No one could walk through Oldfield a second time on the same morning without a visible or audible explanation to a public who had plenty of leisure to note the few passers-by, and to speculate upon their possible destination, and to discuss the most probable reasons for their going up or coming down the big road. Lynn had an instinctive perception of this, little as he knew of the life of the village. Accordingly he now paused uncertainly at his grandmother's gate and stood still, not knowing what to do with the perfect day, with the ideal Ides of May.
Looking idly toward the northern hilltops, he saw the figure of a horseman suddenly break the sky line and rush galloping downward into the village. Onward thundered the big black horse and his strange rider, sweeping by like a whirlwind, and speeding on and on, till they vanished over the southern hilltops. A light cloud of dust floated for a moment between the farthest green and the farthest blue, and then that too disappeared, and the coming and going of the wild apparition might well have been some trick of a fantastic imagination. And yet Lynn had received a curiously distinct impression of the man's appearance in this space of time, brief almost as a lightning flash. He had seen the foreign dress, the great boots so long that they were slit to the knee; the blood-red handkerchief tied loosely around the neck, and, most distinctly of all, the sinister expression of the dark, deeply lined face and the wildness of the black eyes under the wide, flapping, soft brim of the large sombrero hat. Altogether it was so strange, so unreal an interruption of the peace of this pastoral spot, that the young man could only stand silent gazing after it in bewildered surprise.
"That's Alvarado! You've seen one of the sights of the country," his grandmother called out to him from her place by the window.
"Who is Alvarado?" he asked, when he had entered the room.
"That is a question which a good many people have been asking for a good many years, and nobody has ever had a satisfactory answer," old lady Gordon replied.
Smiling her sardonic smile, she deliberately turned down the leaf of the novel which she had been reading as usual, and laid it on her lap. She was always amused by these histrionic appearances of Alvarado which so terrified most of the Oldfield people. It had indeed long been known all over the Pennyroyal Region that, while other folks always drove hastily into the nearest fence corner whenever they saw Alvarado coming, old lady Gordon invariably kept straight along in the middle of the big road--never turning one hair's breadth to the right or the left--and that Alvarado was always the one who had to turn out. She said nothing of this, however, and thought nothing of it; but she told her grandson all that she knew or that any one knew of Alvarado.