The master thought of the vacant plot beside Smith’s grave, and of the passionate little figure before him.  Seizing her hands in his and looking full into her truthful eyes, he said: 

“Lissy, will you go with me?”

The child put her arms around his neck, and said joyfully, “Yes.”

“But now—­tonight?”

“Tonight.”

And, hand in hand, they passed into the road—­the narrow road that had once brought her weary feet to the master’s door, and which it seemed she should not tread again alone.  The stars glittered brightly above them.  For good or ill the lesson had been learned, and behind them the school of Red Mountain closed upon them forever.

THE RIGHT EYE OF THE COMMANDER

The year of grace 1797 passed away on the coast of California in a southwesterly gale.  The little bay of San Carlos, albeit sheltered by the headlands of the blessed Trinity, was rough and turbulent; its foam clung quivering to the seaward wall of the Mission garden; the air was filled with flying sand and spume, and as the Senor Commandante, Hermenegildo Salvatierra, looked from the deep embrasured window of the Presidio guardroom, he felt the salt breath of the distant sea buffet a color into his smoke-dried cheeks.

The Commander, I have said, was gazing thoughtfully from the window of the guardroom.  He may have been reviewing the events of the year now about to pass away.  But, like the garrison at the Presidio, there was little to review; the year, like its predecessors, had been uneventful—­the days had slipped by in a delicious monotony of simple duties, unbroken by incident or interruption.  The regularly recurring feasts and saints’ days, the half-yearly courier from San Diego, the rare transport ship and rarer foreign vessel, were the mere details of his patriarchal life.  If there was no achievement, there was certainly no failure.  Abundant harvests and patient industry amply supplied the wants of Presidio and Mission.  Isolated from the family of nations, the wars which shook the world concerned them not so much as the last earthquake; the struggle that emancipated their sister colonies on the other side of the continent to them had no suggestiveness.  In short, it was that glorious Indian summer of California history around which so much poetical haze still lingers—­that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence and the reviving spring of American conquest.

The Commander turned from the window and walked toward the fire that burned brightly on the deep ovenlike hearth.  A pile of copybooks, the work of the Presidio school, lay on the table.  As he turned over the leaves with a paternal interest, and surveyed the fair round Scripture text—­the first pious pothooks of the pupils of San Carlos—­an audible commentary fell from his lips:  “’Abimelech