When the sound of their laboring oars grew fainter, he told Antonio to lead him and Sanchicha again to the buried boat.  There he bade her kneel beside him.  “We will do penance here, thou and I, daughter,” he said, gravely.  When the fog had drawn its curtain gently around the strange pair, and sea and shore were blotted out, he whispered, “Tell me, it was even so, was it not, daughter, on the night she came?” When the distant clatter of blocks and rattle of cordage came from the unseen vessel, now standing out to sea, he whispered again, “So, this is what thou didst hear, even then.”  And so during the night he marked, more or less audibly to the half-conscious woman at his side, the low whisper of the waves, the murmur of the far-off breakers, the lightening and thickening of the fog, the phantoms of moving shapes, and the slow coming of the dawn.  And when the morning sun had rent the veil over land and sea, Antonio and Jose found him, haggard but erect, beside the trembling old woman, with a blessing on his lips, pointing to the horizon where a single sail still glimmered:—­

“Va Usted con Dios.”

A BLUE-GRASS PENELOPE

I.

She was barely twenty-three years old.  It is probable that up to that age, and the beginning of this episode, her life had been uneventful.  Born to the easy mediocrity of such compensating extremes as a small farmhouse and large lands, a good position and no society, in that vast grazing district of Kentucky known as the “Blue Grass” region, all the possibilities of a Western American girl’s existence lay before her.  A piano in the bare-walled house, the latest patented mower in the limitless meadows, and a silk dress sweeping the rough floor of the unpainted “meeting-house,” were already the promise of those possibilities.  Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors.  There were small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying log cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the county judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest of the blacksmith’s daughter.  Eventually she had married the male of her species, a young stranger, who, as schoolmaster in the nearest town, had utilized to some local extent a scant capital of education.  In obedience to the unwritten law of the West, after the marriage was celebrated the doors of the ancestral home cheerfully opened, and bride and bridegroom issued forth, without regret and without sentiment, to seek the further possibilities of a life beyond these already too familiar voices.  With their departure for California as Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tucker, the parental nest in the Blue Grass meadows knew them no more.