ective good fortune; if anything, the lines
of discontent around his brow and mouth were more strongly drawn.
Apparently, his interview with his father had only the effect of
reviving and stirring into greater activity a certain dogged sentiment
that, through long years, had become languidly mechanical. He was no
longer a beaten animal, but one roused by a chance success into a
dangerous knowledge of his power. In his honest workman's dress, he was
infinitely more to be feared than in his rags; in the lifting of his
downcast eye, there was the revelation of a baleful intelligence. In
his changed condition, civilization only seemed to have armed him
against itself.

The fonda, a long low building, with a red-tiled roof extending over a
porch or whitewashed veranda, in which drunken vaqueros had been known
to occasionally disport their mustangs, did not offer a very reputable
appearance to the eye of young Guest as he approached it in the
gathering shadows. One or two half-broken horses were securely
fastened to the stout cross-beams of some heavy posts driven in the
roadway before it, and a primitive trough of roughly excavated stone
stood near it. Through a broken gate at the side there was a glimpse
of a grass-grown and deserted courtyard piled with the disused
packing-cases and barrels of the tienda, or general country shop, which
huddled under the same roof at the other end of the building. The
opened door of the fonda showed a low-studded room fitted up with a
rude imitation of an American bar on one side, and containing a few
small tables, at which half a dozen men were smoking, drinking, and
playing cards. The faded pictorial poster of the last bull-fight at
Monterey, and an American "Sheriff's notice" were hung on the wall and
in the door-way. A thick yellow atmosphere of cigarette smoke, through
which the inmates appeared like brown shadows, pervaded the room.

The young man hesitated before this pestilential interior, and took a
seat on a bench on the veranda. After a moment's interval, the yellow
landlord came to the door with a look of inquiry, which Guest answered
by a demand for lodging and supper. When the landlord had vanished
again in the cigarette fog, the several other guests, one after the
other, appeared at the doorway, with their cigarettes in their mouths
and their cards still in their hands, and gazed upon him.

There may have been some excuse for their curiosity. As before hinted,
Gue