have been butchering them right and left and doing a big business in beef, according to all accounts. Manuel hates gringos like centipedes, but I happened to get on the good side of him—partly because my Spanish is as good as his own. An Americano who has black hair and can talk Spanish like the don himself isn't an Americano, in Manuel's eyes."
While they were unsaddling under the oak tree, where the vaqueros kept their riding gear in front of the cabin, Manuel himself came to the door and stood squinting into the fog, while he flapped a tortilla dexterously between his brown palms.
"Is it you, Valencia??" he called out in Spanish, giving the tortilla a deft, whirling motion to even its edges.
Dade led the way into the zone of light, and Manuel stepped back with a series of welcoming nods. His black eyes darted curiously to the stranger, who, in Manuel's opinion, looked unpleasantly like a gringo, with his coppery hair waving crisply under his sombrero, and his eyes that were blue as the bay over there to the east. But when Dade introduced him, Jack greeted his squat host with a smile that was disarming in its boyish good humor, and with language as liquidly Spanish as Manuel's best Castilian, which he reserved for his talks with the patron on the porch when the señora and the young señorita were by.
The distrust left Manuel's eyes as he trotted across the hard-trodden dirt floor and laid the tortilla carefully upon a hot rock, where three others crisped and curled their edges in delectable promise of future toothsomeness.
He stood up and turned to Dade amiably, his knuckles pressing lightly upon his hips that his palms might be saved immaculate for the next little corn cake which he would presently slap into thin symmetry.
"Madre de Dios!" he cried suddenly, quite forgetting the hospitable thing he had meant to say about his supper. "You are hurt, Señor! The blood is on your sleeve and your hand."
Dade looked down at his hand and laughed. "I did get a scratch. I'll let you see what it's like."
"You never told me you got shot!" accused Jack sharply, from where he had thrown himself down on a bundle of blankets covered over with a bullock hide dressed soft as chamois.
"Never thought of it," retorted Dade in Spanish, out of regard for his host.
"We had some trouble with the gringos," he explained to Manuel. "There was a little shooting, and a bullet grazed my arm. It doesn't amount to much, but I'll let you look at it."
"Ah, the gringos!" Manuel spat after the hated name. "The patron is too good, too generous! They steal the cattle of the patron, though they might have all they need for the asking. Like the green worms upon the live oaks, they would strip the patron's herds to the last, lean old bull that is too tough even for their wolf teeth! Me, I should like to lasso and drag to the death every gringo who comes sneaking in the night for the meat which tastes sweeter when it is stolen. To-day Valencia rode down to the bayou—"
While he told indignantly the tale of the latest pillage, he bared the wounded arm. Jack got stiffly upon his swollen feet to look. It was not a serious wound, as wounds go; a deep gash in the bicep, where a bullet meant for Dade's heart had plowed under his upraised arm four inches wide of its mark. It must have been painful, though he had not once mentioned it; and a shamed flush stung Jack's cheeks when he remembered his own complaints because of his feet.
"You never told me!" he accused again, this time in the language of his host.
"The Señor Hunter has the brave heart of a Spaniard, though his blood is light," said Manuel rebukingly. "The Señor Hunter would not cry over a bigger hurt than this!"
Jack sat down again upon the bull-hide seat and dropped his face between his palms. Old Manuel spoke truer than he knew. Dade Hunter was made of the stuff that will suffer much for a friend and say nothing about it, and to-day was not the first time when Jack had all unwittingly given that friendship the test supreme.
Manuel carefully inspected the wound and murmured his sympathy. He pulled a bouquet of dry herbs from where it hung in a corner, under the low ceiling, and set a handful brewing in water, where the coals were golden-yellow with heat. He tore a strip of linen off Valencia's best shirt which he was saving for fiestas, and prepared a bandage, interrupting himself now and then to dart over and inspect the tortillas baking on the hot rock. For a fat man he moved with extraordinary briskness, and so managed to do three things at one time and do them all thoroughly; he washed and dressed the wound with the herbs squeezed into a poultice, rescued the tortillas from scorching, and spake his mind concerning the gringos who, he declared, were despoiling this his native land. Then he lifted certain pots and platters to the center of the hut and cheerfully announced supper; and squatted on the floor, facing his guests over the food.
"There's another thing that bothers me, Manuel," Dade announced humorously, when they three were seated around the pot of frijoles, the earthen pan of smoking carne-seco (which is meat flavored hotly after the Spanish style) and a stack of the tortillas Manuel's fat hands had created while he talked.
Manuel, bending a tortilla into a scoop wherewith to help himself to the brown beans, raised his black eyes anxiously. "But is there further hurt?" he asked, and glanced wistfully at the tortilla before laying it down that he might minister further to the señor.
"No—go on with your supper. There's a buckskin horse out there that the gringos may say I stole. I don't want the beast; he's about fourteen years old and he's got a Roman nose to beat Caesar himself, and a bad eye and a wicked heart."
"Dios!" murmured Manuel over the list of equine shortcomings and took a large, relieved bite of tortilla and beans. The señor was pleased to jest with a poor vaquero, but the señor would doubtless explain. He chewed luxuriously and waited, his black eyes darting from this face which he knew and liked, to that strange one of the blue eyes and the hair that was like the dullest of dull California gold.
"I don't like that caballo," went on Dade, helping himself to meat, "and so I'd hate like the deuce to be hung for stealing him; sabe?"
Manuel licked a finger before he spread his hands to show how completely he failed to understand. "But if the caballo does not please the señor, why then did the señor steal—"
"You see, I wanted to bring my partner—Señor Jack Allen—down here with me. And he was riding the caballo, and he couldn't get off—"
Manuel swore a Spanish oath politely, to please his guest who wished to amaze him.
"Because he was tied on." Dade failed just there to keep a betraying hardness out of his voice. "The Viligantes were—going to—hang him." The last two words were cut short off with the click of his jaws coming together.
Manuel thereupon swore more sincerely and spilled beans from his tortilla scoop. He knew the ways of the Committee. Four months ago—when the Committee was newer and more just—they had hanged the third cousin of his half-sister's husband. It is true, the man had killed a woman with a knife; yet Manuel's black beard bristled when he thought of the affront to his hypothetical kinship.
"I had to take the two together," Dade explained, trying with better success to speak lightly. "And now, if I turn the buckskin loose, he may go back—and he may not. I was wondering—"
Manuel cut him short. "To-morrow I ride to town," he said. "I will take the caballo back with me, if that pleases the señors. I will turn him loose near the Mission, and he will go to his stable.
"The señor," he added, "was very brave. Madre de Dios! To run away with a prisoner of the Vigilantes! But they will surely kill the señor for that; the taking of the horse, that is nothing."
