he was knee-high to a grasshopper."

Ezekiel had actually never seen Demorest but once in his life. He would
have scorned to lie, but strict accuracy was not essential with an
ignorant foreign audience.

He took up his carpet-bag.

"I reckon I kin find his house, ef it's anyway handy."

But the Senor Mateo was again politely troubled. The house of Don
Ricardo was of a truth not more than a mile distant. It was even
possible that the Senor had observed it above a wall and vineyard as he
came into the pueblo. But it was late--it was also dark, as the Senor
would himself perceive--and there was still to-morrow. To-morrow--ah, it
was always there! Meanwhile there were beds of a miraculous quality
at the Posada, and a supper such as a caballero might order in his own
house. Health, discretion, solicitude for oneself--all pointed clearly
to to-morrow.

What part of this speech Ezekiel understood affected him only as an
innkeeper's bid for custom, and as such to be steadily exposed and
disposed of. With the remark that he guessed Dick Demorest's was "a good
enough hotel for HIM," and that he'd better be "getting along there," he
walked down the steps, carpet-bag in hand, and coolly departed, leaving
Mateo pained, but smiling, on the doorstep.

"An animal with a pig's head--without doubt," said Mateo, sententiously.

"Clearly a brigand with the liver of a chicken," responded his wife.

The subject of this ambiguous criticism, happily oblivious, meantime
walked doggedly back along the road the stage-coach had just brought
him. It was badly paved and hollowed in the middle with the worn ruts of
a century of slow undeviating ox carts, and the passage of water
during the rainy season. The low adobe houses on each side, with bright
cinnamon-colored tiles relieving their dark-brown walls, had the regular
outlines of their doors and windows obliterated by the crumbling of
years, until they looked as if they had been afterthoughts of the
builder, rudely opened by pick and crowbar, and finished by the gentle
auxiliary architecture of birds and squirrels. Yet these openings at
times permitted glimpses of a picturesque past in the occasional view
of a lace-edged pillow or silken counterpane, striped hangings, or dyed
Indian rugs, the flitting of a flounced petticoat or flower-covered
head, or the indolent leaning figure framed in a doorway of a man in
wide velvet trousers and crimson-barred serape, whose brown face
was partly hi