“My father when he returned to-day and I told him--my father said the story was true as Urgo told it. Once in every second generation--this sign of El Rojo, murderer and violator of the sanctuary--” “But, Benicia, surely you don’t believe this fairy story!” Grant packed into his low words all the willing of a spirit fighting for precious possession. He felt that every word the girl spoke was pushing her farther from him. “Ah, Grant, we desert people believe easily because the truth is not hidden. It _is_ true; my good grey father knew that I knew it to be true and did not seek to deceive me when I asked him. The O’Donoju with this”--again the shrinking touch of fingers to the dull-burning stripe on her forehead--“cannot give love, for with love goes unhappiness--and death.” She broke off suddenly, rose and hurried into the shadows beyond the range of firelight. Grant heard a door latch at the far end of the room click to. CHAPTER XV WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT Somewhere in the darkness of the ancient house a deep-toned bell tolled the hour of two. The sound came to Grant, broad awake in his room, as if from a great distance--tocsin strokes against the bowl of the desert sky. Four times in his sleepless vigil he had heard that bell measuring night watches, and each successive hour struck seemed the period to a century. He had gone to bed with a heavy ache following his words with Benicia and her abrupt termination of his pleading. On his first review of the girl’s abnegation of the love she could not conceal the whole thing had seemed fantastic, almost childish in its essence of witch-bane and belief in blighting curse. How could this virile creature of a fine and cultured mind conceive herself the heritor of a weight of guilt carried down from some ancestor in the dim past? There was the superstition of the evil eye among ignorant peasants of the Latin countries, to be sure; but for a girl of Benicia’s intelligence to be enslaved by such mumbo-jumbo as Urgo had voiced--ridiculous! Such was Grant’s first review. Weighed from every angle and conceding the girl he loved every mitigation of jangled nerves, nevertheless the man of the cities could find naught but lamentable folly in it all. The first striking of the distant bell found him rebellious. From where he lay he could look through a grated window up to the heavens: a square of dappled infinity. Insensibly his eyes began singling out the stars, measuring the gulf between this and that steady-burning point of light. Somewhere outside a desert owl timed the pulse of the night with an insistent call, unvarying, unwearying. The man on the bed found himself tallying the blood beats to his brain by this ghostly metronome. Beat--beat!--passing seconds of mortality for the man Grant Hickman. Beat--beat!--How puny a thing, how inconsequential the life of a man when calipered by the time measure of those burning suns up yonder!