“It’s the princess, Bev, the princess we were looking for,” I joyously asserted.  “And, oh, Bev, she is beautiful, but snappy-like, too.  She called me a ‘big brown bob-cat’, and then she apologized, just as nice as could be.”

“And this little Marcos cuss, he’ll be the ogre,” Beverly declared.  “But who’ll we have for the giant?  That priest, footing it out by that dry creek-thing they call a ’royo?”

“Oh no, no!  He and Jondo made up together, and Jondo’s nobody’s bad man even in a story.  It will be that Ferdinand Ramero,” I insisted.  “But, say, Bev, Jondo wrote a new name on the register this evening, or somebody wrote it for him, maybe.  It wasn’t his own writing.  ’Jean Deau.’  I saw it in big, round, back-slanting letters.  Why did he do that?”

“Well, I reckon that’s his real name in big, round, back-slanting letters down here,” Beverly replied.  “It’s French, and we have just been spelling it like it sounds, that’s all.”

“Well, maybe so,” I commented, and when I fell asleep it was to dream of a princess and Jondo by a strange name, but the same Jondo.

The air of New Mexico puts iron into the blood.  The trail life had hardened us all, but the finishing touch for Rex Krane came in the invigorating breath of that mountain-cooled, sun-cleansed atmosphere of Santa Fe.  Shrewd, philosophic, brave-hearted like his historic ancestry, he laid his plans carefully now, sure of doing what he was set to do.  And the wholesome sense of really serving the man who had measured his worth at a glance gave him a pleasure he had not known before.  Of course, he moved slowly and indifferently.  One could never imagine Rex Krane hurrying about anything.

“We’ll just ‘prospect,’ as Daniel Boone says,” he declared, as he marshaled us for the day.  “We are strangers, sight-seein’, got no other business on earth, least of all any to take us up to this old San Miguel Church for unholy purposes.  ’Course if we see a pretty little dark-eyed, golden-haired lassie anywhere, we’ll just make a diagram of the spot she’s stand’n’ on, for future reference.  We’re in this game to win, but we don’t do no foolish hurryin’ about it.”

So we wandered away, a happy quartet, and the city offered us strange sights on every hand.  It was all so old, so different, so silent, so baffling—­the narrow, crooked street; the solid house-walls that hemmed them in; the strange tongue, strange dress, strange customs; the absence of smiling faces or friendly greetings; the sudden mystery of seeking for one whom we must not seem to seek, and the consciousness of an enemy, Ferdinand Ramero, whom we must avoid—­that it is small wonder that we lived in fairyland.

We saw the boy, Marcos, here and there, sometimes staring defiantly at us from some projected angle; sometimes slipping out of sight as we approached; sometimes quarreling with other children at their play.  But nowhere, since the moment when I had seen the door close on her up that crooked street beside the old church, could we find any trace of the little girl.