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 intelligence to 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 his imagination 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 almost at 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 beyond the 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.