An hour after the sun had set on the day of Colonel Urgo’s humiliation at the Casa O’Donoju, Quelele tooled his car into the avenue of palms at the end of the long return journey from Magdalena, on the railroad. With him were his master, Don Padraic, and an American stranger, Bim Bagley of Arizora. Fate had played capriciously with Bim. When he set out from Arizora on the quest of his pal Grant Hickman it was only on the bare report that the man was seriously wounded and under the care of El Doctor Coyote Belly at Babinioqui, south of the Line. Near the end of his journey his car had wrecked itself beyond repair hard by Magdalena; a mule had been requisitioned to carry him over the mountains to the home of the medicine man; once there he was as far from the end of his quest as ever. For grey old Coyote Belly lied unblinkingly. He knew nothing of a wounded man. Persuasion of words nor the chink of silver dollars availed to budge him from a trust he conceived to be joined between himself and the master of the Casa O’Donoju. The hours following the scene in the patio and the sudden gust of action concluding the visit of Hamilcar Urgo had been trying ones for Grant. Spent as he was by the struggle with the Spaniard, he had suffered himself to be half-carried to his room by the Indian servants. Benicia, accompanying him to the door, had permitted her hand to rest in his at farewell; a clasp tried to tell what the storm in her soul denied speech. The girl’s face was etched by suffering; sacrificed pride and a shadow of some deep fear lay heavy in her eyes and the drawn lines about her mouth. The wound made by her spiteful suitor was deeper than Grant could conceive. Alone on his bed he conned over the tale Urgo had told. Unfamiliar as he was with the Latin temperament, the belief of the romance peoples in the very reality of inherited curse and whips of Nemesis pursuing innocent generations, yet the raw tragedy of the story fired his imagination. He tried to put himself in the place of the girl he loved with all her pride of race and family; to feel with her the stripes of scorn the despicable Urgo had laid on. El Rojo’s desecration of the mission sanctuary by an act of blood; his flight into the desert with the pearls of the Virgin and a girl, “who was wife to him without priest or book”; the blotting of the mission from sight of man; all this cycle of tragedy of the dim past linked to a gloriously vital creature of the present by the chance colour of her hair. The thing was monstrously absurd! And yet-- A knock at the door and Don Padraic entered. He turned to beckon some one behind him. In the candlelight Grant saw the head of a giant stoop to avoid the lintel. “Bim Bagley!” The desert man crossed to the bed by a single wide step and threw both arms about Grant in a bear hug.