“My dear sir”--the courtly Spaniard waved away Grant’s scruples with a smile--“you forget that the evidence El Doctor Coyote Belly found on the Hermosillo Road--you the only survivor among eight men who had been murdered, eight men with marks of fetters on their wrists; that this evidence, I say, clearly indicates you now have no status whatever before what the Mexicans call their law.” Grant looked his surprise. Don Padraic continued easily: “You are officially dead, Señor Hickman. It is the _ley de fuga_--the law of flight. You were shot trying to escape while being transferred from one prison to another. Monstrous barbarism! So the president, Francisco Madero, met his end; so, perhaps, Carranza. When you were chained to other convicts and sent afoot out into the desert you were doomed; the men responsible for that act counted you as dead the minute they ordered you overland to Hermosillo.” Grant recalled the mask of fear he’d seen settle over the features of the big Indian, his chain mate, when the rurales began to loose the fetters in the sunset hour of that fateful night on the desert; how the asthmatic little Chinaman had commenced his chant to the joss--men who had known every weary hour of that march brought them nearer to the stroke of doom. “I have no direct evidence to explain why I was in that chain gang,” Grant began, honestly enough; then he told the story of the fight in the gambling palace after the discovery of the counterfeit dollars in his pocket, reserving only all reference to Colonel Urgo. His host heard him through with a grave face. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “you were on some mission to the Border which ran counter to the interests of a scheming official on the Mexican side.” “To be honest, I do not know yet on what mission I came to Arizora,” Grant conceded with a laugh. “A friend of mine wrote me in New York he wanted me to join him in ’a whale of a proposition’ out here along the Border. I was fool enough to come just on that, and when I had an interview with a Dr. Stooder--” “Ah!” The interjection escaped Don Padraic against instant reflex of judgment, as his hand part way raised to his lips betrayed. Grant caught the other’s quickly covered confusion and suddenly was sensible of his careless garrulity. Here he was bandying names in a matter his friend Bagley had surrounded with unexplained secrecy. He finished lamely: “And so on my first night in Arizora I fell into a trap.” When Don Padraic left the chamber Grant still was dwelling upon his host’s involuntary exclamation at the name of Doc Stooder. What was there about the saturnine physician, what notorious reputation which could lead a hermit such as Don Padraic away off in this desert oasis to evince surprise that one under his roof had had dealings with him? More and more an undefined regret for his mention of the name of Stooder plagued him.