We stepped between the principal actors in this scene, which only the passion of Altascar made tragical, but Tryan, with a humility but ill concealing his triumph, interrupted: 

“Let him curse on.  He’ll find ’em coming home to him sooner than the cattle he has lost through his sloth and pride.  The Lord is on the side of the just, as well as agin all slanderers and revilers.”

Altascar but half guessed the meaning of the Missourian, yet sufficiently to drive from his mind all but the extravagant power of his native invective.

“Stealer of the Sacrament!  Open not!—­open not, I say, your lying, Judas lips to me!  Ah! half-breed, with the soul of a coyote!—­car-r-r-ramba!”

With his passion reverberating among the consonants like distant thunder, he laid his hand upon the mane of his horse as though it had been the gray locks of his adversary, swung himself into the saddle and galloped away.

George turned to me: 

“Will you go back with us tonight?”

I thought of the cheerless walls, the silent figures by the fire, and the roaring wind, and hesitated.

“Well then, goodby.”

“Goodby, George.”

Another wring of the hands, and we parted.  I had not ridden far when I turned and looked back.  The wind had risen early that afternoon, and was already sweeping across the plain.  A cloud of dust traveled before it, and a picturesque figure occasionally emerging therefrom was my last indistinct impression of George Tryan.

PART II—­IN THE FLOOD

Three months after the survey of the Espiritu Santo Rancho, I was again in the valley of the Sacramento.  But a general and terrible visitation had erased the memory of that event as completely as I supposed it had obliterated the boundary monuments I had planted.  The great flood of 1861-62 was at its height when, obeying some indefinite yearning, I took my carpetbag and embarked for the inundated valley.

There was nothing to be seen from the bright cabin windows of the golden city but night deepening over the water.  The only sound was the pattering rain, and that had grown monotonous for the past two weeks, and did not disturb the national gravity of my countrymen as they silently sat around the cabin stove.  Some on errands of relief to friends and relatives wore anxious faces, and conversed soberly on the one absorbing topic.  Others, like myself, attracted by curiosity listened eagerly to newer details.  But with that human disposition to seize upon any circumstance that might give chance event the exaggerated importance of instinct, I was half-conscious of something more than curiosity as an impelling motive.