Colonel Hamilcar Urgo was not addicted to introspection. He took himself as he found himself and as a rule was well pleased with the find. Had any non-partisan voice of conscience told him cruelty played a large part in his make-up undoubtedly the little Colonel would have denied the charge with hot indignation. Cruelty, to his way of thinking, was exclusively a feminine defect; a woman was guilty of cruelty, for example, when she spurned the honourable advances of so honourable a suitor as Hamilcar Urgo. Benicia O’Donoju was the cruelest creature he knew; wherefore like a fractious horse she must be broken. No, Señor Urgo found nothing reprehensible in his orders to Ygnacio, the Papago, that Don Padraic must be put out of the way. The same impulse had prompted him to strip the bandage of ignorance from Benicia’s eyes during that interview in the patio without the least compunction. These headstrong women! There was a way to handle them just as there was a way to break the heart of a high-spirited mount: curb bits that tear and spurs that gouge. Let him have possession of a spirit-broken woman for a little while, to play with and then discard; possession was not nearly so diverting as the game of spirit breaking. At that Urgo considered himself rather a master hand. He had not hated the master of the Casa O’Donoju. Aside from the necessity of clearing the field of a possible objector to his suit and bringing pain to the haughty desert girl, Urgo’s murder impulse was prompted by no personal bias. But with all the deadly spleen compacted into his wispy body the little man hated the gringo Grant Hickman. Hated him because the American was in the lists against him; hated him, especially, because twice Hickman had humiliated him before the eyes of Benicia: once in the Pullman out of El Paso and a second time--searing scar in memory--when the man, though weakened by a bullet wound, had hustled him out the door of the desert manor. If whole-heartedness gives any palliation to hatred then was Hamilcar Urgo’s passion almost to be forgiven him. For very dynamic force no impulse in his twisted career matched it. The vision of this gringo’s impudently smiling face went to bed with him at night and abided with him all day--a veritable ache. Come what might, he would destroy Grant Hickman and in a manner such as to entail the most refined tortures.