Diego, when she ran stealthily across the patio, her riding-habit flapping about her feet in the wind, looked at her uneasily as if he would like to remonstrate; but being a mere peon, he bent silently and held his calloused, brown palm for the senorita’s foot; reverently straightened the flapping skirt when she was mounted, and sent a hasty prayer to whatever saint might be counted upon to watch most carefully over a foolish little Spanish girl.

“An evil spirit is in the caballo to-day,” Diego finally ventured to inform his mistress gravely.  “For a week he has not felt the weight of saddle, and he loves not the trees which sway and sing, or the wind whistling in his ears.”

“And for that he pleases me much,” retorted the senorita, and touched Tejon with her spurred heel, so that he came near upsetting Diego with the lunge he gave.

When the peon recovered his balance, he stood braced against the wind, and with both hands held his hat upon his head while he watched her flying down the slope and out of sight amongst the trees.  No girl in all the valley rode better than the Senorita Teresa Picardo, and Diego knew it well and boasted of it to the peons of other hacendados; but for all that he was ill-at-ease, and when, ten minutes later, he came upon Valencia at the stable, he told him of the madness of the senorita.

“Tejon she would ride, and none other; and to-day he is a devil.  Twice he would have bitten my shoulder while I was saddling, and that is the sign that his heart is full of wickedness.  Me, I would have put the freno Chilene (Chilian bit) in his mouth—­but that would start him bucking; for he hates it because then he cannot run.”

Valencia, a little later, met the new majordomo and repeated what Diego had said; and Dade, catching a little of the uneasiness and yet not wanting to frighten the girl’s father with the tale, made it his immediate business to find Jack and tell him that Teresita had ridden away alone upon a horse that neither Diego nor Valencia considered safe.

Jack, at first declaring that he wouldn’t go where he plainly was not wanted, at the end of an uncomfortable half-hour borrowed Surry, because he was fleet as any mustang in the valley, and rode after her.

In this wise did circumstances and Jack obey the piqued desire of the senorita.

After the first headlong half mile, Tejon became the perfect little saddle-pony which fair weather found him; and Teresita, cheated of her battle of wills and yet too honest to provoke him deliberately, began to think a little less of her own whims and more of the Senora Simpson, housed miserably beneath the canvas covering of the prairie schooner.

She found Mrs. Jerry sitting inside, with a patchwork quilt over her shoulders, her eyes holding a shade more of wistfulness and less twinkle, perhaps, but with her lips quite ready to smile upon her visitor.  Teresita sat down upon a box and curiously watched the pretty senora try to make a small, triangular piece of cloth cover a large, irregular hole in the elbow of the big senor’s coat sleeve.  Sometimes, when she turned it so, the hole was nearly covered—­except that there was the frayed rent at the bottom still grinning maliciously up at the mender.