way to La Dorada as well as any
peon on the place. Peter took out his watch and looked at it in the
moonlight. It was not a quarter to twelve, and he was already at the
little settlement, close by the river, where some Italians and
Spaniards lived. He recognized one of the ill-built small huts as the
place where Juan Lara dwelt, and he drew up to ask whether Purvis was
ahead of him or not, and whether his boy had started with his mail-bag
for the train yet. A Spaniard with a dark face answered his knock, and
told him that no one had passed that way to-night, also that his boy
had left much earlier in the afternoon with the mail. He suggested
that the traveller should come inside and wait until his friend should
overtake him; and as there was plenty of time Peter resolved to rest
his horse, and then to push on to La Dorada if Purvis should not turn
up. Lara's wife came to beg him to enter. She was an old woman before
her time, and had reared a large family in the tiny confines of this
little hut. Peter took off his soft felt hat and, stooping below the
little doorway, came inside. The use of the Spanish language was
inherited from his mother, and he congratulated Lara's wife on her
skill in washing shirts, and made some conversation with her.

The place which he had entered was poor enough; it was built on a mud
floor, and was entirely devoid of furniture save for a ramshackle
bedstead with spotless linen upon it, and a couple of chairs. There
was a tiny shrine with an image of the Virgin in the corner of the
room; before it burned a halfpenny night-light, and round it were
ranged in a row a number of paper match-boxes with little coloured
pictures upon them. They were French match-boxes, which opened with a
spring formed of elastic, and underneath the pictures were jokes of a
doubtful description. Neither Lara nor his wife knew anything of the
French language; the empty paper match-boxes, with the horrible jokes
upon them, were offered faithfully before Our Lady. They were the best
they had to give, and they were the only decorations in the room.

The-woman dusted a chair for Peter, and set the other for her husband,
and she herself sat down upon the edge of the bed. They were both glad
of visitors at whatever hour they arrived, and in the solitary life of
the camp a belated horseman may often ride up after dusk.

Peter explained that it was Senor Purvis, who owned the big estancia
down at La Dorada, wh