Dade led the way into the zone of light, and Manuel stepped back with a series of welcoming nods. His black eyes darted curiously to the stranger, who, in Manuel's opinion, looked unpleasantly like a gringo, with his coppery hair waving crisply under his sombrero, and his eyes that were blue as the bay over there to the east. But when Dade introduced him, Jack greeted his squat host with a smile that was disarming in its boyish good humor, and with language as liquidly Spanish as Manuel's best Castilian, which he reserved for his talks with the patron on the porch when the senora and the young senorita were by.

The distrust left Manuel's eyes as he trotted across the hard-trodden dirt floor and laid the tortilla carefully upon a hot rock, where three others crisped and curled their edges in delectable promise of future toothsomeness.

He stood up and turned to Dade amiably, his knuckles pressing lightly upon his hips that his palms might be saved immaculate for the next little corn cake which he would presently slap into thin symmetry.

"Madre de Dios!" he cried suddenly, quite forgetting the hospitable thing he had meant to say about his supper. "You are hurt, Senor! The blood is on your sleeve and your hand."

Dade looked down at his hand and laughed. "I did get a scratch. I'll let you see what it's like."

"You never told me you got shot!" accused Jack sharply, from where he had thrown himself down on a bundle of blankets covered over with a bullock hide dressed soft as chamois.

"Never thought of it," retorted Dade in Spanish, out of regard for his host.

"We had some trouble with the gringos," he explained to Manuel. "There was a little shooting, and a bullet grazed my arm. It doesn't amount to much, but I'll let you look at it."

"Ah, the gringos!" Manuel spat after the hated name. "The patron is too good, too generous! They steal the cattle of the patron, though they might have all they need for the asking. Like the green worms upon the live oaks, they would strip the patron's herds to the last, lean old bull that is too tough even for their wolf teeth! Me, I should like to la.s.so and drag to the death every gringo who comes sneaking in the night for the meat which tastes sweeter when it is stolen. To-day Valencia rode down to the bayou--"

While he told indignantly the tale of the latest pillage, he bared the wounded arm. Jack got stiffly upon his swollen feet to look. It was not a serious wound, as wounds go; a deep gash in the bicep, where a bullet meant for Dade's heart had plowed under his upraised arm four inches wide of its mark. It must have been painful, though he had not once mentioned it; and a shamed flush stung Jack's cheeks when he remembered his own complaints because of his feet.

"You never told me!" he accused again, this time in the language of his host.

"The Senor Hunter has the brave heart of a Spaniard, though his blood is light," said Manuel rebukingly. "The Senor Hunter would not cry over a bigger hurt than this!"

Jack sat down again upon the bull-hide seat and dropped his face between his palms. Old Manuel spoke truer than he knew. Dade Hunter was made of the stuff that will suffer much for a friend and say nothing about it, and to-day was not the first time when Jack had all unwittingly given that friendship the test supreme.

Manuel carefully inspected the wound and murmured his sympathy. He pulled a bouquet of dry herbs from where it hung in a corner, under the low ceiling, and set a handful brewing in water, where the coals were golden-yellow with heat. He tore a strip of linen off Valencia's best shirt which he was saving for fiestas, and prepared a bandage, interrupting himself now and then to dart over and inspect the tortillas baking on the hot rock. For a fat man he moved with extraordinary briskness, and so managed to do three things at one time and do them all thoroughly; he washed and dressed the wound with the herbs squeezed into a poultice, rescued the tortillas from scorching, and spake his mind concerning the gringos who, he declared, were despoiling this his native land. Then he lifted certain pots and platters to the center of the hut and cheerfully announced supper; and squatted on the floor, facing his guests over the food.

"There's another thing that bothers me, Manuel," Dade announced humorously, when they three were seated around the pot of frijoles, the earthen pan of smoking carne-seco (which is meat flavored hotly after the Spanish style) and a stack of the tortillas Manuel's fat hands had created while he talked.

Manuel, bending a tortilla into a scoop wherewith to help himself to the brown beans, raised his black eyes anxiously. "But is there further hurt?" he asked, and glanced wistfully at the tortilla before laying it down that he might minister further to the senor.

"No--go on with your supper. There's a buckskin horse out there that the gringos may say I stole. I don't want the beast; he's about fourteen years old and he's got a Roman nose to beat Caesar himself, and a bad eye and a wicked heart."

"Dios!" murmured Manuel over the list of equine shortcomings and took a large, relieved bite of tortilla and beans. The senor was pleased to jest with a poor vaquero, but the senor would doubtless explain. He chewed luxuriously and waited, his black eyes darting from this face which he knew and liked, to that strange one of the blue eyes and the hair that was like the dullest of dull California gold.

"I don't like that caballo," went on Dade, helping himself to meat, "and so I'd hate like the deuce to be hung for stealing him; sabe?"

Manuel licked a finger before he spread his hands to show how completely he failed to understand. "But if the caballo does not please the senor, why then did the senor steal--"

"You see, I wanted to bring my partner--Senor Jack Allen--down here with me. And he was riding the caballo, and he couldn't get off--"

Manuel swore a Spanish oath politely, to please his guest who wished to amaze him.

"Because he was tied on." Dade failed just there to keep a betraying hardness out of his voice. "The Viligantes were--going to--hang him."

The last two words were cut short off with the click of his jaws coming together.

Manuel thereupon swore more sincerely and spilled beans from his tortilla scoop. He knew the ways of the Committee. Four months ago--when the Committee was newer and more just--they had hanged the third cousin of his half-sister's husband. It is true, the man had killed a woman with a knife; yet Manuel's black beard bristled when he thought of the affront to his hypothetical kinship.

"I had to take the two together," Dade explained, trying with better success to speak lightly. "And now, if I turn the buckskin loose, he may go back--and he may not. I was wondering--"

Manuel cut him short. "To-morrow I ride to town," he said. "I will take the caballo back with me, if that pleases the senors. I will turn him loose near the Mission, and he will go to his stable.

"The senor," he added, "was very brave. _Madre de Dios!_ To run away with a prisoner of the Vigilantes! But they will surely kill the senor for that; the taking of the horse, that is nothing." His teeth shone briefly under his black mustache. "One can die but once," he pointed out, and emphasized his meaning by a swift glance at Jack, moodily nibbling the edge of a corn cake. "But if the horse does not please the senor--"

Dade caught his meaning and laughed a little over it. "The horse," he said, "belongs to the Committee; my friend does not."

"Si, Senor--but surely that is true. Only--" he stroked his crisp beard thoughtfully--"the senors would better go to-morrow to the patron. There the gringos dare not come. In this poor hut the senors may not be safe--for we are but three poor vaqueros when all are here.

We will do our best--"

"Three vaqueros," declared Dade with fine diplomacy, "as brave as the three who live here, would equal twenty of the Committee. But we will not let it come to that."

Manuel took the flattery with a glimpse of white teeth and a deprecatory wave of the hand, and himself qualified it modestly afterward.

"With the knife--perhaps. But the gringos have guns which speak fast.

Still, we would do our best--"

"Say, if he's going back to town to-morrow," spake Jack suddenly, from where he reclined in the shadow "why can't I write a note to Bill Wilson and have him send down my guns? The Captain took them away, you know; but he won't object to giving them back now!" His voice was bitter.

"The rest of them might. You seem to think that when you killed Perkins you wiped out the whole delegation--which you didn't. What was the row about; if you don't mind telling me?"

"I thought you knew," said Jack quite sincerely, which proved more than anything how absorbed he was in his own part in the affair. He shifted his head upon his clasped hands so that his eyes might rest upon the waning firelight, where the pot of frijoles, set back from supper, was still steaming languidly in the hot ashes.

"You started it yourself, two weeks ago," he announced whimsically, to lighten a little the somber tale. "If you hadn't bought that white horse from that drunken Spaniard, I'd be holding a handful of aces and kings to-night, most likely, in Bill Wilson's place. And my legs wouldn't be aching like the devil," he added, reminded anew of his troubles, when he shifted his position. "It's all your fault, bought the horse."

Dade grinned and bent to hold a twig in the coals, that he might light a cigarette. "All right, I'm the guilty party. Let's have the consequences of my evil deed," he advised, settling back on his heels and lowering an eyelid at Manuel in behalf of this humorous partner of his.

"You bought the horse and broke the Spaniard's heart and ruined his temper. And he and Sandy had a fight, and--So," he went on, after a two-minute break in the argument, "when I heard Swift sneering something about Sandy, last night, I rose up in meeting and told him and some others what I thought of 'em. I was not," he explained, "thinking nice thoughts at the time. You see, Perkins, since he got the lead, has gathered a mighty scaly bunch around him, and they've been running things to suit themselves.

"Then, Swift and two or three others held up a boy from the mines to-day, and I happened to see it. I interfered; fact is, I killed a couple of them. So they arrested both of us, went through a farce trial, and were trying to hurry me into Kingdom Come before Bill Wilson got a rescue party together, when you come along. That's all.

They let the kid go--which was a good thing. I don't think they'll be down here after me. In fact, I've been thinking maybe I'd go back, in a day or so, and have it out with them."

"Yes, that's about what you'd be thinking, all right," retorted Dade unemotionally. "Sounds perfectly natural." The tone of him, being unsympathetic, precipitated an argument which flung crisp English sentences back and forth across the cabin. Manuel, when the words grew strange and took on a harsh tang which to his ear meant anger, diplomatically sought his blankets and merged into the shadow of the corner farthest from the fire and nearest the door. The senors were pleased to disagree; if they fought, he had but to dodge out into the night and neutrality. The duties of hospitality weighed hard upon Manuel during that half-hour or so.

Dade's cigarette stub, flung violently into the heart of the fire glow, seemed to Manuel a crucial point in the quarrel; he slipped back the blankets, ready to retreat at the first lunge of open warfare. He breathed relief, however, when Dade got up and stretched his arms to the dried tules overhead, and laughed a lazy surrender of the argument, if not of his opinion upon the subject.

"You're surely the most ambitious trouble-hunter I ever saw," he said, returning to his habitual humorous drawl, with the twinkle in his eyes that went with it. "Just the same, we'll not go back to the mine just yet. Till the dust settles, we're both better off down here with Don Andres Picardo. I don't want to be hung for the company I keep.

Besides--"

"I'll bet ten ounces there's a senorita," hazarded. Jack maliciously.

"You're like Bill Wilson; but you can preach caution till your jaws ache; you can't fool me into believing you're afraid to go back to the mine. Is there a senorita?"

"You shut up and go to sleep," snapped Dade, and afterward would not speak at all.

Manuel, in the shadow, frowned over the only words he understood--Don Andres Picardo and senorita. The senors were agreeable companions, and they were his guests. But they were gringos, after all. And if they should presume to lift desireful eyes to the little Senorita Teresa--Teresita, they called her fondly who knew her--Manuel's mustache lifted suddenly at one side at the bare possibility.

CHAPTER VI