ROBERTO found the air of his room stifling, the confinement of its walls oppressive. It seemed that the teeth of a man, which he had be come cognizant of possessing only that hour, ached for something to fasten upon and try their strength, urging him out into the open with savage restlessness.
His door opened into the wide patio between the wings of the house, where an immense pepper tree rose high above the roof, its softly draped foliage blue-tinted in the moonlight like a vast, still smoke. There was no light in the house as Roberto stood a little while in the patio, drowned in the gloom of the great tree's shadow. If Helena's conscience troubled her on account of this night's rebellion, she hid the shame of it in the dark.
That was as it should be, Roberto thought. It would have been satisfying to him to know that she was bowed in remorseful shame at her prayers; he suspected, with resentful anger, that she was asleep in her bed.
All was as quiet outside the house as within rhe men who had ridden from the ranch, but few in number, mean-spirited fellows all, excepting Simon alone, had found places to stretch themselves and sleep. It was nothing to them whether Gabriel Henderson went free or was taken; nothing to them whether the power and dignity of Don Abrahan's house rose or fell. Vengeful, bitter, contemptuous of them all, Roberto went to the front of the house and into the broad road that passed before it, the fire of his passion burning the desire for sleep.
Along this road'a little way toward the north he walked, striding rapidly, his spurs clicking at his heels. The land in this valley was sandy, soft, almost white as snow in the bright moonlight, far different from the black, tenuous adobe of his father's homestead. Between the little groves of live-oaks which grew in this rich valley the erratic highway ran, the royal road, the king's highway, of the old mission days. The Indians made it first between their villages, long before the zeal of the Franciscan fathers brought them to that shore; the traffic of the missionaries broadened it, and gave it the dignity of its name.
Roberto felt that his heart was nested in this valley, toward which he had yearned sometimes among the dissipations of the capital. He had intended, all the years of his betrothal to Helena, to establish the dignity of his house here on the land that the Yankee captain, who had been accepted as an equal of the best in that country, had acquired by grant for some service to the Mexican government, real or contrived, which was forgotten now. But the land remained, no matter for the evanescent memory of those who gave it or him who received. It yielded as no other rancho in that part of the country under the wise management of John Toberman, who had given up herding ships on the sea for the herding of cattle on the land.
It was a wrench to give up that plantation, with its green vegas, its stream of living water that came down from the mountains to refresh the great herds, its groves of oak and sycamore trees, its barley and wheat fields, its mansion by the roadside. Yet honor was dearer to a man than lands and herds. At least custom made it so, Roberto said, beginning to feel his anger against Helena diminish in weighing it against what it would cost him. Custom was wrong in many things, as the constant abandonment of old usages proved. Custom was cruel when it separated a man from his dreams and desires in such manner as this.
Roberto's feet found a slower pace, the boiling turmoil of his anger cooled, as these considerations assailed him. Helena was not guilty of any indecorum that smirched her; of that he was well satisfied. She was modern, she was disdainful of the old limitations upon her sex; the Yankee blood of that old captain had drowned the Castilian in her veins. It was wrong to judge her by the standards of that country, as it would be wrong for him to throw away a fortune on no sounder proof than this.
Soft words would repair this breach between them, he was confident, knowing the weakness of women well. A man could bend to soft words, even dissimulation, to save a fortune. That would be a trifling price. But consider Helena. If, by some strength of her alien strain that made her different in many ways from the women he knew best, she held to the repudiation of their betrothal, what was hetodo? Helena might refuse to accept his apology tomorrow; she might scorn him, and turn her cold white face away. It was a thing to pace slowly up and down here in the shadow of the roadside oaks and consider, hands behind the back like a thinking man.
A man must leave home, hunger for it, sigh for it, to return and perceive its beauties hitherto unknown, to feel its friendliness as he felt it here tonight. His heart rose in him, a tenderness of poetic feeling blended out the last shred of his anger, as he stood in the moonlight at the margin of the oak trees' shade, viewing the beauty of that place.
In the south stood the low chain of hills separating this broad valley from that in which the pueblo of Los Angeles lay; close at hand on the north, higher mountains rose, the crumbling granite ledges on their rough sides and summits glistening like snow.
Dark, repellent, the canyons of these mountains appeared, rough and unfriendly their steeps and mangy slopes. No trees graced them, little verdure. They seemed the great cinder-heap of a burning world that the sea had rushed upon and extinguished in some long-distant age. Even with their austerity chastened in the moonlight, there was no invitation to man in the face they presented.
Yet Roberto knew that their sides were covered with low-growing shrubs, with sweet-scented plants, with sage and holly and honey-bearing flowers, which left a man's clothing perfumed by their touch when he threaded the tangle of their barring limbs. Green things grew there which sheep and cattle fattened on; the sage-bloom called the bees to gather such honey as never gladdened man's tongue in any other land. There was a great beneficence, a gentle kindness, even in the forbidding hills.
To the east Roberto could not see far, the vision hemmed by trees, but there he knew the valley came down to a point, like a river flowing between the hills. To the west it broadened for miles, closing again before coming quite to the sea. In that direction the road turned from San Fernando Mission, threading to Santa Barbara and, in its weary course, to Monterey.
It was clear in the valley this night, not a curl of mist drifted along the hills, a sweet languor in its placidity that embraced a man and made him glad. He could dissemble, he could put pride aside, stoop to soft words to beguile a foolish girl's ear, for the blessings of that place. This knowledge that he had teeth to bite made a man wiser, fortified his courage like a pistol in the belt.
With these reflections over him, the thought of his vengeance against Gabriel Henderson put aside for that hour, Roberto walked on up the road, thinking nothing of the time, sleep a stranger to his eyes. There grew mesquite and screw-bean by the roadside, cactus and chaparral, and grass in bunches that put up tall plumes. Soon Roberto was far beyond sight of the ranchhouse, his eyes on the white road, the weight of his new manhood upon him making him grave.
Roberto was startled out of his meditations by the beat of a horse's feet in the road to the north. Before the rider came in sight around one of the goat-path windings of the highway, Roberto knew that the horse had been ridden hard, and far. He stood in the middle of the road, curious to know who had come from a distance in such pressure, whither he was bound, and the mission that urged him to ride in haste through the night.
The rider halted suddenly when he rounded the turn of the road, seeing his way blocked by a man. He seemed to hesitate for a moment between advance and flight. Roberto, prickling with a keen suspicion that all was not honest with the rider, hailed him.
"Advance!" he said, in commanding voice.
The rider lifted his right hand in signal that he understood, and came forward slowly.
"Can you direct me to the Sprague ranch?" he inquired, in the speech of a common man. Roberto saw that he wore the dress of a vaquero, or cattleherder. His carriage in the saddle fixed him as one of that calling.
"It is close by," Roberto replied, laying hold of the bridle rein as a man might do a friend's. Yet there was nothing of friendliness in the young man's bearing; much of suspicious severity, and question of the other's right to pass. "Who is it you have business with there at this late hour?"
"It is a man's own business, whatever it may be," the horseman replied, undisturbed by Roberto's hostility. "Would you deny a man the road, like a bandit?"
"I am a kinsman of Miss Sprague, I have the right to stop any stranger who comes looking for her at this hour of the night. If your business is honest, you will not hesitate to tell me what it is."
"You might be her brother?"
"No, not her brother. I am a distant relative, but my authority is not to be questioned."
"Only a distant relative!" said the rider, with a short laugh. "But you stop a man in the road with a pistol under your fingers. If you were a near relative, a brother or a cousin, maybe you would shoot a man if he even looked in the lady's direction? You are too quick for me, young gentleman. Let go my bridle—I must be on my way."
He seemed to hold Roberto in little seriousness, in trifling account. His teeth flashed in a quick smile; he sat in a posture of graceful indulgence, one hand on his hip, his bridle reins held high in the other.
"Who sent you?" Roberto demanded with all the sternness of his privileged class.
"A man with fingers on his hands, and money in them to pay for what he wanted. That's enough for me to know; it will have to be enough for you."
"Where do you come from? impertinent scoundrel!"
"Have you heard of Monterey, little man?" the vaquero asked, patronizingly insolent, as a free man who knows his strength and despises that of another. "Well then, I come from Monterey. I bring letters for the young lady. Whether they are from a lover, that is another thing. Now let go my bridle— permit me."
The vaquero leaned as he spoke, laying hold of Roberto's wrist to remove his hand from the rein. His cool insolence, his impertinent disregard of any force that his challenger might use to prevent his going, seemed to Roberto a mighty insult to his new manhood, as it doubtless was intended to be.
"Get down!" Roberto commanded, presenting his pistol at the rider's ribs.
"Presently—at the lady's door," the messenger replied, his teeth white in the moonlight as he laughed.
With the words he set spur to his horse, waking in the agany of the cruel thrust the spirit that seemed beaten out of the weary animal. It bounded forward, the dust of its high-flung hoofs in Roberto's face.
The chaparral echoed with a sound strange and discordant in the placidity of that night. Don Roberto had snapped his teeth.