ed with less objection than Joan anticipated. "Besides,
dear," said Joan, eying her with feline watchfulness, "it is four years
since you've seen him, and surely the man has either shaved since, or
else he took a ridiculous vow never to do it, and then he would be more
fully bearded."

But Dona Rosita only shook her pretty head. "Ah, but he have an air--a
something I know not what you call--so." She threw her shawl over her
left shoulder, and as far as a pair of soft blue eyes and comfortably
pacific features would admit, endeavored to convey an idea of wicked and
gloomy abstraction.

"You child," said Joan,--"that's nothing; they all of them do that. Why,
there was a stranger at the Oriental Hotel whom I met twice when I was
there--just as mysterious, romantic, and wicked-looking. And in fact
they hinted terrible things about him. Well! so much so, that Mr.
Demorest was quite foolish about my being barely civil to him--you
understand--and--" She stopped suddenly, with a heightened color under
the fire of Rosita's laughing eyes.

"Ah--so--Dona Discretion! Tell to me all. Did our hoosband eat him?"

Joan's features suddenly tightened to their old puritan rigidity. "Mr.
Demorest has reasons--abundant reasons--to thoroughly understand and
trust me," she replied in an austere voice.

Rosita looked at her a moment in mystification and then shrugged her
shoulders. The conversation dropped. Nevertheless, it is worthy of being
recorded that from that moment the usual familiar allusions, playful and
serious, to Rosita's mysterious visitor began to diminish in frequency
and finally ceased. Even the news brought by Demorest of some vague
rumor in the pueblo that an intended attack on the stage-coach had been
frustrated by the authorities, and that the vicinity had been haunted by
incognitos of both parties, failed to revive the discussion.

Meantime the slight excitement that had stirred the sluggish life of the
pueblo of San Buenaventura had subsided. The posada of Senor Mateo
had lost its feverish and perplexing dual life; the alley behind it
no longer was congested by lounging cigarette smokers; the compartment
looking upon the silent patio was unoccupied, and its chairs and tables
were empty. The two deputy sheriffs, of whom Senor Mateo presumably
knew very little, had fled; and the mysterious Senor Johnson, of whom
he--still presumably--knew still less, had also disappeared. For Senor
Mateo's knowledge of what transpire