He started crawling on his belly up out of the draw to the crest of the hog’s back.  He had an impression, amounting almost to a certainty, that the assassin in the valley had not seen him riding down the draw, otherwise he would not have opened fire on Don Miguel.  He would have bided his time and chosen an occasion when there would be no witnesses.

For an hour he waited, watching, grieving, weeping a little.  From the draw where Don Miguel lay no sound came forth.  Pablo tried hard to erase from his mind a vision of what he would find when, his primal duty of vengeance, swift and complete, accomplished, he should go down into that draw.  His tear-dimmed, bloodshot eyes searched the valley—­ah, what was that?  A cow, a deer or a man?  Surely something had moved in the brush at the edge of the river wash.

Pablo rubbed the moisture from his eyes and looked again.  A man was crossing the wash on foot and he carried a rifle.  A few feet out in the wash he paused, irresolute, turned back, and knelt in the sand.

“Oh, blessed Mother of God!” Pablo almost sobbed, joyously.  “I will burn six candles in thy honor and keep flowers on thy altar at the Mission for a year!”

Again the man stood up and started across the wash.  He no longer had his rifle.  “It is as I thought,” Pablo soliloquized.  “He has buried the rifle in the sand.”

Pablo watched the man start resolutely across the three-mile stretch of flat ground between the river and the hills to the south.  Don Nicolas Sandoval had remarked that the stranger had come in over the hills to the south.  Very well!  Believing himself undetected, he would depart in the same direction.  The Rancho Palomar stretched ten miles to the south and it would be a strange coincidence if, in that stretch of rolling, brushy country, a human being should cross his path.

The majordomo quickly crawled back into the draw where the black mare patiently awaited him.  Leading her, he started cautiously down, taking advantage of every tuft of cover until, arrived at the foot of the draw, he discovered that some oaks effectually screened his quarry from sight.  Reasoning quite correctly that the same oaks as effectually screened him from his quarry, Pablo mounted and galloped straight across country for his man.

He rode easily, for he was saving the mare’s speed for a purpose.  The fugitive, casting a guilty look to the rear, saw him coming and paused, irresolute, but observing no evidences of precipitate haste, continued his retreat, which (Pablo observed, grimly) was casual now, as if he desired to avert suspicion.

Pablo pulled the mare down to a trot, to a walk.  He could afford to take his time and it was not part of his plan to bungle his work by undue baste.  The fugitive was crossing through a patch of lilac and Pablo desired to overhaul him in a wide open space beyond, so he urged the mare to a trot again and jogged by on a parallel course, a hundred yards distant.