La gente?  Oh, Ignacio knew them well, all of them!  There was Senor Engle, to begin with.  The banker of whom no doubt she had heard?  He owned a big residencia just yonder; you could catch the gleam of its white walls through a clump of cottonwoods, withdrawn aloofly from San Juan’s street.  Many men worked for him; he had big cattle and sheep ranches throughout the county; he paid well and loaned out much money.  Also he had a beautiful wife and a truly marvellously beautiful daughter.  And horses such as one could not look upon elsewhere.  Then there was Senor Nortone, as Ignacio pronounced him; a sincere friend of Ignacio Chavez and a man fearless and true and extravagantly to be admired, who, it appeared, was the sheriff.  Not a family man; he was too young yet.  But soon; oh, one could see!  It would be Ignacio who would ring the bells for the wedding when Roderico Nortone married himself with the daughter of the banker.

“He is what you call a gunman, isn’t he?” asked the girl, interested.  “I heard two of the men on the stage talking of him.  They called him Roddy Norton; he is the one, isn’t he?”

Seguro; sure, he was the one.  A gunman?  Ignacio shrugged.  He was sheriff, and what must a sheriff be if not a gunman?

“On the stage,” continued the girl, “was a man they called Doc; and another named Galloway.  They are San Juan men, are they not?”

Ignacio lifted his brows a shade disdainfully.  They were both San Juan citizens, but obviously not to his liking.  Jim Galloway was a big man, yes; but of la gente, never!  The senorita should look the other way when he passed.  He owned the Casa Blanca; that was enough to ticket him, and Ignacio passed quickly to el senor doctor.  Oh, he was smart and did much good to the sick; but the poor Mexican who called him for a bedridden wife must first sell something and show the money.

Beyond these it appeared that the enviable class of San Juan consisted of the padre Jose, who was at present and much of the time away visiting the poor and sick throughout the countryside; Julius Struve, who owned and operated the local hotel, one of the lesser luminaries, though a portly gentleman with an amiable wife; the Porters, who had a farm off to the northwest and whose connection to San Juan lay in the fact that an old maid daughter taught the school here; various other individuals and family groups to be disposed of with a word and a careless wave of a cigarette.  Already for the fair stranger Ignacio had skimmed the cream of the cream.

The girl sighed, as though her question had been no idle one and his reply had disappointed her.  For a moment her brows gathered slightly into a frown that was like a faint shadow; then she smiled again brightly, a quick smile which seemed more at home in her eyes than the frown had been.