When the young man found himself again confronting the glittering light of the courtyard, he remembered the interview and the soft twilight of the boudoir only as part of a pleasant dream.  There was a rude awakening in the fierce wind, which had increased with the lengthening shadows.  It seemed to sweep away the half-sensuous comfort that had pervaded him, and made him coldly realize that he had done nothing to solve the difficulties of his relations to Susy.  He had lost the one chance of confiding to Mrs. Peyton,—­if he had ever really intended to do so.  It was impossible for him to do it hereafter without a confession of prolonged deceit.

He reached the stables impatiently, where his attention was attracted by the sound of excited voices in the corral.  Looking within, he was concerned to see that one of the vacqueros was holding the dragging bridle of a blown, dusty, and foam-covered horse, around whom a dozen idlers were gathered.  Even beneath its coating of dust and foam and the half-displaced saddle blanket, Clarence immediately recognized the spirited pinto mustang which Peyton had ridden that morning.

“What’s the matter?” said Clarence, from the gateway.

The men fell apart, glancing at each other.  One said quickly in Spanish:—­

“Say nothing to him.  It is an affair of the house.”

But this brought Clarence down like a bombshell among them, not to be overlooked in his equal command of their tongue and of them.  “Ah! come, now.  What drunken piggishness is this?  Speak!”

“The padron has been—­perhaps—­thrown,” stammered the first speaker.  “His horse arrives,—­but he does not.  We go to inform the senora.”

“No, you don’t! mules and imbeciles!  Do you want to frighten her to death?  Mount, every one of you, and follow me!”

The men hesitated, but for only a moment.  Clarence had a fine assortment of Spanish epithets, expletives, and objurgations, gathered in his rodeo experience at El Refugio, and laid them about him with such fervor and discrimination that two or three mules, presumably with guilty consciences, mistaking their direction, actually cowered against the stockade of the corral in fear.  In another moment the vacqueros had hastily mounted, and, with Clarence at their head, were dashing down the road towards Santa Inez.  Here he spread them in open order in the grain, on either side of the track, himself taking the road.

They did not proceed very far.  For when they had reached the gradual slope which marked the decline to the second terrace, Clarence, obeying an instinct as irresistible as it was unaccountable, which for the last few moments had been forcing itself upon him, ordered a halt.  The casa and corral had already sunk in the plain behind them; it was the spot where the lasso had been thrown at him a few evenings before!  Bidding the men converge slowly towards the road, he went on more cautiously, with his eyes upon the track before him.  Presently he stopped.  There was a ragged displacement of the cracked and crumbling soil and the unmistakable scoop of kicking hoofs.  As he stooped to examine them, one of the men at the right uttered a shout.  By the same strange instinct Clarence knew that Peyton was found!