Dade’s eyes followed Jack’s understandingly, and the thing he had meant to do seemed all at once contemptible, selfish, and weak.  He had meant to leave and take Jack with him, because it hurt him mightily to see those two falling in love with each other.  The trouble his staying might bring to Don Andres was nothing more nor less than a subterfuge.  If Teresita’s smiles had continued to be given to him as they had been before Jack came, he told himself bitterly, he would never have thought of going.  And Jack thought he hesitated from pure unselfishness!  The fingers that groped mechanically for his tobacco, though he had no intention of smoking just then, trembled noticeably.

“All right,” he said quietly.  “I’ll stay, then.”  And a moment after:  “Go ask her if she wants to ride Surry.  I promised her she could, next time she rode.”

CHAPTER IX

JERRY SIMPSON, SQUATTER

The senorita, it would seem, had lost interest in the white horse as well as in his master.  That was the construction which Dade pessimistically put upon her smiling assurance that she could never be so selfish as to take Senor Hunter’s wonderful Surry and condemn him to some commonplace caballo; though she gave also a better reason than that, which was that her own horse was already saddled—­witness the peon leading the animal into the patio at that very moment—­and that an exchange would mean delay.  Dade took both reasons smilingly, and mentally made a vow with a fearsome penalty attached to the breaking of it.  After which he felt a little more of a man, with his pride to bear him company.

Manuel came out from the room which Don Andres used for an office, saluted the senorita with the air of a permanent leave-taking, as well as a greeting, and passed the gringos with face averted.  A moment later the don followed him with the look of one who would dismiss a distasteful business from his mind; and entered amiably into the pleasure-seeking spirit of the ride.

With the March sun warm upon them when they rode out from the wide shade of the oaks, they faced the cooling little breeze which blew out of the south.

“Valencia tells me that the prairie schooner which Jose spoke of has of a truth cast anchor upon my land,” observed the don to Dade, reining in beside him where he rode a little in advance of the others.  “Since we are riding that way, we may as well see the fellow and make him aware of the fact that he is trespassing upon land which belongs to another; though if he has halted but to rest his cattle and himself, he is welcome.  But Valencia tells me that the fellow is cutting down trees for a house, and that I do not like.”

“Some emigrants seem to think, because they have traveled over so much wilderness, there is no land west of the Mississippi that they haven’t a perfect right to take, if it suits them.  They are a little like your countryman Columbus, I suppose.  Every man who crosses the desert feels as if he’s out on a voyage of discovery to a new world; and when he does strike California, it’s hard for him to realize that he can’t take what he wants of it.”