ay on his furious circuit. But this time he wheeled suddenly before
it was half completed and bore down directly upon the unconscious
object. Within a hundred feet he swerved slightly; the long detaching
rings again writhed in mid air and softly descended as he thundered
past. But when he had reached the line of circuit again, he turned and
made directly for the road he had entered. Fifty feet behind his
horse's heels, at the end of a shadowy cord, the luckless serape was
dragging and bounding after him!

"The old man is quiet enough this morning," said Andreas, as he groomed
the sweat-dried skin of the mustang the next day. "It is easy to see,
friend Pinto, that he has worked off his madness on thee."

CHAPTER IV

The Rancho of San Antonio might have been a characteristic asylum for
its blessed patron, offering as it did a secure retreat from
temptations for the carnal eye, and affording every facility for
uninterrupted contemplation of the sky above, unbroken by tree or
elevation. Unlike La Mision Perdida, of which it had been part, it was
a level plain of rich adobe, half the year presenting a billowy sea of
tossing verdure breaking on the far-off horizon line, half the year
presenting a dry and dusty shore, from which the vernal sea had ebbed,
to the low sky that seemed to mock it with a visionary sea beyond. A
row of rough, irregular, and severely practical sheds and buildings
housed the machinery and the fifty or sixty men employed in the
cultivation of the soil, but neither residential mansion nor farmhouse
offered any nucleus of rural comfort or civilization in the midst of
this wild expanse of earth and sky. The simplest adjuncts of country
life were unknown: milk and butter were brought from the nearest town;
weekly supplies of fresh meat and vegetables came from the same place;
in the harvest season, the laborers and harvesters lodged and boarded
in the adjacent settlement and walked to their work. No cultivated
flower bloomed beside the unpainted tenement, though the fields were
starred in early spring with poppies and daisies; the humblest garden
plant or herb had no place in that prolific soil. The serried ranks of
wheat pressed closely round the straggling sheds and barns and hid the
lower windows. But the sheds were fitted with the latest agricultural
machinery; a telegraphic wire connected the nearest town with an office
in the wing of one of the buildings, where Dr. West sat, and in th