But Mrs. Engle’s sigh, while her husband spoke of black mud and straw, testified that her thoughts still clung about those events and possibilities which she herself had asked him to avoid; her eyes wandered to the tall, rudely garbed figure dimly seen in the patio.  Virginia, recalling Jim Galloway as she had seen him on the stage, heavy-bodied, narrow-hipped, masterful alike in carriage and the look of the prominent eyes, glanced with Mrs. Engle toward Rod Norton.  He was laughing at something passing between him and Florence, and for the moment appeared utterly boyish.  Were it not for the grim reminder of the forty-five-caliber revolver which the nature of his sworn duties did not allow of his laying aside even upon a night like this, it would have been easy to forget that he was all that which the one word sheriff connotes in a land like that about San Juan.

“Can’t get away from it, can we?” Engle having caught the look in the two women’s eyes, broke off abruptly in what he was saying, and now sat studying his cigar with frowning eyes.  “Man against man, and the whole county knows it, one employing whatever criminal’s tools slip into his hands, the other fighting fair and in the open.  Man against man and in a death grapple just because they are the men they are, with one backed up by a hang-dog crowd like Kid Rickard and Antone, and the other playing virtually a lone hand.  What’s the end going to be?”

Virginia thought of Ignacio Chavez.  He, had he been here, would have answered: 

“In the end there will be the ringing of the bells for a man dead.  You will see!  Which one? Quien sabe!  The bells will ring.”

CHAPTER V

IN THE DARKNESS OF THE PATIO

Through the silence of the outer night, as though actually Ignacio Chavez were prophesying, came billowing the slow beating of the deep mourning bell.  Mrs. Engle sighed; Engle frowned; Virginia sat rigid, at once disturbed and oppressed.

“How can you stand that terrible bell?” she cried softly.  “I should think that it would drive you mad!  How long does he ring it?”

“Once every hour until midnight,” answered Engle, his face once more placid as he withdrew his look from the patio and transferred it to his cigar.  And then, with a half smile:  “There are many San Juans; there is, in all the wide world, but one San Juan of the Bells.  You would not take our distinction from us?  Now that you are to become of San Juan you must, like the rest of us, take a pride in San Juan’s bells.  Which you will do soon or late; perhaps just as soon as you come to know something of their separate and collective histories.”

“Tell her, John,” suggested Mrs. Engle, again obviously anxious to dispel the more lugubrious and tragic atmospheres of the evening with any chance talk which might offer itself.

“Let her wait until Ignacio can tell her,” laughed Engle.  “No one else can tell it so well, and certainly no one else has an equal pride or even an equal right in the matter.”