lared.

Uncle Esmond smiled, but the stern lines in his face hardly broke as he
said, earnestly, "Keep your eyes open and, whatever you do, stay close
to Krane while Bill helps me here, and don't forget to watch for that
little girl when you are sight-seeing."

"There's not much to see, as Bev says, but the outside of 'dobe walls
five feet thick," Rex Krane observed. "But if you know which wall to
look through, the lookin' may be easy enough. Seein' things is my
specialty, and we'll get this princess if we have to slay a giant and an
ogre and take a few dozen Mexican scalps first. The plot just thickens.
It's a great game." The tall New-Englander would not take life seriously
anywhere, and, with our trust in his guardianship, we could want no
better chaperon.

That night Beverly Clarenden and I were in fairyland.

"It's the princess, Bev, the princess we were looking for," I joyously
asserted. "And, oh, Bev, she is beautiful, but snappy-like, too. She
called me a 'big brown bob-cat', and then she apologized, just as nice
as could be."

"And this little Marcos cuss, he'll be the ogre," Beverly declared. "But
who'll we have for the giant? That priest, footing it out by that dry
creek-thing they call a 'royo?"

"Oh no, no! He and Jondo made up together, and Jondo's nobody's bad man
even in a story. It will be that Ferdinand Ramero," I insisted. "But,
say, Bev, Jondo wrote a new name on the register this evening, or
somebody wrote it for him, maybe. It wasn't his own writing. 'Jean
Deau.' I saw it in big, round, back-slanting letters. Why did he do
that?"

"Well, I reckon that's his real name in big, round, back-slanting
letters down here," Beverly replied. "It's French, and we have just been
spelling it like it sounds, that's all."

"Well, maybe so," I commented, and when I fell asleep it was to dream of
a princess and Jondo by a strange name, but the same Jondo.

The air of New Mexico puts iron into the blood. The trail life had
hardened us all, but the finishing touch for Rex Krane came in the
invigorating breath of that mountain-cooled, sun-cleansed atmosphere of
Santa Fe. Shrewd, philosophic, brave-hearted like his historic ancestry,
he laid his plans carefully now, sure of doing what he was set to do.
And the wholesome sense of really serving the man who had measured his
worth at a glance gave him a pleasure he had not known before. Of
course, he moved slowly and indifferently. One could never imagine Rex