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 dollars availed 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. El Rojo’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, old side 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 him ride 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 a topic 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 Four Evangelists 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.”