"Clearly a brigand with the liver of a chicken," responded his wife.

The subject of this ambiguous criticism, happily oblivious, meantime
walked doggedly back along the road the stage-coach had just brought
him. It was badly paved and hollowed in the middle with the worn ruts of
a century of slow undeviating ox carts, and the passage of water
during the rainy season. The low adobe houses on each side, with bright
cinnamon-colored tiles relieving their dark-brown walls, had the regular
outlines of their doors and windows obliterated by the crumbling of
years, until they looked as if they had been afterthoughts of the
builder, rudely opened by pick and crowbar, and finished by the gentle
auxiliary architecture of birds and squirrels. Yet these openings at
times permitted glimpses of a picturesque past in the occasional view
of a lace-edged pillow or silken counterpane, striped hangings, or dyed
Indian rugs, the flitting of a flounced petticoat or flower-covered
head, or the indolent leaning figure framed in a doorway of a man in
wide velvet trousers and crimson-barred serape, whose brown face
was partly hidden in a yellow nimbus of cigarette smoke. Even in the
semi-darkness, Ezekiel's penetrating and impertinent eyes took eager
note of these facts with superior complacency, quite unmindful, after
the fashion of most critical travellers, of the hideous contrast of his
own long shapeless nankeen duster, his stiff half-clerical brown straw
hat, his wisp of gingham necktie, his dusty boots, his outrageous
carpet-bag, and his straggling goat-like beard. A few looked at him in
grave, discreet wonder. Whether they recognized in him the advent of a
civilization that was destined to supplant their own ignorant, sensuous,
colorful life with austere intelligence and rigid practical improvement,
did not appear. He walked steadily on. As he passed the low arched door
of the mission church and saw a faint light glimmering from the side