of domesticity seemed to have evaporated, yet, notwithstanding Mrs.
Peyton's playful permission, he never intruded upon the sanctity of the
boudoir, and kept it jealously locked.
He was sitting in Peyton's business room one morning, when Incarnacion
entered. Clarence had taken a fancy to this Indian, half steward, half
vacquero, who had reciprocated it with a certain dog-like fidelity,
but also a feline indirectness that was part of his nature. He had been
early prepossessed with Clarence through a kinsman at El Refugio, where
the young American's generosity had left a romantic record among the
common people. He had been pleased to approve of his follies before
the knowledge of his profitless and lordly land purchase had commended
itself to him as corroborative testimony. "Of true hidalgo blood, mark
you," he had said oracularly. "Wherefore was his father sacrificed by
mongrels! As to the others, believe me,--bah!"
He stood there, sombrero in hand, murky and confidential, steaming
through his soaked serape and exhaling a blended odor of equine
perspiration and cigarette smoke.
"It was, perhaps, as the master had noticed, a brigand's own day!
Bullying, treacherous, and wicked! It blew you off your horse if you so
much as lifted your arms and let the wind get inside your serape; and as
for the mud,--caramba! in fifty varas your forelegs were like bears, and
your hoofs were earthen plasters!"
Clarence knew that Incarnacion had not sought him with mere
meteorological information, and patiently awaited further developments.
The vacquero went on:--
"But one of the things this beast of a weather did was to wash down the
stalks of the grain, and to clear out the trough and hollows between,
and to make level the fields, and--look you! to uncover the stones and
rubbish and whatever the summer dust had buried. Indeed, it was even as
a miracle that Jose Mendez one day, after the first showers, came upon
a silver button from his calzas, which he had lost in the early summer.
And it was only that morning that, remembering how much and with what
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