The firelight in the tule-thatched hut of Manuel Sepulveda winked facetiously at the black fog that peered in at the open door.  A night wind from the north crept up, parted the fog like a black curtain and whispered something which set the flames a-dancing as they listened.  The fog swung back jealously to hear what it was, and the wind went away to whisper its wonder-tale to the trees that rustled astonishment and nodded afterward to one another in approval, like the arrant gossips they were.  The chill curtain fell straight and heavy again before the door, so that the firelight shone dimly through its folds; but not before Dade, riding at random save for the trust he put in the sure homing instinct of his horse, caught the brief gleam of light and sighed thankfully.

“We’ll stop with old Manuel to-night,” he announced cheerfully.  “Here’s his cabin, just ahead.”

“And who’s old Manuel?” asked Jack petulantly, because of the pain in his feet and his own unpleasant memories of that day.

“Don Andres Picardo’s head vaquero.  He camps here to keep an eye on the cattle.  Some fellows from town have been butchering them right and left and doing a big business in beef, according to all accounts.  Manuel hates gringos like centipedes, but I happened to get on the good side of him—­partly because my Spanish is as good as his own.  An Americano who has black hair and can talk Spanish like the don himself isn’t an Americano, in Manuel’s eyes.”

While they were unsaddling under the oak tree, where the vaqueros kept their riding gear in front of the cabin, Manuel himself came to the door and stood squinting into the fog, while he flapped a tortilla dexterously between his brown palms.

“Is it you, Valencia??” he called out in Spanish, giving the tortilla a deft, whirling motion to even its edges.

Dade led the way into the zone of light, and Manuel stepped back with a series of welcoming nods.  His black eyes darted curiously to the stranger, who, in Manuel’s opinion, looked unpleasantly like a gringo, with his coppery hair waving crisply under his sombrero, and his eyes that were blue as the bay over there to the east.  But when Dade introduced him, Jack greeted his squat host with a smile that was disarming in its boyish good humor, and with language as liquidly Spanish as Manuel’s best Castilian, which he reserved for his talks with the patron on the porch when the senora and the young senorita were by.

The distrust left Manuel’s eyes as he trotted across the hard-trodden dirt floor and laid the tortilla carefully upon a hot rock, where three others crisped and curled their edges in delectable promise of future toothsomeness.

He stood up and turned to Dade amiably, his knuckles pressing lightly upon his hips that his palms might be saved immaculate for the next little corn cake which he would presently slap into thin symmetry.

“Madre de Dios!” he cried suddenly, quite forgetting the hospitable thing he had meant to say about his supper.  “You are hurt, Senor!  The blood is on your sleeve and your hand.”