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.