k with
blinking eyes.

"Madre de Dios!" he exclaimed in a loud whisper. "It is the young
priest--Padre Dominguez. It must have been a panther, for they spring at
the breast, and his very heart is torn out, senor. Ay, yi!"

"Ah! You must inform the Church as soon as we have gone. Go on."

They had proceeded a few moments in silence, when Sturges suddenly
reined in his mustang.

"Tomaso," he whispered, "come here."

The vaquero joined him at once.

"Tomaso," said Sturges, "have you any objection to cutting off a dead
man's head?"

"No, senor."

"Then go back and cut off that priest's and wrap it in a piece of his
cassock, and carry it the best way you can."

Tomaso disappeared, and Sturges pushed back the gray hood and looked
upon the pure noble face of the girl he had chosen for wife.

"I believe in gratifying a woman's whims whenever it is practicable," he
thought.

But she made him a very good wife.

LA PERDIDA

On her fourteenth birthday they had married her to an old man, and at
sixteen she had met and loved a fire-hearted young vaquero. The old
husband had twisted his skinny fingers around her arm and dragged her
before the Alcalde, who had ordered her beautiful black braids cut close
to her neck, and sentenced her to sweep the streets. Carlos, the tempter
of that childish unhappy heart, was flung into prison. Such were law and
justice in California before the Americans came.

The haughty elegant women of Monterey drew their mantillas more closely
about their shocked faces as they passed La Perdida sweeping the dirt
into little heaps. The soft-eyed girls, lovely in their white or
flowered gowns, peered curiously through the gratings of their homes at
the "lost one," whose sin they did not understand, but whose sad face
and sorry plight appealed to their youthful sympathies. The caballeros,
dashing up and down the street, and dazzling in bright silken jackets,
gold embroidered, lace-trimmed, the sun reflected in the silver of their
saddles, shot bold admiring glances from beneath their sombreros. No one
spoke to her, and she asked no one for sympathy.

She slept alone in a little hut on the outskirts of the town. With the
dawn she rose, put on her coarse smock and black skirt, made herself a
tortilla, then went forth and swept the streets. The children mocked her
sometimes, and she looked at them in wonder. Why should she be mocked or
punished? She felt no repentance; neither the Alcalde n