“No!  I’m in a hurry.  I will go on and meet him.”  He took off his hat, mopped his crisp, wet hair with his handkerchief, and in a thick, slow, impeded voice, more suggestive than the outburst he restrained, said, “And as long as my son remains here that man, Van Loo, must not pass this gate, speak to him, or even see him.  You hear me?  See to it, you and all the others.  See to it, I say, or”—­He stopped abruptly, clapped his hat on the swollen veins of his forehead, turned quickly, passed out without another word through the archway into the road, and before the good priest could cross himself or recover from his astonishment the thud of his horse’s hoofs came from the dusty road.

It was ten minutes before his face resumed its usual color.  But in that ten minutes, as if some of the struggle of his rider had passed into him, his horse was sweating with exhaustion and fear.  For in that ten minutes, in this new imagination with which he was cursed, he had killed both Van Loo and his son, and burned the refectory over the heads of the treacherous priests.  Then, quite himself again, a voice came to him from the rocky trail above the road with the hail of “Father!” He started quickly as a lad of fifteen or sixteen came bounding down the hillside, and ran towards him.

“You passed me and I called to you, but you did not seem to hear,” said the boy breathlessly.  “Then I ran after you.  Have you been to the Mission?”

Steptoe looked at him quite as breathlessly, but from a deeper emotion.  He was, even at first sight, a handsome lad, glowing with youth and the excitement of his run, and, as the father looked at him, he could see the likeness to his mother in his clear-cut features, and even a resemblance to himself in his square, compact chest and shoulders and crisp, black curls.  A thrill of purely animal paternity passed over him, the fierce joy of his flesh over his own flesh!  His own son, by God!  They could not take that from him; they might plot, swindle, fawn, cheat, lie, and steal away his affections, but there he was, plain to all eyes, his own son, his very son!

“Come here,” he said in a singular, half-weary and half-protesting voice, which the boy instantly recognized as his father’s accents of affection.

The boy hesitated as he stood on the edge of the road and pointed with mingled mischief and fastidiousness to the depths of impalpable red dust that lay between him and the horseman.  Steptoe saw that he was very smartly attired in holiday guise, with white duck trousers and patent leather shoes, and, after the Spanish fashion, wore black kid gloves.  He certainly was a bit of a dandy, as he had said.  The father’s whole face changed as he wheeled and came before the lad, who lifted up his arms expectantly.  They had often ridden together on the same horse.

“No rides to-day in that toggery, Eddy,” he said in the same voice.  “But I’ll get down and we’ll go and sit somewhere under a tree and have some talk.  I’ve got a bit of a job that’s hurrying me, and I can’t waste time.”