the moving drama of a dream. That instant of flight from the chain gang, when a bullet tore through his shoulder and sent him toppling into the arroyo, was the visitation of death; in his flickering perceptions all else following was but adventuring in the country beyond death—incidents to paint impressions on a consciousness otherwise wiped clean of otherworld recollections. First of these exposures on the cloudy plate of his mind came many days after the rurales had left him for dead in the desert: a face deep-dyed as mahogany and with white bristles of a beard about chin and lips, a face kindly withal, which bent near his as a hand lifted his head to bring his lips to a vessel of pungent brew. Then another age of drifting and swimming through soft clouds.

Grant had just come to accept the grey-thatched face of El Doctor Coyote Belly as part of a permanent picture when another Indian appeared between himself and the bundles of sticks making a roof over his head. This second personage in the world of the unreal, a giant with the features of a boy, had spelled El Doctor in ministering herb brews and keeping the wet cloths under the burning wound in his back for what seemed many years. Then Grant had felt himself lifted, carried from the hut with the bundles of sticks for a roof and laid on sweet smelling straw. In the starshine he felt the hand of El Doctor close over his own with a heartening squeeze.

Then—wonder of wonders!—the racking cough of a gas engine, and Grant was soaring back to that familiar earth which had been lost to him so long.

Upon the arrival of the car bringing Grant to the Casa O’Donoju Don Padraic, hastily dressed, superintended the moving of his guest to a small, clean room, candle lit. The wounded man felt the gracious softness of feathers under him, the suave clinging of sheets. An aged Indian woman, working under the white man’s direction, divested him of his tattered clothes and patted everything comfortable. Drowsy luxury stole across his consciousness to cloud it and bring sleep.

Sunlight flooded the room when Grant awoke. He was alone. His mind was clearer than it had been since he was shot. Only the steady burning in his vitals linked this moment of comfort with the tortured past. His eyes roved about the room to take in its appointments. White walls devoid of ornamentation; by the heavy door with its curiously wrought iron latch a single chest of drawers of some antique pattern; the bed he lay upon massive as a galleon of old days and with a canopy of carved wood and tapestry for a sail: here was a room from the period department of the Metropolitan Museum.

Grant was patiently trying to fit together the jig-saw scraps of his memory when the door opened and the white man he had seen the night before entered. Seeing the light of reason in the patient’s eyes, Don Padraic smiled and bowed. Something mighty heartening lay in that welcome and the warm cordiality of Don Padraic’s features.

“I am rejoiced to find you better to-day,” he said as he drew a chair to the side of the bed. “Yours was a hard journey last night.”

“I am still a little uncertain up here”—Grant tapped his forehead with an attempt at a laugh. “For instance, I was just thinking I had been lifted straight into a room of the Metropolitan in New York.”

The host’s brows were knitted an instant, then he caught the allusion and smiled.

“Ah, yes; we have rather ancient furnishings here. But you are quite a distance from New York, seÑor. This is the Casa O’Donoju in the Garden of Solitude, and I am Don Padraic O’Donoju.”

The name crashed into Grant’s consciousness like the clang of iron. His heart gave a great leap. Could it be possible—? No, this must be but part of the aurora dreams of the vague eternity still just behind his back. Grant wished to make no blunder which might belie the present soundness of his mind, so he held his tongue over the question burning to be asked. Instead:

“My name is Grant Hickman, sir. I am deeply obliged to you for your charity in bringing me here. Of course, I do not know quite how it all happened—my coming here from some place else, where an Indian, or two of them—seemed to be caring for me. And I fear I am hardly a presentable guest.” The sick man’s hand passed ruefully over his stubby chin.

Don Padraic made a gesture dismissing Grant’s fastidiousness. “SeÑor, a gentleman should not consider the state of his beard and the state of his health with equal seriousness. The one may be repaired at once even if our wishes cannot immediately effect a cure of the other. Permit me to retire, seÑor, and not tax you with questions until you are stronger.”

Shortly after the gentle host had bowed himself out an Indian servant entered with basin and razor and effected an agreeable change in the patient’s appearance. Then Grant was left alone with the tab to a wonderful possibility to turn over and over in his mind.

He was in the house of the O’Donoju. Could there be more than one family of that unusual name in the desert country; or had fate thrown him a recompense for all he’d suffered by lifting him from a line of chained convicts to carry him through a nightmare straight to the one spot in all the world he most desired to be in? Perhaps under the same roof, near enough to him to permit the carrying of her laughter, was Benicia, the vivid creature who had won his heart into captivity.

He was not kept long in suspense. The door opened and Don Padraic’s white clad figure appeared, behind it Benicia. She was in khaki, as Grant had last seen her at the Arizora station, wide-brimmed hat noosed under her chin just as she had come in from a ride through the oasis. All the wild, free spaces of the wilderness seemed compacted in the girl’s trim figure, in the flush of her browned cheeks touched by the sun.

“SeÑor Hickman—” Don Padraic began introduction, but Benicia was at the bedside; her cool hand was given to Grant’s clasp with a gesture of boyish comradeship.

“We need not be introduced, father,” Benicia laughed, and there was a queer catch in her throat. “SeÑor Hickman did me a service on the train which served as the best introduction in the world.” Turning back to Grant—“I did not know, seÑor, you were the wounded man Quelele brought into our home so early this morning—did not even know we had a guest until my father told me when I returned from my ride a few minutes ago.”

Grant strove to put all his heart prompted in words that were mete: “And I did not dare hope that this house to which a miracle has brought me was the desert home you described on the train.”

Benicia’s eyes read surely what his lips would not frame. She saw in the white face of the wounded man a touch of that old hardihood and forthright spirit of address which had commended this American to her at first meeting—commended him even against her own impulse to resent his self-assurance. But she saw, too, how suffering battled to dim the valiant spirit, and something deeper than abstract sympathy stirred in her heart.

“But, seÑor, to meet you again this way! Father has told me the message brought from El Doctor: how you were found among dead men on the Hermosillo road and brought back to life by that old Papago. You, a stranger and unknown here in the desert country—how could this happen to you, seÑor?”

Don Padraic interposed:

“Perhaps, ’Nicia, when SeÑor Hickman is stronger he will answer questions. Would it not be better—?”

The girl was quick to appreciate her father’s considerate thought. Again she laid her hand in Grant’s.

“If you will permit me to play the doctor—at least to see to it that lazy old ’Cepcion, your nurse, does not neglect you?” The smile that went with this promise was tonic for the sick man. It remained like an afterglow when the door was closed behind the girl. And when the wrinkled Indian woman came an hour later with broth on a silver tray that smile reappeared, translated into the fragrant beauty of rose petals laid by the side of the bowl.

Five luxurious days passed—days each with a wonderful spot of sunshine in them—that when Benicia accompanied the aged ’Cepcion to his chamber. On these daily visits she would draw her chair to the side of the great bed—she looked very small below the high buttress of the mattress—and while he quaffed his chicken broth and nibbled his flaky tortillas Benicia would talk. ’Cepcion, like some mahogany coloured manikin in her flaring skirts and winged bodice, always stood, arms akimbo and features passive as a graven image, behind her mistress’ chair.

The girl’s talk was directed away from the personal; with an art concealing art she evaded Grant’s frequent endeavours to swing conversation into more intimate channels. She brought the world of the desert into the sick room, unconsciously revealing herself as a flashing, restless creature of the wastes: now on horseback and threading dim trails over the Line to carry quinine to a family of Papagoes down with the fever; now beside Quelele in the little gas-beetle and skimming to Caborca, the southern town, to buy a wedding dress for an Indian belle.

Not once did she touch again upon the subject of Grant’s misadventures and how he came to be found on the road to Hermosillo. A delicate sense of the fitness of things prompted her to await the moment when he himself should volunteer explanations. Grant, on his part, felt an impelling reluctance to give details, for to do so would necessitate his revealing his conviction that little Colonel Urgo’s was the hand that had pushed him so near death. A delicate—perhaps quixotic—sense of personal honour prompted that he keep his enemy’s name out of any explanations. He could not know how close might be the little Spaniard’s relations with Benicia and her father—even discounting Urgo’s boast that he expected to make the girl his wife—and, besides, he felt the score between himself and Urgo must be evened before he linked the Colonel’s name with his experiences.

With Benicia’s father Grant modified his resolution to a certain degree. It was no more than proper, he argued with himself, that the master of the Casa O’Donoju have some explanation for the presence in his house of a man from a Mexican chain gang.

“SeÑor O’Donoju,” Grant addressed his host when the latter was come on one of his daily visits, “you have been more than kind to me, but I fear I may be an embarrassment to you—a fugitive, you know, if that is my status before the law.”

“My dear sir”—the courtly Spaniard waved away Grant’s scruples with a smile—“you forget that the evidence El Doctor Coyote Belly found on the Hermosillo Road—you the only survivor among eight men who had been murdered, eight men with marks of fetters on their wrists; that this evidence, I say, clearly indicates you now have no status whatever before what the Mexicans call their law.”

Grant looked his surprise. Don Padraic continued easily:

“You are officially dead, SeÑor Hickman. It is the ley de fuga—the law of flight. You were shot trying to escape while being transferred from one prison to another. Monstrous barbarism! So the president, Francisco Madero, met his end; so, perhaps, Carranza. When you were chained to other convicts and sent afoot out into the desert you were doomed; the men responsible for that act counted you as dead the minute they ordered you overland to Hermosillo.”

Grant recalled the mask of fear he’d seen settle over the features of the big Indian, his chain mate, when the rurales began to loose the fetters in the sunset hour of that fateful night on the desert; how the asthmatic little Chinaman had commenced his chant to the joss—men who had known every weary hour of that march brought them nearer to the stroke of doom.

“I have no direct evidence to explain why I was in that chain gang,” Grant began, honestly enough; then he told the story of the fight in the gambling palace after the discovery of the counterfeit dollars in his pocket, reserving only all reference to Colonel Urgo. His host heard him through with a grave face.

“Perhaps,” he ventured, “you were on some mission to the Border which ran counter to the interests of a scheming official on the Mexican side.”

“To be honest, I do not know yet on what mission I came to Arizora,” Grant conceded with a laugh. “A friend of mine wrote me in New York he wanted me to join him in ’a whale of a proposition’ out here along the Border. I was fool enough to come just on that, and when I had an interview with a Dr. Stooder—”

“Ah!” The interjection escaped Don Padraic against instant reflex of judgment, as his hand part way raised to his lips betrayed. Grant caught the other’s quickly covered confusion and suddenly was sensible of his careless garrulity. Here he was bandying names in a matter his friend Bagley had surrounded with unexplained secrecy. He finished lamely:

“And so on my first night in Arizora I fell into a trap.”

When Don Padraic left the chamber Grant still was dwelling upon his host’s involuntary exclamation at the name of Doc Stooder. What was there about the saturnine physician, what notorious reputation which could lead a hermit such as Don Padraic away off in this desert oasis to evince surprise that one under his roof had had dealings with him? More and more an undefined regret for his mention of the name of Stooder plagued him.

In truth, the whole reason for his coming to Arizora and whatever fantastic project might be at the bottom of it appeared now strangely linked with this latest turn of fate, his coming to the Casa O’Donoju. Grant became aware of a duty long overlooked and wrote a brief and non-committal note to Bim Bagley, in Arizora, saying only he had suffered an accident and would return to the Border town as soon as he was able. This Benicia took from him to give to Quelele when he should go to the nearest railroad town.

Two days thereafter befell a boon the wounded man had dreamed of during many yearning hours. Two male servants of the household came to dress him in one of Don Padraic’s white suits—his own clothes were rags—and assisted him down a long hall which turned into the green paradise of the patio. There under the royal date palm they sat him, with the fountain pool and its magic purple sails of the hyacinth at his feet, behind and on either hand the green and crimson glory of the geraniums.

Benicia was awaiting him there alone. The girl, in a simple green frock which revealed bare arms and the warm round of her shoulders, was the embodiment of the garden’s fairy essence. She was a sprite of this green and glowing place. Hot sunlight falling upon her head made it a great exotic flower.

“Now both of us can revel in being lawbreakers,” she exclaimed when the Indians had bowed themselves out. She was hovering about Grant, patting into place the gay serape which covered his knees.

“Lawbreakers!” Grant’s glowing eyes bespoke the intoxication of pleasure. “I feel, rather, like a prisoner whose sentence is commuted.”

The girl’s rippling laughter ended with, “Oh, but my father said you should not be moved for three days yet. Now he has gone into town with Quelele and you and I are breaking the law—with you equally guilty.”

“What man would not rush into crime with you to lead?” he rallied, and the little game of give and take in joke and repartee which had been of their devising these last few days of Grant’s convalescence, when Benicia made her daily visits at his bedside, was resumed. It was in this course their friendship had grown: on a basis of comradeship and with healthy minds in apposition, giving and finding something of humour, of rollicking fun. No angling for sickly sentimentalism on the part of this unspoiled girl of the waste places—so Grant during hours of staring at the ceiling had appraised the heart of Benicia O’Donoju; no place in their communion for any of the trite nothings a man burbles into concealed ear of a flapper over tea or whatever else comes from the sophisticated city teapot.

During these delicious hours in the shadow-dappled patio, as heretofore, Benicia continued a tantalizing enigma to the man of cities. While seeming to give so freely of herself in laughing quip and quick answer to his sallies, never was there that least suspicion of some overtone to her buoyancy the man yearned to catch; not the quick revealing of secret depths in the eyes which would betray a heart responsive to the waves of the man’s love enveloping her. Yet the lips of the girl, full, soft, trembling with unconcealed promise of richness to the one conquering them: these were not the lips of one devoid of love’s alluring tyrannies. Nor was the rounded body of her, fully ripened to share in the law of life giving, one to wither outside love’s garden.

Grant could not speculate, with tremors of eagerness, on the flood of passion that was dammed behind the girl’s sure mastery of herself. Dare he believe that he might be the one to loose that flood? As he sat there in the odorous garden the nimble, superficial part of his brain was playing with bubbles while the deeper fibre of him resolved that nothing in the world mattered beyond possessing Benicia’s love.

When luncheon was cleared away—it had been a veritable feast of laughter—Benicia clapped her hands and gave some direction to the servant answering. The Indian woman disappeared in the body of the house, soon to come waddling out under the weight of the great harp. Grant gasped his surprise; he never had associated harps with any surroundings other than the orchestra pit.

“My Irish ancestors, who were kings in Donegal, always called for their harp after a feast,” Benicia declared with laughter in her eyes. “That is the reason we Irish are such dreamers. The harp is the stairs to dreams. Listen, seÑor, and hear if I tell the truth.”

Grant watched her, fascinated. Her slender body was in the shade of a great palm frond, but when she leaned her head forward against the carved sounding board a narrow lance of sunshine shot down to kindle her hair to flame there against the gold. As her bare arms passed in swift flight of swallows across the field of strings shadows and sunlight played upon them in gules and chevrons of black and ivory.

First she gave the solo, Depuis le Jour, from some opera Grant vaguely recalled; it was a mad thing, wherein the great instrument thundered to the far recesses of the patio garden. Then the girl’s mood changed and was interpreted in the sighing motif of In the Garden. It was all bird song and lisping fountains. Grant allowed his eyes to close so his soul could take flight with the music.

Slowly, reluctantly, Benicia’s fingers swept the final chords. The great harp was still.

Out from the shadow of a flanking archway stepped a dapper little figure in a cloak. Heels clicked sharply and the marionette bowed low. It was Colonel Hamilcar Urgo.