Slowly, reluctantly, Benicia’s fingers swept the final chords. The great harp was still.
Out from the shadow of a flanking archway stepped a dapper little figure in a cloak. Heels clicked sharply and the marionette bowed low. It was Colonel Hamilcar Urgo.
[CHAPTER XI]
THE MARK OF EL ROJO
Colonel Urgo straightened himself, and the smile that had twisted his little waxed moustache awry suddenly was smudged out. For his eyes encountered what they were hardly prepared to see—a living dead man. His face went sickly white; one hand arrested itself in the motion of making the sign of the cross. He stared at Grant, fascinated.
Grant himself was little less shaken at the appearance of his enemy. It was as if a cobra suddenly had lifted its head from the patio’s flowering jungle. In a moment of dreamy ecstasy, when he had felt his heart yearning toward the girl’s over a bridge of music, came this sinister apparition of evil. It was not fear of the man that caused Grant’s heart to pound—the waspish little Spaniard possessed no essence of malignity sufficient to terrify one of the American’s fibre; rather a loathing and instinctive reflex of anger gorged his combative nerves with blood. Grant read surely enough the shock of surprise in his enemy’s eyes and cannily laid this revelation away as a weapon to hand should necessity demand its use.
As for Benicia, she made no pretence of concealing her annoyance. Quick perception seized upon the coincidence of her father’s absence and Colonel Urgo’s coming; she knew the wily little suitor had somehow managed to time his visit to that circumstance. In the first flush of her surprise Benicia caught herself feeling a great thankfulness that Grant Hickman was in the house.
“If you have come to see my father”—Benicia did not rise to greet Urgo when he took a tentative step toward her—“he is absent at the moment. I am sorry you have not found him at home.”
Urgo’s lynx eyes darted from the girl’s face to Grant’s and back again. Plainly he was in a quandary, not knowing how much—if anything—this American had told his hosts of the circumstances of a night in Sonizona and its consequences. Benicia, misreading his perturbation, was quick to interpose with a smile all irony: