and fairly truthful;
entertaining, too, to a degree which held many a wayfarer chained to his
chair till small hours of the morning, listening to his landlord's talk.
How he had drifted from Alsace to San Diego County, he could hardly have
told in minute detail himself, there had been so many stages and phases
of the strange journey; but he had come to his last halt now. Here, in
this Temecula, he would lay his bones. He liked the country. He liked
the wild life, and, for a wonder, he liked the Indians. Many a good word
he spoke for them to travellers who believed no good of the race, and
evidently listened with polite incredulity when he would say, as he
often did: "I've never lost a dollar off these Indians yet. They do all
their trading with me. There's some of them I trust as high's a hundred
dollars. If they can't pay this year, they'll pay next; and if they die,
their relations will pay their debts for them, a little at a time, till
they've got it all paid off. They'll pay in wheat, or bring a steer,
maybe, or baskets or mats the women make; but they'll pay. They're
honester 'n the general run of Mexicans about paying; I mean Mexicans
that are as poor's they are."

Hartsel's dwelling-house was a long, low adobe building, with still
lower flanking additions, in which were bedrooms for travellers, the
kitchen, and storerooms. The shop was a separate building, of rough
planks, a story and a half high, the loft of which was one great
dormitory well provided with beds on the floor, but with no other
article of bedroom furniture. They who slept in this loft had no
fastidious standards of personal luxury. These two buildings, with some
half-dozen out-houses of one sort and another, stood in an enclosure
surrounded by a low white picket fence, which gave to the place a
certain home-like look, spite of the neglected condition of the ground,
which was bare sand, or sparsely tufted with weeds and wild grass. A few
plants, parched and straggling, stood in pots and tin cans around the
door of the dwelling-house. One hardly knew whether they made the place
look less desolate or more so. But they were token of a woman's
hand, and of a nature which craved something more than the unredeemed
wilderness around her afforded.

A dull and lurid light streamed out from the wide-open door of the
store. Alessandro drew cautiously near. The place was full of men, and
he heard loud laughing and talking. He dared not go in. Stealing around