As if to avoid noticing any angry reply from the young man, he reentered the cabin and shut the door behind him.  Clarence felt the uselessness of further parley, and rode away.

But Gilroy’s Parthian arrow rankled as he rode.  He was not greatly shocked at Jim’s defection, for he was always fully conscious of his vanity and weakness; but he was by no means certain that Jim’s extravagance and braggadocio, which he had found only amusing and, perhaps, even pathetic, might not be as provocative and prejudicial to others as Gilroy had said.  But, like all sympathetic and unselfish natures, he sought to find some excuse for his old companion’s weakness in his own mistaken judgment.  He had no business to bring poor Jim on the land, to subject his singular temperament to the temptations of such a life and such surroundings; he should never have made use of his services at the rancho.  He had done him harm rather than good in his ill-advised, and, perhaps, selfish attempts to help him.  I have said that Gilroy’s parting warning rankled in his breast, but not ignobly.  It wounded the surface of his sensitive nature, but could not taint or corrupt the pure, wholesome blood of the gentleman beneath it.  For in Gilroy’s warning he saw only his own shortcomings.  A strange fatality had marked his friendships.  He had been no help to Jim; he had brought no happiness to Susy or Mrs. Peyton, whose disagreement his visit seemed to have accented.  Thinking over the mysterious attack upon himself, it now seemed to him possible that, in some obscure way, his presence at the rancho had precipitated the more serious attack on Peyton.  If, as it had been said, there was some curse upon his inheritance from his father, he seemed to have made others share it with him.  He was riding onward abstractedly, with his head sunk on his breast and his eyes fixed upon some vague point between his horse’s sensitive ears, when a sudden, intelligent, forward pricking of them startled him, and an apparition arose from the plain before him that seemed to sweep all other sense away.

It was the figure of a handsome young horseman as abstracted as himself, but evidently on better terms with his own personality.  He was dark haired, sallow cheeked, and blue eyed,—­the type of the old Spanish Californian.  A burnt-out cigarette was in his mouth, and he was riding a roan mustang with the lazy grace of his race.  But what arrested Clarence’s attention more than his picturesque person was the narrow, flexible, long coil of gray horse-hair riata which hung from his saddle-bow, but whose knotted and silver-beaded terminating lash he was swirling idly in his narrow brown hand.  Clarence knew and instantly recognized it as the ordinary fanciful appendage of a gentleman rider, used for tethering his horse on lonely plains, and always made the object of the most lavish expenditure of decoration and artistic skill.  But he was as suddenly filled with a blind, unreasoning sense of repulsion and fury, and lifted