reckonin's back here a ways."

We must return to love matters. However amazing it may be that a man who
has no conscience should nevertheless have a heart, such appears to have
been the case with that abnormal creature Coronado. The desert had made
him take a strong liking to Clara, and now that he had a rival at hand he
became impassioned for her. He began to want to marry her, not alone for
the sake of her great fortune, but also for her own sake. Her beauty
unfolded and blossomed wonderfully before his ardent eyes; for he was
under that mighty glamour of the emotions which enables us to see beauty
in its completeness; he was favored with the greatest earthly second-sight
which is vouchsafed to mortals.

Only in a measure, however; the money still counted for much with him. He
had already decided what he would do with the Muñoz fortune when he should
get it. He would go to New York and lead a life of frugal extravagance,
economical in comforts (as we understand them) and expensive in pleasures.
New York, with its adjuncts of Saratoga and Newport, was to him what Paris
is to many Americans. In his imagination it was the height of grandeur and
happiness to have a box at the opera, to lounge in Broadway, and to dance
at the hops of the Saratoga hotels. New Mexico! he would turn his back on
it; he would never set eyes on its dull poverty again. As for Clara? Well,
of course she would share in his gayeties; was not that enough for any
reasonable woman?

But here was this stumbling-block of a Thurstane. In the presence of a
handsome rival, who, moreover, had started first in the race, slow was far
from being sure. Coronado had discovered, by long experience in flirtation
and much intelligent meditation upon it, that, if a man wants to win a
woman, he must get her head full of him. He decided, therefore, that at