sponsibility. To his alarm Garcia
broke out in a venomous rage, calling everybody pigs, dogs, toads, etc.;
and crying and cursing alternately.

"Fifty thousand piasters!" he squeaked, tottering about the room on his
short weak legs and wringing his hands, so that he looked like a fat dog
walking on his hind feet. "Fifty thousand piasters! O Madre de Dios! It is
nothing. It is nothing. It will not save me from ruin. It will not cover
my debts. I shall be sold out. I am ruined. Fifty thousand piasters! O
Madre de Dios!"

Fifty thousand dollars would have left him more than solvent; but ten
times that sum would not have satisfied his grasping soul.

Coronado saw that he had made a blunder, and sought to rectify it by lying
copiously. He averred that he had been merely trying his uncle; he begged
his pardon for this absurd and ill-timed joke; he admitted that he was a
pig and a dog and everything else ignoble; he should not have trifled with
the feelings of his benefactor, his more than father; those feelings were
to him sacred, and should be held so henceforward and forever.

But he was not believed. He could fool the old man sometimes, but not on
this occasion. Garcia, greedy and anxious, apt by nature to see the dark
side of things, judged that the fifty-thousand-dollar story was the true
one. Although he pretended at last to accept Coronado's explanation for
fact, he remained at bottom unconvinced, and showed it in his swollen and
trembling visage.

Thenceforward the nephew watched the uncle incessantly; during his absence
he stole into his room, opened his baggage, and examined his drawers. And
if he saw him near Clara at table, or when refreshments were handed
around, he never took his eyes off him.

But he could not be always at hand. One day the two men rode to the city
in company. Garcia dodged Coronado, hastened back to the hacienda, asked
to have some chocolate prepared, poured out a cup for Clara, looked at her
eagerly while she drank it, and then fell down in a fit.

An hour later Coronado returned at a full run, to find the old man just
recovering his senses and Clara alarmingly ill.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Clara had been taken ill while waiting on the unconscious Garcia, and the
attack had been so violent as to drive her at once to her room and bed.

The first person whom Coronado met when he reached the house was Aunt
Maria, oscillating from one invalid to the other in such fright and
confusion