called through one of the patio side windows.

"Coming." Drew left the huddle of his possessions on the bunk.

The Casa Grande of the Stronghold was a high-ceilinged, five-room building
about sixty feet long, the kitchen making a right angle to the other rooms
and joining the smoke house to form part of another wall for the patio.
Mesquite logs, adze-hewn and only partially smoothed, were placed over the
doorways, and the plank doors themselves were slung on hand-wrought iron
hinges or on leather straps, from oak turning-posts. Drew knocked on the
age-darkened surface of the big door.

"Kirby? Come in."

Here in contrast to the brilliant sunlight of the patio was a dusky
coolness. There were no glass panes in the windows. Manta, the unbleached
muslin which served to cover such openings in the frontier ranches, was
tacked taut, allowing in air but only subdued light. The walls had been
smoothly plastered, and as in Topham's office, lengths of colorful woven
materials and a couple of Navajo blankets served as hangings. Rugs of
cougar and wolf skin were scattered on the beaten earth of the floor.
There was a tall carved cupboard with a grilled door, a bookcase, and two
massive chests shoved back against the walls. And over the stone mantel of
the fireplace hung a picture of a morose-looking, bearded man wearing a
steel breastplate, the canvas dim and dark with age and smoke.

_Don_ Cazar was seated at a table as massive as the chests, a pile of
papers before him flanked by two four-branch candelabra of native silver.
Bartolome Rivas' more substantial bulk weighed down the rawhide seat of
another chair more to one side.

"Sit down--" Rennie nodded to the seat in front of the table. "Smoke?" He
pushed forward a silver box holding the long cigarillos of the border
country. Drew shook his head.

"Whisky? Wine?" He gestured to a tray with waiting glasses.

"Sherry." Drew automatically answered without thought.

"What do you think of the stock you saw down in the corral?" _Don_ Cazar
poured a honey-colored liquid from the decanter into a small glass.

As the Kentuckian raised it to sip, the scent of the wine quirked time for
him, making this for a fleeting moment the dining room at Red Springs
during a customary after-dinner gathering of the men of the household. The
talk there, too, had been of horses--always horses. Then Drew came back in
a twitch of eyelid to the here and now, to Hunt Rennie watching him with a
meas