He has agonized with sea-sickness during the voyage, and this is the first day that he has found tolerable.  Once more he is able to eat and stand up; able to think, devise, resolve, and execute; able, in short, to be Coronado.  Look at the little, sunburnt, sinewy, earnest, enduring man; study his diplomatic countenance, serious and yet courteous, full of gravity and yet ready for gayety; notice his ready smile and gracious wave of the hand as he salutes the skipper.  He has been through horrors; he has fought a tremendous fight of passion, crime, and peril; yet he scarcely shows a sign of it.  There is some such lasting stuff in him as goes to make the Bolivars, Francias, and Lopez, the restless and indefatigable agitators of the Spanish-American communities.  You cannot help sympathizing with him somewhat, because of his energy and bottom.  You are tempted to say that he deserves to win.

He has made some progress in his conspiracy to entrap love and a fortune.  It must be understood that the two muleteers persisted in their story concerning Apaches, and that consequently Clara has come to think of Thurstane as dead.  Meantime Coronado, after the first two days of wild excitement, has conducted himself with rare intelligence, never alarming her with talk of love, always courteous, kind, and useful.  Little by little he has worn away her suspicions that he planned murder, and her only remaining anger against him is because he did not attempt to search for Thurstane; but even for that she is obliged to see some excuse in the terrible word “Apaches.”

“I have had no thought but for her safety,” Coronado often said to Mrs. Stanley, who as often repeated the words to Clara.  “I have made mistakes,” he would go on.  “The San Juan journey was one.  I will not even plead Garcia’s instructions to excuse it.  But our circumstances have been terrible.  Who could always take the right step amid such trials?  All I ask is charity.  If humility deserves mercy, I deserve it.”

Coronado even schooled himself into expressing sympathy with Clara for the loss of Thurstane.  He spoke of him as her affianced, eulogized his character, admitted that he had not formerly done him justice, hinting that this blindness had sprung from jealousy, and so alluded to his own affection.  These things he said at first to Aunt Maria, and she, his steady partisan, repeated them to Clara, until at last the girl could bear to hear them from Coronado.  Sympathy! the bleeding heart must have it; it will accept this balm from almost any hand, and it will pay for it in gratitude and trust.

Thus in two months from the disappearance of Thurstane his rival had begun to hope that he was supplanting him.  Of course he had given up all thought of carrying out the horrible plan with which he had started from Santa Fe.  Indeed, he began to have a horror of Garcia, as a man who had set him on a wrong track and nearly brought him into folly and ruin.  One might say that Satan was in a state of mind to rebuke sin.