The single cry from the village instantly grew in volume. Treble voices of squaws lifted the abomination of noise to the saw edge of a screech; men’s harsher notes rumbled and boomed intolerably. All the night was made bedlam. Lights were winking through the chinks of the jacals when Grant and Bim came to the outskirts of the village. There was confusion of forms skittering about from hut to hut. Bim seized upon one man and demanded to know the whereabouts of Quelele, head man of the village. The big Indian soon stood before them with a gesture of hand to breast indicating they were to command him. “Somebody has killed your master,” Bim told him. “Get out men on horses to circle the Garden and go out along the road both ways. Cover every foot and bring in anybody you may find.” Quelele sped with hoarse shouts down the village’s single street; a dozen men joined him in a race for the corrals. “There’s no way for the murderer to get out and live except along the road,” was Bim’s comment as they turned to retrace their steps to the house. “If he took to the mountains even with a horse he couldn’t last a day; they’re straight up and down.” They had not gone fifty yards from the Papago village when a new sound punctuated the death cry, now settled to a monotonous chant promising hours’ duration. It was the _bum-bum-bum_ of the water-drum--gigantic gourds floated, cut side down, in a tub of water and drubbed with sticks. That noise was accompanied by the locust-like slither and rattle of the rasping sticks, another primitive tempo-setting instrument of the Southwestern natives. The death howl began to catch its measure by the boom and screak of these two instruments. A noise to beat against the inside of men’s skulls and set the bone of them in rhythm. Savage as the peaks of Altar, unremitting as the drive of wind-blown sand against granite. _Bum-chut-chut-chut!_ Sob of a land in chains. “Oh, tell them to cut it!” Grant’s frayed nerves cried out protest. The other merely gave a wave of his hand comprehending resignation. “Might as well tell the wind to stop. This’ll keep up for three days--this ding-dong business. It’s custom, old son.” As they drew near to the house of death again Grant caught his mind harking back to that moment when he had come from Don Padraic’s chamber to confront the girl’s wild eyes--eyes with almost the unthinkable look of accusation in them. That aspect of her eyes dumbfounded him, left him groping for an explanation. Once at the house, Grant took his friend to his chamber and showed him the knife where it lay on the floor as he had dropped it. The big Arizonan stooped over with the candle near the grisly thing--his hawk’s nose and salient cheekbones were outlined against the candle flame like the raised head of some emperor on a Roman coin--and very gingerly he turned the dagger over. “Finger prints here on the haft,” he grunted.