It so chanced that the medical practitioner of the district was a man of large experience, of military training, and plain speech.  When, therefore, he one day found in his surgery a man of rude Western type, strong-limbed and sunburned, but trembling, hesitating and neurotic in movement, after listening to his symptoms gravely, he asked, abruptly:  “And how much are you drinking now?”

“I am a lifelong abstainer,” stammered his patient in quivering indignation.  But this was followed by another question so frankly appalling to the hearer that he staggered to his feet.

“I’m Stephen Masterton—­known of men as a circuit preacher, of the Northern California district,” he thundered—­“and an enemy of the flesh in all its forms.”

“I beg your pardon,” responded Dr. Duchesne, grimly, “but as you are suffering from excessive and repeated excitation of the nervous system, and the depression following prolonged artificial exaltation—­it makes little difference whether the cause be spiritual, as long as there is a certain physical effect upon your body—­which I believe you have brought to me to cure.  Now—­as to diet? you look all wrong there.

“My food is of the simplest—­I have no hankering for fleshpots,” responded the patient.

“I suppose you call saleratus bread and salt pork and flapjacks simple?” said the doctor, coolly; “they are common enough, and if you were working with your muscles instead of your nerves in that frame of yours they might not hurt you; but you are suffering as much from eating more than you can digest as the veriest gourmand.  You must stop all that.  Go down to a quiet watering-place for two months.” . . .

“I go to a watering-place?” interrupted Masterton; “to the haunt of the idle, the frivolous and wanton—­never!”

“Well, I’m not particular about a ‘watering-place,’” said the doctor, with a shrug, “although a little idleness and frivolity with different food wouldn’t hurt you—­but you must go somewhere and change your habits and mode of life completely.  I will find you some sleepy old Spanish town in the southern country where you can rest and diet.  If this is distasteful to you,” he continued, grimly, “you can always call it ’a trial.’”

Stephen Masterton may have thought it so when, a week later, he found himself issuing from a rocky gorge into a rough, badly paved, hilly street, which seemed to be only a continuation of the mountain road itself.  It broadened suddenly into a square or plaza, flanked on each side by an irregular row of yellowing adobe houses, with the inevitable verandaed tienda in each corner, and the solitary, galleried fonda, with a half-Moorish archway leading into an inner patio or courtyard in the center.