WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT
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.