her figures were flitting
through the parade ground, which the Commander might have seen had he
not slept so quietly. The intruder stepped noiselessly to the couch and
listened to the sleeper's deep-drawn inspiration. Something glittered in
the firelight as the savage lifted his arm; another moment and the sore
perplexities of Hermenegildo Salvatierra would have been over, when
suddenly the savage started and fell back in a paroxysm of terror. The
Commander slept peacefully, but his right eye, widely opened, fixed and
unaltered, glared coldly on the would-be assassin. The man fell to the
earth in a fit, and the noise awoke the sleeper.

To rise to his feet, grasp his sword, and deal blows thick and fast upon
the mutinous savages who now thronged the room was the work of a moment.
Help opportunely arrived, and the undisciplined Indians were speedily
driven beyond the walls, but in the scuffle the Commander received a
blow upon his right eye, and, lifting his hand to that mysterious organ,
it was gone. Never again was it found, and never again, for bale or
bliss, did it adorn the right orbit of the Commander.

With it passed away the spell that had fallen upon San Carlos. The rain
returned to invigorate the languid soil, harmony was restored between
priest and soldier, the green grass presently waved over the sere
hillsides, the children flocked again to the side of their martial
preceptor, a TE DEUM was sung in the Mission Church, and pastoral
content once more smiled upon the gentle valleys of San Carlos. And
far southward crept the GENERAL COURT with its master, Peleg Scudder,
trafficking in beads and peltries with the Indians, and offering glass
eyes, wooden legs, and other Boston notions to the chiefs.

NOTES BY FLOOD AND FIELD

PART I--IN THE FIELD

It was near the close of an October day that I began to be disagreeably
conscious of the Sacramento Valley. I had been riding since sunrise, and
my course through the depressing monotony of the long level landscape
affected me more like a dull dyspeptic dream than a business journey,
performed under that sincerest of natural phenomena--a California sky.
The recurring stretches of brown and baked fields, the gaping fissures
in the dusty trail, the hard outline of the distant hills, and the
herds of slowly moving cattle, seemed like features of some glittering
stereoscopic picture that never changed. Active exercise might have
removed this feeling, but my hors