Benicia nodded to Quelele, who made a sign to others. They brought a hair rope and trussed the murderer hands to feet. His lips were mute. Stamp of fate was on his grey features. He knew his punishment: to be taken to the burning lava fields of Pinacate, where the dead volcanoes are, there to be left without gun or canteen; no man would see him again. Such was the Papago custom decreed for murderers from beforetime. She who had ordained this trial by ordeal had turned away, once the wretch’s confession had been heard. The soul of the girl now stood its own trial in turn; faced by the guilt of false suspicion, by the wounds wrought of bitter accusation, it must needs purge itself. Yes, even though the spirit of Benicia O’Donoju was not one easily to humble itself. A long minute she fought with herself and finally turned gropingly to make her hard penance before Grant. Then she saw the figure of the man whose debtor in honour she was striding with his companion towards the avenue of palms leading to the house. The distance between them seemed suddenly the breadth of the world. CHAPTER XVIII THE DESERT INTERVENES That day omniscient will of the desert moved to point a murderer’s guilt the same inscrutable power flexed a finger to mould events some seventy miles away from the Garden of Solitude where the worthy doctor from Arizora and his Papago had been nibbling at a mystery. Though Doc Stooder moved in a haze of strong waters, though he looked upon the face of the desert through a golden veil of his own weaving, yet was he not the least immune from the law of the waste places. The Doc walked with God, even as did the pioneer fathers of the Church; the fact that he did not admit the companionship had no influence on the operations of destiny. We left Stooder on his knees before the uncovered bell with its inscription carrying identification. His excitements, his hysterical grubbings, soundings and prospectings of the ensuing twenty-four hours were heroic. After the uncovering of the bell he had paced off a square through the scrub thirty or forty feet each way and with the corroded cone of metal for a centre; then the Indian and he had gone on their hands and knees over every inch of this square. Result, a single stick of hewn timber whose fire-blackened end had projected but an inch above the sand; digging revealed a twenty-foot beam, dry as a puff-ball and almost ready to disintegrate. That was all: the bell and the uncovered beam. But that was enough. Doc Stooder knew that beneath him lay the mission site; how deeply the blown sands of more than a century had buried it he could not guess. But it was here! Here lay the rich core of a legend that had sent many a man out into the desert to chase rainbow ends. His--Stooder’s! A’mighty God! how he’d riffle those pearls through his fingers--lay ’em all out on a piece of velvet under some secret lamp and match ’em, pearl with pearl.