he eddies, and drawing near
to a village set on a low bluff on the Spanish side and gleaming white
among the trees. And as I looked, the thought came again like a twinge
of pain that Mrs. Temple and Riddle might be there, thinking themselves
secure in this spot, so removed from the world and its doings.

"How now, my man of mysterious affairs?" cried Nick, from the bottom of
the boat; "you are as puckered as a sour persimmon. Have you a treaty
with Spain in your pocket or a declaration of war? What can trouble
you?"

"Nothing, if you do not," I answered, smiling.

"Lord send we don't admire the same lady, then," said Nick. "Pierrot,"
he cried, turning to one of the boatmen, "il y a des belles demoiselles
la, n'est-ce pas?"

The man missed a stroke in his astonishment, and the boat swung
lengthwise in the swift current.

"Dame, Monsieur, il y en a," he answered.

"Where did you learn French, Nick?" I demanded.

"Mr. Mason had it hammered into me," he answered carelessly, his eyes on
the line of keel boats moored along the shore. Our guides shot the canoe
deftly between two of these, the prow grounded in the yellow mud, and we
landed on Spanish territory.

We looked about us while our packs were being unloaded, and the place
had a strange flavor in that year of our Lord, 1789. A swarthy boatman
in a tow shirt with a bright handkerchief on his head stared at us over
the gunwale of one of the keel boats, and spat into the still, yellow
water; three high-cheeked Indians, with smudgy faces and dirty red
blankets, regarded us in silent contempt; and by the water-side above
us was a sled loaded with a huge water cask, a bony mustang pony between
the shafts, and a chanting negro dipping gourdfuls from the river. A
road slanted up the little limestone bluff, and above and below us stone
houses could be seen nestling into the hill, houses higher on the river
side, and with galleries there. We climbed the bluff, Benjy at our heels
with the saddle-bags, and found ourselves on a yellow-clay street lined
with grass and wild flowers. A great peace hung over the village, an air
of a different race, a restfulness strange to a Kentuckian. Clematis and
honeysuckle climbed the high palings, and behind the privacy of these,
low, big-chimneyed houses of limestone, weathered gray, could be seen,
their roofs sloping in gentle curves to the shaded porches in front;
or again, houses of posts set upright in the ground and these filled
be