“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—”