It had been Benicia’s mastering purpose that had moved the cavalcade away from the Casa O’Donoju and out onto the desert immediately upon the return of Bim and Quelele reporting the leisurely approach of Colonel Urgo and his rurales. This was not flight, she told Bim; they would go in search of the treasure of the Lost Mission whose hiding place the old medicine man was willing to reveal, and if Urgo followed--well, eventualities could be met as they arose. In this resolve Grant had strongly seconded her. The girl’s slavery under the obsession of the bane of El Rojo, especially following the slaying of her father, had laid an impenetrable barrier between her and him; he had seized upon this possibility promising her emancipation from this horror. This chance failing, he had but the last desperate recourse. The first hour of their pilgrimage away from the desert oasis Grant rode by Benicia’s side. He essayed to distract her thoughts from the tragedy that lay behind by questioning her on the revelations El Doctor had made: how had the old Indian come by knowledge of the buried gold and pearls; what impulse had led him to promise their restoration? But the girl was not to be drawn. She answered his queries by evasions or meaningless monosyllables. It was as if Grant were a stranger, impudently prying. At first the man was stung by this treatment. His self-pride rebelled against so arbitrary a closing of the door of confidence against him. Why should he be treated thus cavalierly when the girl had surely read the great love he bore her and his single desire to place himself between her and the menace of one who had prompted murder? But these hurts did not continue long. Riding by Benicia’s side in the starshine, the man began to feel the emanations of a mastering will which poured from her as the pungent prickles of ozone surround a high-power dynamo. Her consciousness was frozen into a mould of purpose, locked against any distractions. Benicia was alive only to the single resolve to free herself from the curse of the Red One. Man nor spirit could invade that preoccupation. There under the steady-burning desert lamps the man of the cities began to feel again that spell of the infinite which had chained him the night of Don Padraic’s passing. Here was he, lately denizen of a hive of stone and steel, tiny integer in that man-made machine called a metropolis, moving through the darkness over a land unsullied by hand of man since the floods of melting glaciers drove a shadowy race of stone-axe people back to the highlands. The loves and hates, the battles and deaths of these stone-axe folk occurred but yesterday in the time-sheet of the waste places. The to-morrow of ten thousand years would find the desert still untouched, supine under the stars. What then of hidden baubles of gold; what then of the love of a Grant Hickman for a Benicia O’Donoju? A fossil snail shell by the shore of the gulf left a more enduring record.