He rallied himself, for such drifting into the subjective was a new and puzzling experience for a practical man. But minute by minute the spirit of the desert, which is the spirit of chaos become ponderable, stole over him, chaining his imagination to things felt but not seen of men. A chill of the untoward and the unreal swept over him. He seemed to be braced nervously for some blow out of the void. His imagination played with a dim figure, the shape of El Rojo of the red hair riding--riding through the dark on his eternal mission of damnation. The clock struck three and at the instant of the third stroke a shadow like a bat’s wing flitted across the bars of the window through which the eyes of the wakeful man had been roaming. A sharp tinkle of steel on stone split the silence of the chamber. Grant was galvanized into a leap from the bed. He stood shaking. Silence. Silence absolute as the grave after that single sharp ring of steel on stone. He looked up at the window where the flitting passage of the bat’s wing had showed. Just the clear-burning stars there. The dim recesses of the room revealed no bulk of an intruder. Was this but the trick of overwrought nerves? Grant fumbled for his matches and brought a light to the candle wick. By the waxing yellow glow he peered round the chamber. A flicker of white reflection caught his eye and he almost leaped to a spot on the floor directly beneath the window. A dagger lay there. It was that curiously wrought affair of dulled silver haft and double-edged blade which he had noted before as part of the rosette of ancient knives and short swords clamped against the high wainscoting above the window for a wall decoration--the weapons Don Padraic had pointed to with the pride of a collector that first day the wounded guest was brought in from the desert. But how could this dagger have slipped from its sheath with no hand to disturb it? Grant stooped to pick it up. He had the haft in his grip for a quarter-second, then dropped the thing and leaped back as if from an asp. Something gummed the palm of his hand. Something showed dull black against the dim flicker of the blade. With a gasp he knelt and brought the candle closer. Blood there on the blade! Blood on his hand! He stood frozen while the pumping of his heart volleyed thunder against his ear drums. Murder cried aloud from that stained thing of silver and steel on the floor. Somewhere in this rambling old pile--somewhere in the silence a swift stroke that had snuffed out a life, and then the murderer, fleeing, had flung this weapon through the window. He had flung it almost at the feet of the only one in the whole house who was not sleeping.