Clarence was staggered.

“And you have not found Valdez?  You have looked for him?” he said, hurriedly throwing on his clothes.

“Everywhere,—­all over the plain.  The whole rancho has been out since sunrise,—­here and there and everywhere.  And there is nothing!  Of course not.  What would you?” He pointed solemnly to the ground.

“Nonsense!” said Clarence, buttoning his coat and seizing his hat.  “Follow me.”

He ran down the passage, followed by Incarnacion, through the excited, gesticulating crowd of servants in the patio, and out of the back gate.  He turned first along the wall of the casa towards the barred window of the boudoir.  Then a cry came from Incarnacion.

They ran quickly forward.  Hanging from the grating of the window, like a mass of limp and saturated clothes, was the body of Pedro Valdez, with one unbooted foot dangling within an inch of the ground.  His head was passed inside the grating and fixed as at that moment when the first spring of the frightened horse had broken his neck between the bars as in a garrote, and the second plunge of the terrified animal had carried off his boot in the caught stirrup when it escaped.

CHAPTER XI.

The winter rains were over and gone, and the whole long line of Californian coast was dashed with color.  There were miles of yellow and red poppies, leagues of lupines that painted the gently rounded hills with soft primary hues, and long continuous slopes, like low mountain systems, of daisies and dandelions.  At Sacramento it was already summer; the yellow river was flashing and intolerable; the tule and marsh grasses were lush and long; the bloom of cottonwood and sycamore whitened the outskirts of the city, and as Cyrus Hopkins and his daughter Phoebe looked from the veranda of the Placer Hotel, accustomed as they were to the cool trade winds of the coast valleys, they felt homesick from the memory of eastern heats.

Later, when they were surveying the long dinner tables at the table d’hote with something of the uncomfortable and shamefaced loneliness of the provincial, Phoebe uttered a slight cry and clutched her father’s arm.  Mr. Hopkins stayed the play of his squared elbows and glanced inquiringly at his daughter’s face.  There was a pretty animation in it, as she pointed to a figure that had just entered.  It was that of a young man attired in the extravagance rather than the taste of the prevailing fashion, which did not, however, in the least conceal a decided rusticity of limb and movement.  A long mustache, which looked unkempt, even in its pomatumed stiffness, and lank, dark hair that had bent but never curled under the barber’s iron, made him notable even in that heterogeneous assembly.

“That’s he,” whispered Phoebe.

“Who?” said her father.

Alas for the inconsistencies of love!  The blush came with the name and not the vision.