Referring to the slipper incident and receiving her assurances that “she” (the slipper) was much too large and fell often “so,” a fact really established by demonstration, he seized his opportunity.  “But tell me, when you were with the padre and your slipper fell off, you did not expect him to put it on for you?”

Concha looked at him coyly and then said triumphantly, “Ah, no! but he was a priest, and you are a young caballero.”

Yet even after this audacity Mr. Brooks found he could only recommend to Mr. Hoover a change in the young girl’s slippers, the absence of the rose-pinned veil, and the substitution of a sunbonnet.  For the rest he must trust to circumstances.  As Mr. Hoover—­who with large paternal optimism had professed to see already an improvement in her—­helped her into the saddle, the schoolmaster could not help noticing that she had evidently expected him to perform that act of courtesy, and that she looked correspondingly reproachful.

“The holy fathers used sometimes to let me ride with them on their mules,” said Concha, leaning over her saddle towards the schoolmaster.

“Eh, what, missy?” said the Protestant Mr. Hoover, pricking up his ears.  “Now you just listen to Mr. Brooks’s doctrines, and never mind them Papists,” he added as he rode away, with the firm conviction that the master had already commenced the task of her spiritual conversion.

The next day the master awoke to find his little school famous.  Whatever were the exaggerations or whatever the fancies carried home to their parents by the children, the result was an overwhelming interest in the proceedings and personnel of the school by the whole district.  People had already called at the Hoover ranch to see Mrs. Hoover’s pretty adopted daughter.  The master, on his way to the schoolroom that morning, had found a few woodmen and charcoal burners lounging on the bridle path that led from the main road.  Two or three parents accompanied their children to school, asserting they had just dropped in to see how “Aramanta” or “Tommy” were “gettin’ on.”  As the school began to assemble several unfamiliar faces passed the windows or were boldly flattened against the glass.  The little schoolhouse had not seen such a gathering since it had been borrowed for a political meeting in the previous autumn.  And the master noticed with some concern that many of the faces were the same which he had seen uplifted to the glittering periods of Colonel Starbottle, “the war horse of the Democracy.”

For he could not shut his eyes to the fact that they came from no mere curiosity to see the novel and bizarre; no appreciation of mere picturesqueness or beauty; and alas! from no enthusiasm for the progression of education.  He knew the people among whom he had lived, and he realized the fatal question of “color” had been raised in some mysterious way by those Southwestern emigrants who had carried into this “free state” their inherited prejudices.  A few words convinced