He tried to think. Came to his mind a picture of his office in the Manhattan skyscraper--his desk with the mounted bit of shrapnel for a paperweight, its clear greeny-white glass top, the two wire baskets which held his correspondence. He saw the squash court at the club--men in sleeveless shirts straining after a white ball. Henry’s bar in the little side street off the Rue D’Anou in Paris; Henry selling stolen American cigarettes for five times their value at the commissary. St. Mihiel and the old woman who knitted lace. Then the girl--Benicia O’Donoju. Grant called to his mind the vivid glory of her hair, the trick of her short upper lip in curling outward like the petal of a tea rose, a something roguish always lurking deep down in the warm pools of her eyes. “Not Mexican. We are Spanish folk.” That was her sharp reproof when he, blundering, had asked her if she was of Mexican blood. That night on the train--it seemed a year back. “Not Mexican.” Now he understood why the girl had corrected him so pointedly. Thank God she was not of that breed! Near dusk the line was halted and one of the guards dismounted. Grant saw him fumble in his shirt and bring out a bright bit of metal, saw him approach the head of the line and tinker with the first fellow’s wrist shackle. He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him and, turning, caught the stamp of terror on the giant Indian’s face. Something was going forward which he could not comprehend, something to shake the stoicism of this Indian. Within five minutes the steel band about his wrist was unlocked and he stood free of the chain with the rest of the prisoners. He saw on the faces of all of them that same terror mask the Indian wore. The freed men cast covert glances at the guards, followed their every move with cat-like slyness. The little Chinaman began a falsetto sing-song under his breath, which might have been a prayer to his protecting joss. One of the guards turned in his saddle and called some jocular order to the prisoners. They moved on in the wine-light of the sunset, falling precisely into the line they had held when chained, their eyes vigilant for every move of a hand on the part of the mounted men. The rurales now carried their rifles swung free across the saddles. Though he could understand no word of the muttered scraps of speech passed between man and man behind him, the magnetic fear waves possessing all the rest began to prompt Grant to some comprehension. The coming night--dropping of the chain--those rifles unslung from shoulders and carried free across the saddles:--did these things presage the near end of this farce of a pilgrimage across the desert to a court?