s home in the
south; and then he was going to arrest the man who had murdered her
husband, and have him hanged,--yes, hanged! Small doubt about that;
or, if the law cleared him, there was still the bullet. This rich Senor
would see him shot, if rope were not to be had. Jim Farrar heard these
tales, and quaked in his guilty soul. The rope he had small fear of, for
well he knew the temper of San Diego County juries and judges; but the
bullet, that was another thing; and these Mexicans were like Indians in
their vengeance. Time did not tire them, and their memories were long.
Farrar cursed the day he had let his temper get the better of him on
that lonely mountainside; how much the better, nobody but he himself
knew,--nobody but he and Ramona: and even Ramona did not know the bitter
whole. She knew that Alessandro had no knife, and had gone forward with
no hostile intent; but she knew nothing beyond that. Only the murderer
himself knew that the dialogue which he had reported to the judge and
jury, to justify his act, was an entire fabrication of his own, and
that, instead of it, had been spoken but four words by Alessandro, and
those were, "Senor, I will explain;" and that even after the first shot
had pierced his lungs, and the blood was choking in his throat, he had
still run a step or two farther, with his hand uplifted deprecatingly,
and made one more effort to speak before he fell to the ground dead.
Callous as Farrar was, and clear as it was in his mind that killing an
Indian was no harm, he had not liked to recall the pleading anguish in
Alessandro's tone and in his face as he fell. He had not liked to recall
this, even before he heard of this rich Mexican brother-in-law who
had appeared on the scene; and now, he found the memories still more
unpleasant. Fear is a wonderful goad to remorse. There was another
thing, too, which to his great wonder had been apparently overlooked by
everybody; at least, nothing had been said about it; but the bearing of
it on his case, if the case were brought up a second time and minutely
investigated, would be most unfortunate. And this was, that the only
clew he had to the fact of Alessandro's having taken his horse, was that
the poor, half-crazed fellow had left his own well-known gray pony in
the corral in place of the horse he took. A strange thing, surely, for a
horse-thief to do! Cold sweat burst out on Farrar's forehead, more
than once, as he realized how this, coupled with the w