certainly gave no evidence of actual and prospective good fortune;
if anything, the lines of discontent around his brow and mouth were
more strongly drawn. Apparently, his interview with his father had
only the effect of reviving and stirring into greater activity a
certain dogged sentiment that, through long years, had become
languidly mechanical. He was no longer a beaten animal, but one
roused by a chance success into a dangerous knowledge of his power.
In his honest workman's dress, he was infinitely more to be feared
than in his rags; in the lifting of his downcast eye, there was the
revelation of a baleful intelligence. In his changed condition,
civilization only seemed to have armed him against itself.

The fonda, a long low building, with a red-tiled roof extending
over a porch or whitewashed veranda, in which drunken vaqueros had
been known to occasionally disport their mustangs, did not offer a
very reputable appearance to the eye of young Guest as he
approached it in the gathering shadows. One or two half-broken
horses were securely fastened to the stout cross-beams of some
heavy posts driven in the roadway before it, and a primitive trough
of roughly excavated stone stood near it. Through a broken gate at
the side there was a glimpse of a grass-grown and deserted court-
yard piled with the disused packing-cases and barrels of the
tienda, or general country shop, which huddled under the same roof
at the other end of the building. The opened door of the fonda
showed a low-studded room fitted up with a rude imitation of an
American bar on one side, and containing a few small tables, at
which half a dozen men were smoking, drinking, and playing cards.
The faded pictorial poster of the last bull-fight at Monterey, and
an American "Sheriff's notice" were hung on the wall and in the
door-way. A thick yellow atmosphere of cigarette smoke, through