bed, and, taking a lamp from the table,
commenced moving towards his _cuarto de camara_.

On coming opposite a picture suspended against the _sala_ wall--the
portrait of a beautiful girl--he stopped in front, for a moment gazed
upon it, and then into a mirror that stood close by.

As if there was something in the glass that reflected its shadow into
his very soul, the expression of exultant triumph, so lately depicted
upon his face, was all at once swept from it, giving place to a look of
blank bitterness.

"One is gone," he said, in a half-muttered soliloquy; "one part of the
stain wiped out--thanks to the Holy Virgin for that. But the other; and
she--where, where?"

And with these words he staggered on towards his chamber.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

STRUGGLING AMONG THE SAGES.

It is the fourth day after forsaking the couch among the shin oaks, and
the two fugitives are still travelling upon the Llano Estacado. They
have made little more than sixty miles to the south-eastward, and have
not yet struck any of the streams leading out to the lower level of the
Texan plain.

Their progress has been slow; for the wounded man, instead of recovering
strength, has grown feebler. His steps are now unequal and tottering.
In addition to the loss of blood, something else has aided to disable
him--the fierce cravings of hunger and the yet more insufferable agony
of thirst.

His companion is similarly afflicted; if not in so great a degree,
enough to make him also stagger in his steps. Neither has had any water
since the last drop drank amid the waggons, before commencing the fight;
and since then a fervent sun shining down upon them, with no food save
crickets caught in the plain, an occasional horned frog, and some fruit
of the _opuntia_ cactus--the last obtained sparingly.

Hunger has made havoc with both, sad and quick. Already at the end of
the fourth day their forms are wasted. They are more like spectres than
men.

And the scene around them is in keeping. The plain, far as the eye can
reach, is covered with _artemisia_, whose hoary foliage, in close
contact at the tops, displays a continuation of surface like a vast
winding-sheet spread over the world.

Across this fall the shadows of the two men, proportioned to their
respective heights. That of the ex-Ranger extends nearly a mile before
him; for the sun is low down, and they have its beams upon their backs.

They are facing eastward, in the hope of b