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.