Bim’s easy injunction to sleep was not so easily followed by the man who was a self-appointed prisoner. On his bed Grant tossed in a fever of mingled blind speculation and outraged pride. Strive though he might to palliate Benicia’s charge against him on the score of the girl’s complete prostration through the night’s tragedy, the quick and fiery blood in her that was inheritance from Spanish forebears, yet always he came against the same ugly fact: one whom he loved with all the passion in him and whose return of love he had dared hope to win had accused him of murder out of hand. Yet how could he prove his innocence? Of a sudden that thought plumped down on him with the burst of a high explosive shell. Benicia’s accusation had appeared monstrous, yes. But, look upon the facts through her eyes--so a curiously impersonal phase of mind prompted; what were those facts as they appeared to the girl? A man who was first a chance acquaintance in a train and then, by a trick of fate, a guest in the house, rouses the household at three o’clock in the morning by sounding an alarm in the patio. He calls “Murder!” though he does not say who has been murdered, he has not apparently discovered the body of Don Padraic in his chamber. This man--this waif brought in from the desert--prevents the daughter’s going in to the room of death until first he has entered that room and locked the door behind him. He leaves the marks of his fingers in blood upon the outside of that door. Then he and his friend--“call him confederate” was Grant’s cynical amendment--organize a hue and cry outside of the house. While this is in progress a servant finds in the guest’s room a dagger; instead of being in its usual place amid the rack of weapons on the wall this dagger lies on the floor as if hastily thrown there by one who had no proper time for its concealment. The dagger is blood stained and on its haft are the same finger prints as those on the door of the dead don’s chamber. There was the record. How refute it? Say that while lying awake he saw a hand appear at the bars of his window and heard the tinkle of a knife dropped within? Why, if he was so vigilant at three o’clock in the morning, had he not seen that hand of a murderer steal in to abstract the weapon before the deed? And whose hand was it? Did not the burden of proof that it was not his own which took the dagger from the wall rest solely upon Grant Hickman? Another’s finger prints on that bloodied haft besides his own? Perhaps. But it needed the instruments of precision of a detective central office to juggle with such minutiæ as the whorls and spirals in a finger print, and they most certainly were lacking at the Casa O’Donoju. Graver difficulty still, there were a hundred and more Indians in the oasis; how gather them all together and take the prints of their fingers?