xhausted? There was David Law, for
instance; he was utterly carefree, no duties shackled him. He had his
horse, his gun, and his blanket, and they were enough; Alaire, like
him, was young, her mind was eager, her body ripe, and her veins full
of fire. Life must be sweet to those who were free and happy.

But the object of her envy was not so completely at peace with himself
as she supposed. Even yet his mind was in a black turmoil from his
recent anger, and of late, be it said, these spells of temper had given
him cause for uneasiness. Then, too, there was a lie upon his lips.

Under the stars, at the break of the arroyo, three hundred yards below
the water-hole, a coyote was slinking in a wide circle around the body
of Panfilo Sanchez.

IV

AN EVENING AT LAS PALMAS

Although the lower counties of southwest Texas are flat and badly
watered, they possess a rich soil. They are favored, too, by a kindly
climate, subtropic in its mildness. The days are long and bright and
breezy, while night brings a drenching dew that keeps the grasses
green. Of late years there have been few of those distressing droughts
that gave this part of the state an evil reputation, and there has been
a corresponding increase in prosperity. The Rio Grande, jaundiced,
erratic as an invalid, wrings its saffron blood from the clay bluffs
and gravel canons of the hill country, but near its estuary winds
quietly through a low coastal plain which the very impurities of that
blood have richened. Here the river's banks are smothered in thickets
of huisache, ebony, mesquite, oak, and alamo.

Railroads, those vitalizing nerve-fibers of commerce, are so scarce
along this division of the border that even in this day when we boast,
or lament, that we no longer have a frontier, there remain in Texas
sections larger than some of our Eastern states which hear the sound of
iron wheels only on their boundaries. To travel from Brownsville north
along the international line one must, for several hundred miles, avail
oneself of horses, mules, or motor-cars, since rail transportation is
almost lacking. And on his way the traveler will traverse whole
counties where the houses are jacals, where English is a foreign
tongue, and where peons plow their fields with crooked sticks as did
the ancient Egyptians.

That part of the state which lies below the Nueces River was for a time
disputed territory, and long after Texans had given their lives to
drive the Ea