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 arcade from 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 manor house. 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 the village’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 the bum-bum-bum of 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 merely gave 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 water into 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 the padrone of every Indian from the Gulf to Arizora. From what his daughter tells me there’s not a Papago on the place here who wouldn’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 me trompin’ 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.