understanding, as true
subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes
the Master's witchery had wrought. In supreme intoxication of the
senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long
sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a
surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.

It was dusk. Shadows returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the
sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the
bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself.
It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She
was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of
blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so
genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him.

With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came
upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up,
grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.

"I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary.

She observed in his manner something new!--a positive enthusiasm for his
three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their
loyalty and character.

"Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat
and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit!
Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la
Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"

Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of
aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish
blood in the primitive southern strain.

"And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a
low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was
exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?--always miserable,
whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad
philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many
theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a
desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a
solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature.
There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the
cheerful humor of Jag Ear."

"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," s