beloved child, that the lady concluded, rightly or wrongly, that she would be penniless when the niece married. Habituated, since a great while back, to a very easy, not to say pampered existence at her kinsman's expense, she beheld with terror the time coming when her host would settle all his property on the girl, and constitute the strange young man, who was so reserved about his origin, the steward for his young wife. However, doña Maria Josefa was too sly and adroit to openly oppose the paternal determination, and allow him to perceive the hate she bore Benito and would be only too delighted to manifest.

Whenever she threw out hints of a better match for her niece than this mysterious youth, they had fallen in deaf ears, and she fretted in silence that boded no good prospects.

Nevertheless, some two years had known the young hearts formally engaged without the serpent lifting her head to emit a truly alarming hiss. At that time doña Maria Josefa introduced at her brother's a hook-nosed gentleman, arrayed sumptuously, who rejoiced in a long name which paraded pretensions to an illustrious lineage. This don Aníbal Cristobal de Luna y Almagro de Cortez so displeased Benito and Dolores, whilst not ingratiating himself deeply with don José, that his presence would not have been tolerated, only for the young couple hopefully supposing that the tall and bony scion of the first conqueror of Mexico was a flame of Dolores' duenna, and as such would wed the dragon and take her away from the hacienda to the beautiful and boundless domains in Spain, upon which he expatiated in a shrill voice of enthusiasm.

Don Aníbal had excellent credentials from a banker's at Guaymas, but, somehow, the gentlemen farmers received him with cold courtesy. Besides, it having been remarked that those who offended him met with injury, personal, like the being waylaid, or in their property, stock being run off or outhouses fired, there sprang up a peculiar way of treating the stranger for which the Spanish morgue, that counterpart of English phlegm, is very well suited.

All at once, Benito received word that a messenger from his mother had arrived at Guaymas, bearing the very good news that she expected to obtain a revocation of the sentence of banishment against the brood of Bustamente, and then he could publicly avow his name.

He had already imparted his secret to Captain Miranda.

The messenger had grievously suffered with seasickness, and was unable to come up the valley. Miranda counselled Benito to go to him therefore, and besides, as the formalities attending the settlement of his estate upon his daughter, under the marriage contract, required such legal owls as nestled alone in the port, he volunteered to accompany the young man. Over and above all this pleasing arrangement, as Dolores had never seen the city, of which the five thousand inhabitants think no little—for after all it is the finest harbour in the Gulf of California—he proposed she should be of the party.

Another reason, which he did not confide in anyone, acted as a spur. A neighbour had told don José that, from a communication of his majordomo, an expert in border warfare, he believed that the illustrious don Aníbal de Luna was not wholly above complicity with a troop of robbers who lately infested Sonora, and caused as much dread and more damage, forasmuch as they were intelligently directed to the best stores of plunder as the Indians themselves. This neighbour, though he loved doña Josefa no more cordially than anybody else, still deemed it dutiful to prevent Captain Miranda allowing a "gentleman of the highway" to marry into his family.

Don José felt the caution more painfully, as his sister had plainly let him know that the famous don Aníbal was not so much her worshipper as her niece's. He might have thanked the salteador to rid his house of the old maid, but to allow one to court his daughter was another matter. At the same time, as of such dubious characters are made the "colonels" who buckler up a Mexican revolutionary pretender, don José was scarcely less coldly civil to the hidalgo, though he hastened on the preparations to withdraw his daughter from the swoop of the bird of rapine.

Doña Maria Josefa drew a long face at the prospect of being left alone at the hacienda, but she was too great a dependant on her brother, and too hypocritical to trammel the undertaking.

The party set forth, then, under good and sufficient escort. But the very foul fiend himself appeared to have taken all doña Maria Josefa's evil wishes in hand to carry them out, to say nothing of the baulked don Aníbal's.

Half the escort left without returning, at a mere alarm of the Indios bravos ("hostiles") being at La Palma, and massacring and firing farmhouses wholesale. The rest were lost in the bush, were abandoned dead or dying; the mules and horses were "stampeded" by unseen foes; and finally a fatal bowman slew the two horses which had borne don José and his daughter in their futile endeavour to regain the lost track; and, to come to the present time, their dog, of whom the instinct had preserved them more than once from death by thirst, had been despatched by the same relentless demon.

Still, there was the contradictory consolation which the persistent enemy afforded by these evidences of his bloodthirsty hunt. By a singular anomaly of the human organisation, as long as man knows his fellows are at hand, even though they be enemies, he does not feel utterly stripped of hope. In the depth of his heart, the vaguest of hope sustains and encourages him, though he may not reason about it. But as soon as all human vestiges disappear, the imperceptible human waif on the sea, alone with nature, trembles in full revelation of his paltriness. The colossal surroundings daunt him, and he acknowledges it is folly to struggle with the waves that multitudinously mount up to swamp him from all sides.

Meanwhile, no further occasion to be fearful had been shown, the sun went down, and shot up one short gleam ere the swift darkness shrouded the sky. The howling of wild beasts rushing out to enjoy their time of sport could be traced from the lair to the "licks" and springs.

But our disarmed gente perdida, the lost ones, durst not light a fire; had they the means to scare the wolf away, it might have afforded a mark for the unknown archer. Don José wept as he saw his daughter, who pretended to sleep, to give him and her lover less uneasiness. But sleep does not come under these circumstances to them who court it.

Indeed, only those who have undergone the horror of a night in the untamed forest can imagine its poignancy. Lugubrious phantoms people the glades, the wild beasts intone a devilish concert, the limbs of trees seem to be animated into semblances of the really awakened serpents, whose scales can be heard gliding with a slime softened hush over the bending boughs. None but the experienced can reckon how many ages are compressed in one second of this gruesome "fix," a nightmare of the wakeful, during which the racked mind finds a distorted relish in picturing the most monstrous lucubrations, particularly when the faint yet tantalised appetite sets the brain palpitating with delirium.

After enduring this strain for some hours of the gloom, hope or mere instinct of self-preservation caused Benito to suggest, as one acquainted with hunters expedients, that the shelter existed by the increasing danger of their position on the ground, was upon the summit of a huge broken cottonwood tree. He assisted don José to mount to the top, which he found tolerably solid, spite of wet and solar rot, passed him up poor Dolores, and stood on guard at the base. He meant to have kept awake, or, rather, had not the least idea that he should go off to sleep, but famine had passed its acute stage, and fatigue collaborated with it to lull him. The last look he gave upwards showed him vaguely, like a St. Simon Stylites, the elder Mexican on the broad summit of the stump, his daughter reclining