Alarm! He must give the alarm while yet the murderer was near the scene! Spur to action followed swiftly upon Grant’s momentary numbness. He threw a dressing robe over him and ran through the door of his chamber giving onto the arcade about the patio. Just over the low balustrade lay the little jungle of flowering things, and on the opposite side, he remembered, hung the great Javanese gong Benicia used to summon the servants to the patio. Grant leaped the low balustrade and stumbled crashing through the geraniums and giant fuchsias toward the dim moon of metal he saw in the shadows of an arch. He came to the gong, groped for the padded mace hanging over it. The patio roared with its released thunders. Muffled shouts. Banging of doors. Lights. A white figure came blundering through the arcade; it was Bim Bagley. “Some one’s been murdered!” Grant greeted him. “A dagger--through my window!” Came others--servants with blankets clutched around them. Bim directed them to run to the great door in the outer wall and catch any skulker they might find in the gardens beyond the house. Only dimly aware himself of something untoward, the big man could give no more specific directions. Then Benicia, bare-footed, her hair fallen down over a blue robe she drew together across her breast. Grant started towards her. “Where is father?” she cried in a woman’s divination, and Grant noted Don Padraic’s absence. He saw the girl make a quick step for a closed door behind her. Unreasoned instinct prompted him to put himself before the door, denying her. “No; let me,” he commanded. She made a swaying step towards Grant but was met by the door swiftly closing in her face. Inside the chamber, he turned the key in the lock and struck a match to grope for a candle wick. In the pallid flicker he saw the figure of Don Padraic on his high bed. A dagger wound was in his breast. And the girl outside the locked door stood very still. Her eyes, wide with horror, were fixed upon the spot where she had seen Grant put his hand in pushing open the door. Three small smears of blood there. CHAPTER XVI ACCUSATION Grant was stunned. The vision of the figure with the fine patrician face there on the bed--in the breast the savage mark of violence--seemed but a part with the disordered fancies of recent hours. Beating of Benicia’s hands on the locked door and the faint sound of her calls aroused him. He stepped to the bedside and felt for a pulse, listened for a breath. There was none. Murder had been done swiftly and surely--and done with the ancient dagger from the weapon cluster on the wall of his own room. In the stunning discovery he had just made Grant did not find any grim correlation between these two circumstances. He pulled up a coverlet to conceal ugly stains, then stepped to the door and unlocked it.