s showed its scanty but rich furnishings, and the one who had
opened, a tall, evil-looking Yaqui who wore in his sash a long-barreled
revolver on one side and a longer, curved knife at the other. The girl
sidled about the doorkeeper and, safe behind his back made a grimace of
distaste at him, then hurried on. Again she knocked at a locked door;
again it was swung open only when she had added her voice to her
rapping. Who opened this door Kendric did not know; for it was pitch
dark as soon as the door was shut after them and they stood in a room
either windowless or darkened by thick curtains. But the girl hastened
on before him and he followed the patter of her soft moccasins, albeit
with a hand under his left arm pit; all of this locking and unlocking
of doors and the attendant mystery struck him as clap-trap and he set
it down as further play for effect by the mistress of the place, but
none the less he was ready to strike back if a wary arm struck at him
through the dark.

The girl had stopped before another door, Kendric close behind her.
This time she neither knocked nor called. He heard her fingers groping
along the wall; then the silvery tinkle of a bell faintly heard through
the thick oak panels.

"You will wait," she whispered. And he knew that she was gone.

He was not forced to wait long. Suddenly the door was opened; he heard
it move on its hinges and made out a pale rectangle of light. A softly
modulated voice said: "_Entra, senor_." He stepped across the
threshhold and into the presence of another serving girl, taller than
the other two maidens, finer bred, a calm-eyed, serene girl of twenty
dressed in a plain white gown girdled with a smooth gold band.

They were in a little anteroom; the curtains between them and the main
apartment had made the light dim, for just beyond he could make out the
blurred glowing of many lamps.

The girl's great calm eyes looked at him frankly an instant, vague
shadows drifting across them. Then, abruptly, she put her lips quite
close to his ear, and whispered: "Do not anger her, senor!" Then,
stepping quickly to the curtain, she threw it back and he entered.

A vain, headstrong girl, deemed Kendric, given the opportunity and very
great wealth, might be looked to for absurdities of this kind. But was
all of this nothing more, nothing worse, than absurdity? Suppose
Zoraida were sincere in all that she had said to him, in all the things
she did? He had h