He was sitting in Peyton’s business room one morning, when Incarnacion entered.  Clarence had taken a fancy to this Indian, half steward, half vacquero, who had reciprocated it with a certain dog-like fidelity, but also a feline indirectness that was part of his nature.  He had been early prepossessed with Clarence through a kinsman at El Refugio, where the young American’s generosity had left a romantic record among the common people.  He had been pleased to approve of his follies before the knowledge of his profitless and lordly land purchase had commended itself to him as corroborative testimony.  “Of true hidalgo blood, mark you,” he had said oracularly.  “Wherefore was his father sacrificed by mongrels!  As to the others, believe me,—­bah!”

He stood there, sombrero in hand, murky and confidential, steaming through his soaked serape and exhaling a blended odor of equine perspiration and cigarette smoke.

“It was, perhaps, as the master had noticed, a brigand’s own day!  Bullying, treacherous, and wicked!  It blew you off your horse if you so much as lifted your arms and let the wind get inside your serape; and as for the mud,—­caramba! in fifty varas your forelegs were like bears, and your hoofs were earthen plasters!”

Clarence knew that Incarnacion had not sought him with mere meteorological information, and patiently awaited further developments.  The vacquero went on:—­

“But one of the things this beast of a weather did was to wash down the stalks of the grain, and to clear out the trough and hollows between, and to make level the fields, and—­look you! to uncover the stones and rubbish and whatever the summer dust had buried.  Indeed, it was even as a miracle that Jose Mendez one day, after the first showers, came upon a silver button from his calzas, which he had lost in the early summer.  And it was only that morning that, remembering how much and with what fire Don Clarencio had sought the missing boot from the foot of the Senor Peyton when his body was found, he, Incarnacion, had thought he would look for it on the falda of the second terrace.  And behold, Mother of God it was there!  Soaked with mud and rain, but the same as when the senor was alive.  To the very spur!”

He drew the boot from beneath his serape and laid it before Clarence.  The young man instantly recognized it, in spite of its weather-beaten condition and its air of grotesque and drunken inconsistency to the usually trim and correct appearance of Peyton when alive.  “It is the same,” he said, in a low voice.

“Good!” said Incarnacion.  “Now, if Don Clarencio will examine the American spur, he will see—­what?  A few horse-hairs twisted and caught in the sharp points of the rowel.  Good!  Is it the hair of the horse that Senor rode?  Clearly not; and in truth not.  It is too long for the flanks and belly of the horse; it is not the same color as the tail and the mane.  How comes it there?  It comes from the twisted horsehair rope of a riata, and not from the braided cowhide thongs of the regular lasso of a vacquero.  The lasso slips not much, but holds; the riata slips much and strangles.”