midnight
Under the burden of this sun-glare , and through these stifling dust-cones , our little company struggled sturdily forward . We had left Santa Fé as suddenly and daringly as we had entered it , the very impossibility of risking such a journey again being our , greatest safeguard . Esmond Clarenden was doing the thing that could n't be done , and doing it quickly . In the gray dawn after that midnight ride to Agua Fria a little Indian girl had slipped like a brown shadow across the Plaza . Stopping at the door of the Exchange Hotel , she leaned against the low slab of petrified wood that for many a year served as a loafer 's roost before the hotel doorway . Inside the building Jondo caught the clear twitter of a bird 's song at daybreak , twice repeated . A pause , and then it came again , fainter this time , as if the bird were fluttering away through the Plaza treetops .