“Yes, I sent Firio with Wrath of God and Jag Ear on ahead and told him to wait at the foot of the descent.  Wrath of God will worry—­he is of a worrying nature.  I must be going.”

In view of the dinosaur nonsense she was already prepared for a variety of inventional talk from him.  As they started down from the pass in single file, she leading, the sun sank behind the hills, leaving the Eternal Painter, unhindered by a furnace glare in the centre of the canvas, to paint with a thousand brushes in the radiant tints of the afterglow.

“You don’t like that one, O art critics!” we hear him saying.  “Well, here is another before you have adjusted your pince-nez, and I will brush it away before you have emitted your first Ah!  I do not criticise.  I paint—­I paint for the love of it.  I paint with the pigments of the firmament and the imagination of the universe.”

The two did not talk of that sky which held their averted glances, while knowing hoofs that bore their weight kept the path.  For how can you talk of the desert sky except in the banality of exclamations?  It is lese majeste to the Eternal Painter to attempt description.

At times she looked back and their eyes met in understanding, as true subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes the Master’s witchery had wrought.  In supreme intoxication of the senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.

It was dusk.  Shadows returned to the crevasses.  Free of the magic of the sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself.  It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy.  She was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him.

With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony.  The Indian sprang up, grinning:  his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.

“I must introduce you all around,” Jack told Mary.

She observed in his manner something new!—­a positive enthusiasm for his three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their loyalty and character.

“Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle,” Jack said.  “Sancho was fat and unresourceful; even stupid.  Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit!  Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la Mancha!  Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!”

Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack’s view, winnowed out of bushels of aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish blood in the primitive southern strain.