ACCUSATION
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.