“Yes, she will hear,” came an unexpected voice from the direction of the doorway, and Benicia walked up to the Indian. El Doctor made a step forward to meet her; with a gesture of reverence he took the hand stretched out to him and placed it first on his brow then over his heart. His old eyes shone. The two white men turned and walked beyond earshot. From a distance Grant saw the girl lead the medicine man to a rustic seat beneath the pepper tree; snatches of barbarous Papago speech came to his ears.
The glory of sunset, more glorious because of the dust held in suspension in the air, came and passed and still Benicia and the medicine man talked beneath the pepper tree. The evening meal was a mournful affair, with only Grant and Bim at the candle-lit table. Grant, unable to contain his restlessness, quit the house alone when supper was finished; he walked down the avenue of palms in the direction of the red fires marking the Indian village. The night was luminous with that sheen which covers the desert heavens like a bloom. Thin rind of a moon hung low in the west, a cold glow of nacre.
He had crossed the bridge and was about to turn off into an adjacent field when he heard a footstep in the shadowed aisle below palm tops ahead of him. A figure scarce discernible in its black garb came upon him.
“Benicia!”
She stopped, startled. “Ah, it is you,” was her murmured greeting as Grant stepped to her side.
“Alone and in the dark,” he chided, but the girl tossed off his fears with a gesture of the hands. “I have been with El Doctor down to the village to find a place for him to lodge.” Grant imprisoned her arm and gently persuaded her steps back down the aisle of darkness toward the village. For a minute they walked in silence. Each knew there were things to be spoken, yet each was reluctant to break the silent communion their nearness wrought.
“And El Doctor gave you the message he came to bring?” finally from Grant. Her head nodded assent.
“Not bad news, I hope,” he hazarded. A tightening of fingers on his arm as she answered, “The best—and the worst.” Grant drew a long breath.
“And may I share with you—the worst?” he managed to murmur. Now once more that dragging weight on his arm as when he guided Benicia through the storm—mute signal of surrender from one spent in the fight.