Carquinez had relaxed finally. He stole a glance at the rattling windows,
looked upward at the beamed roof, and listened for a moment to the savage
roar of the south-easter as it caught the bungalow in its bellowing jaws.
Then he held his glass between him and the fire and laughed for joy through
the golden wine.

"It is beautiful," he said. "It is sweetly sweet. It is a woman's wine,
and it was made for gray-robed saints to drink."

"We grow it on our own warm hills," I said, with pardonable California
pride. "You rode up yesterday through the vines from which it was made."

It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really
himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his blood.
He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the
high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to
be as deadly dull as a British Sunday--not dull as other men are dull, but
dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was when he
was really himself.

From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear friend
and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. He rarely erred. As I have
said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough, with him,
was equilibrium--the equilibrium that is yours and mine when we are sober.

His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the Greek.
Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard," I have
heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange and
ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and
primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows,