and
Carlos. She rode away between the two towards home, and she did not
once look behind her until she had gone so far she feared she could not
see what her blue-eyed one was doing. Then she turned, and her teeth
went together with a click. For Jack was lying just as she had left him,
with his head upon his arm as if he might be asleep.

CHAPTER XXI

FIESTA DAY

Dade, rolling over in bed and at the same moment opening his eyes
reluctantly upon the new day, that he hated, beheld Jack half-dressed
and shaving his left jaw, and looking as if he were committing murder
upon an enemy. Dade watched him idly; he could afford the luxury of
idleness that morning; for rodeo was over, and he was lying between
linen sheets on a real bed, under a roof other than the branches of a
tree; and if his mind had rested as easily as his body, he would have
been almost happy.

But this was the day of the fiesta; and with the remembrance of that
vital fact came a realization that on this day the Picardo ranch would
be the Mecca toward which all California was making pilgrimage; and, he
feared, the battle-ground of the warring interests and prejudices of the
pilgrims themselves.

Dade listened to the voices shouting orders and greetings without as the
vaqueros hurried here and there in excited preparations for the event.
He judged that not another man in the valley was in bed at that moment,
unless sickness held him there; and for that very reason he pulled a
blanket snugger about his ears and tried to make himself believe that he
was enjoying to the full his laziness. He had earned it; and last night
had been the first one of deep, unbroken sleep that he had had since
that moonlit night when Manuel and Valencia rode in haste to meet this
surly-browed fellow before him.

Jack did not wipe off the scowl with the lather, and Dade began to
observe him more critically; which he had not before had an opportunity
to do, for the reason that Jack had not returned to the ranch the night
before until Dade was in bed and asleep.

"Say, you don't want to let the fellows outside see you looking like
that," he remarked, when Jack had yanked a horn comb through his
red-brown mop of hair as if he were hoeing corn.

"Why?" Jack turned on him truculently.

"Well, you look a whole lot like a man that expects a licking. And I
don't see any excuse for that; you're sure to win, old man. I'd bet my
last shirt on that." Which was Dade's method of w