e, and advancing to within a few paces of Joseph
Tryan, said, in a voice broken with passion:

"And I, Fernando Jesus Maria Altascar, put you in possession of my land
in the fashion of my country."

He threw a sod to each of the cardinal points.

"I don't know your courts, your judges, or your CORREGIDORES. Take the
LLANO!--and take this with it. May the drought seize your cattle till
their tongues hang down as long as those of your lying lawyers! May it
be the curse and torment of your old age, as you and yours have made it
of mine!"

We stepped between the principal actors in this scene, which only the
passion of Altascar made tragical, but Tryan, with a humility but ill
concealing his triumph, interrupted:

"Let him curse on. He'll find 'em coming home to him sooner than the
cattle he has lost through his sloth and pride. The Lord is on the side
of the just, as well as agin all slanderers and revilers."

Altascar but half guessed the meaning of the Missourian, yet
sufficiently to drive from his mind all but the extravagant power of his
native invective.

"Stealer of the Sacrament! Open not!--open not, I say, your lying, Judas
lips to me! Ah! half-breed, with the soul of a coyote!--car-r-r-ramba!"

With his passion reverberating among the consonants like distant
thunder, he laid his hand upon the mane of his horse as though it had
been the gray locks of his adversary, swung himself into the saddle and
galloped away.

George turned to me:

"Will you go back with us tonight?"

I thought of the cheerless walls, the silent figures by the fire, and
the roaring wind, and hesitated.

"Well then, goodby."

"Goodby, George."

Another wring of the hands, and we parted. I had not ridden far when I
turned and looked back. The wind had risen early that afternoon, and was
already sweeping across the plain. A cloud of dust traveled before it,
and a picturesque figure occasionally emerging therefrom was my last
indistinct impression of George Tryan.

PART II--IN THE FLOOD

Three months after the survey of the Espiritu Santo Rancho, I was again
in the valley of the Sacramento. But a general and terrible visitation
had erased the memory of that event as completely as I supposed it had
obliterated the boundary monuments I had planted. The great flood of
1861-62 was at its height when, obeying some indefinite yearning, I took
my carpetbag and embarked for the inundated valley.

There was nothing to be seen from