find nothing to object to. Father Pedro was
charmed with him. A man of affairs, and yet a good Catholic, too. It
was a Senor Van Loo--Don Paul the boy called him, and they talked of the
boy's studies in the old days as if--indeed, but for the stranger being
a caballero and man of the world--as if he had been his teacher."

It was a proof of the intensity of the father's feelings that they had
passed beyond the power of his usual coarse, brutal expression, and he
only stared at the priest with a dull red face in which the blood seemed
to have stagnated. Presently he said thickly, "When did he come?"

"A few days ago."

"Which way did Eddy go?"

"To Brown's Mills, scarcely a league away. He will be here--even now--on
the instant. But the senor will come into the refectory and take some
of the old Mission wine from the Catalan grape, planted one hundred and
fifty years ago, until the dear child returns. He will be so happy."

"No! I'm in a hurry. I will go on and meet him." He took off his hat,
mopped his crisp, wet hair with his handkerchief, and in a thick, slow,
impeded voice, more suggestive than the outburst he restrained, said,
"And as long as my son remains here that man, Van Loo, must not pass
this gate, speak to him, or even see him. You hear me? See to it, you
and all the others. See to it, I say, or"--He stopped abruptly, clapped
his hat on the swollen veins of his forehead, turned quickly, passed out
without another word through the archway into the road, and before the
good priest could cross himself or recover from his astonishment the
thud of his horse's hoofs came from the dusty road.

It was ten minutes before his face resumed its usual color. But in that
ten minutes, as if some of the struggle of his rider had passed into
him, his horse was sweating with exhaustion and fear. For in that ten
minutes, in this new imagination with which he was cursed, he had killed
both Van Loo and his son, and burned the refectory over the heads of the
treacherous priests. Then, quite himself again, a voice came to him from
the rocky trail above the road with the hail of "Father!" He started
quickly as a lad of fifteen or sixteen came bounding down the hillside,
and ran towards him.

"You passed me and I called to you, but you did not seem to hear,"
said the boy breathlessly. "Then I ran after you. Have you been to the
Mission?"

Steptoe looked at him quite as breathlessly, but from a deeper emotion.
He was, even a