She broke off suddenly, rose and hurried into the shadows beyond the range of firelight. Grant heard a door latch at the far end of the room click to.
[CHAPTER XV]
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.