On the staircase he ran against a stranger, precise, dignified, accurately clothed and fitted--the "Señor Perkins" just released from his slavery, a very different person from the one accidentally disclosed to him an hour before, on his probable way to the gaming table, and his habitual enjoyment on the evening of the day. In his maudlin condition, Victor would have fain exchanged views with him in regard to the general deceitfulness of the fair, and the misfortunes that attend a sincere passion, but Don Pedro hurried him below into the parlour, and out of the reach of the serenely contemptuous observation of the Señor Perkins's eye. Once in the parlour, and in the presence of the coquettish Manuela, who was still closely shawled, as if yet uncertain and doubtful in regard to the propriety of her garments above the waist, Victor, after a few vague remarks upon the general inability of the sex to understand a nature so profoundly deep and so wildly passionate as his own, eventually succumbed in a large black haircloth arm-chair, and became helplessly and hopelessly comatose.
"We must find a bed here for him to-night," said the sympathising, but practical Manuela; "he is not fit, poor imbecile, to be sent to his hotel. Mother of God! what is this?"
In lifting him out of the chair into which he had subsided with a fatal tendency to slide to the floor, unless held by main force, something had fallen from his breast pocket, and Manuela had picked it up. It was the bowie-knife he had purchased that morning.
"Ah!" said Manuela, "desperate little brigand: he has been among the _Americanos_! Look, my uncle!"
Don Pedro took the weapon quietly from the brown hands of Manuela and examined it coolly.
"It is new, my niece," he responded, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "The gloss is still upon its blade. We will take him to bed."
If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony of the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent and natural expression, that spot was the ancient and time-honoured _pueblo_ and Mission of the blessed St. Anthony. The changeless, cloudless, expressionless skies of summer seemed to symbolise that aristocratic conservatism which repelled all innovation, and was its distinguishing mark. The stranger who rode into the _pueblo_, in his own conveyance,--for the instincts of San Antonio refused to sanction the introduction of a stage-coach or diligence that might bring into the town irresponsible and vagabond travellers,--read in the faces of the idle, lounging _peons_ the fact that the great _rancheros_ who occupied the outlying grants had refused to sell their lands, long before he entered the one short walled street and open plaza, and found that he was in a town where there was no hotel or tavern, and that he was dependent entirely upon the hospitality of some courteous resident for a meal or a night's lodging.