“If you will permit me to play the doctor--at least to see to it that lazy old ’Cepcion, your nurse, does not neglect you?” The smile that went with this promise was tonic for the sick man. It remained like an afterglow when the door was closed behind the girl. And when the wrinkled Indian woman came an hour later with broth on a silver tray that smile reappeared, translated into the fragrant beauty of rose petals laid by the side of the bowl. Five luxurious days passed--days each with a wonderful spot of sunshine in them--that when Benicia accompanied the aged ’Cepcion to his chamber. On these daily visits she would draw her chair to the side of the great bed--she looked very small below the high buttress of the mattress--and while he quaffed his chicken broth and nibbled his flaky tortillas Benicia would talk. ’Cepcion, like some mahogany coloured manikin in her flaring skirts and winged bodice, always stood, arms akimbo and features passive as a graven image, behind her mistress’ chair. The girl’s talk was directed away from the personal; with an art concealing art she evaded Grant’s frequent endeavours to swing conversation into more intimate channels. She brought the world of the desert into the sick room, unconsciously revealing herself as a flashing, restless creature of the wastes: now on horseback and threading dim trails over the Line to carry quinine to a family of Papagoes down with the fever; now beside Quelele in the little gas-beetle and skimming to Caborca, the southern town, to buy a wedding dress for an Indian belle. Not once did she touch again upon the subject of Grant’s misadventures and how he came to be found on the road to Hermosillo. A delicate sense of the fitness of things prompted her to await the moment when he himself should volunteer explanations. Grant, on his part, felt an impelling reluctance to give details, for to do so would necessitate his revealing his conviction that little Colonel Urgo’s was the hand that had pushed him so near death. A delicate--perhaps quixotic--sense of personal honour prompted that he keep his enemy’s name out of any explanations. He could not know how close might be the little Spaniard’s relations with Benicia and her father--even discounting Urgo’s boast that he expected to make the girl his wife--and, besides, he felt the score between himself and Urgo must be evened before he linked the Colonel’s name with his experiences. With Benicia’s father Grant modified his resolution to a certain degree. It was no more than proper, he argued with himself, that the master of the Casa O’Donoju have some explanation for the presence in his house of a man from a Mexican chain gang. “Señor O’Donoju,” Grant addressed his host when the latter was come on one of his daily visits, “you have been more than kind to me, but I fear I may be an embarrassment to you--a fugitive, you know, if that is my status before the law.”