“I had been riding one day for ten hours, and was so fatigued that I determined to spend the night with one of my herdsmen.  He had a little shelter under some fine pecan trees on the Guadalupe, and after a cup of coffee and a meal of dried beef, I sauntered with my cigar down the river bank.  Then the cool, dusky shadows of the wood tempted me.  I entered it.  It was an enchanted wood, for there stood Jessy Lorimer, just as I had painted her.

“I did not move nor speak.  I watched her, spell-bound.  I had not even the power, when she had mounted her pony and was coming toward me, to assume another attitude.  She saw that I had been watching her, and a look, half reproachful and half angry, came for a moment into her face.  But she inclined her head to me as she passed, and then went off at a rapid gallop before I could collect my senses.

“Some people, Jack, walk into love with their eyes open, calculating every step.  I tumbled in over head, lost my feet, lost my senses, narrowed in one moment the whole world down to one bewitching woman.  I did not know her, of course; but I soon should.  I was well aware she could not live very far away, and that my herd must be able to give me some information.  I was so deeply in love that this poor ignorant fellow, knowing something about this girl, seemed to me to be a person to be respected, and even envied.

“I gave him immediately a plentiful supply of cigars, and sitting down beside him opened the conversation with horses, but drifted speedily into the subject of new settlers.

“‘Were there any since I had left?’

“’Two or three, no ‘count travelers, one likely family.’

“‘Much of a family?’

“‘You may bet on that, sir.’

“‘Any pleasant young men?’

“‘Reckon so.  Mighty likely young gal.’

“So, bit by bit, I found that Mr. Lorimer, my beauty’s father, was a Scotchman, who had bought the ranch which had formerly belonged to the old Spanish family of the Yturris.  Then I remembered pretty Inez and Dolores Yturri, with their black eyes, olive skins and soft, lazy embonpoint; and thought of golden-haired Jessy Lorimer in their dark, latticed rooms.

“Jack, turn the picture to me.  Beautiful Jessy!  How I loved her in those happy days that followed.  How I humored her grave, stern father and courted her brothers for her sake!  I was a slave to the whole family, so that I might gain an hour with or a smile from Jessy.  Do I regret it now?  Not one moment.  Such delicious hours as we had together were worth any price.  I would throw all my future to old Time, Jack, only to live them over again.”

“That is a great deal to say, Petralto.”

“Perhaps; and yet I will not recall it.  In those few months everything that was good in me prospered and grew.  Jessy brought out nothing but the best part of my character.  I was always at my best with her.  No thought of selfish pleasure mingled in my love for her.  If it delighted me to touch her hand, to feel her soft hair against my cheek, to meet her earnest, subduing gaze, it also made me careful by no word or look to soil the dainty purity of my white lily.