The Mystery of The Barranca

menting on his order to the mule-driver. But, fagged out by the day's hot travel, they did not awaken unt

you must see the Barranca by daylight. Without its naked savagery it is as big and grand as the Colorado Ca?on. Besid

was Paz and Luz, the mules the se?ors were riding! And having roundly cursed the memory of the fool wife who had been induced by an a

ut by means of this devil of a light who, within one week, chooses the fat belly of the jefe of Tehultepec as a cushion for his heels. A year's earnings that trick cost me, not to mention the prettiest set of blue stripes that ever warmed a cold back. Neither

ined silver buttons, filled the whole place with light and cheer. Not to mention their interest in the saddling and packing of the loads-to which some refractory mule contributed an occasional humorous touch-a comedy was invariably enacted between the fat landlord and the departing travelers, for only after an altercation which always required the

. What has be

their bells tinkled pleasantly in the scrub oak and copal which first climbed with the trail up a ravine behind the tow

yawn. The sibilant hiss of the muleteers urging the mules grew fainter in Seyd's ears, and, though he was conscious in a dim way that the trail had led out from the fields and was falling, falling, falling downhill through growths of cac

e bigger of the two muleteers answered Seyd's

" Billy commented on Seyd's translation. "I'

f his hacienda, an act that all thought would end by the wiping of the very memory of the place from the face of the earth. But instead of waiting to be attacked Don Sebastien took the stoutest of his peons and went out after the thieves. And he kept after them all that winter, the following summer, into the next year. No trail was too long, wet, or weary if he could mark its end with a brigand swinging under a tree. Here, there, everywhere within a hundred miles of

bastien," Seyd

"What use would he have of purses,

stopped laughing, surprised by the sud

n Sebastien never crosses its threshold. And Mattias,

the face of the padre who stands before him. And his voice comes ringing down to where Miguel, the steward, is trying to beat me down a peso on the price of the charcoal. 'I have builded you a church, and for performing the offices I shall pay you one hundred silver pesos the month, for, though I did not feel, myself, any need of your mutterings, they serve to keep my peo

egin to understand the general respect for our friend. A man who does things like that is entitled to some consideration. Let us be

with brush and creepers that they would have passed without notice if the trail had not happened to run along the face of one wall. Looking closely, Seyd first observed a monstrous squat figure in bas-relief, one of dozens which were interwoven into an intricate design; then, riding along, he saw frightfully distorted faces peering out from behind a green veil of creepers. Broad and fat, long and thin, some were stretched in a wide grin, others thrust out tongues in ribald mockery. Here the eyes of one were distorted in a painful squint. There a slant upturn of tight-drawn lids re

uldn't have been ve

ecur under conditions that would lend it enormous force. He forgot it in the moment of utterance, saying, as

denly entered into the burros and sent them flying downhill through a grove of trees. Entering on one side fully loade

it now in daylight. We ma

ail? It is nothing! A peso for every time I have traveled it by night would buy me a rancho-and Paz and Luz, devils as they are, could travel it blindfold." And whether, as Billy suggested, they were afraid of missing their usual communion with the flea

om which dark hills uplifted ruddy peaks into the blaze of the setting sun. The Barranca was so deep, so vast in scale, that he grew dizzy in following with his eye the tiny zigzag of the trail down, down, till it was lost in blue haze through which even the gia

mountains loose in a crazy world. The whole earth is turned on edge. H

d more in a few miles to the coast. You see, we are still in touch with

. Isn't that pine

pe, lifting its skirts from the contamination of the tropics. That spark of green in the far distance is sugar cane-two thousand acres of it on the General's hacienda of San Nicolas. And you see the gash over there,

if these devils should take to running again, not in s

rom his mule's foot dropped five hundred feet plumb before rebounding into greater depths, and at no place did the width of the path allow an unnecessary inch for the sw

Looks to me as though w

et to a bump, about fourteen seconds ought to distribute you nicely among the bottom trees. But if you ele

the rim above. In darkness and silence that was broken only by the scrape of hoofs and rattle of displaced stones they followed down and down and down, until Billy presently came under a singular hallucination. Repeatedly he put out his hand to repel the rock wall that seemed to be animated with a desire to crowd him off into the ca?on, and because of this pa

ahead of the train around a rock wall, he almost went over her head. Recovering quickly, he was about to drive in the spurs; and a man of slower intuitions would surely have done it. With him, however, action invariably preceded thought,

A slide has carri