For an hour he waited, watching, grieving, weeping a little. From the
draw where Don Miguel lay no sound came forth. Pablo tried hard to
erase from his mind a vision of what he would find when, his primal
duty of vengeance, swift and complete, accomplished, he should go down
into that draw. His tear-dimmed, bloodshot eyes searched the
valley--ah, what was that? A cow, a deer or a man? Surely something
had moved in the brush at the edge of the river wash.
Pablo rubbed the moisture from his eyes and looked again. A man was
crossing the wash on foot and he carried a rifle. A few feet out in
the wash he paused, irresolute, turned back, and knelt in the sand.
"Oh, blessed Mother of God!" Pablo almost sobbed, joyously. "I will
burn six candles in thy honor and keep flowers on thy altar at the
Mission for a year!"
Again the man stood up and started across the wash. He no longer had
his rifle. "It is as I thought," Pablo soliloquized. "He has buried
the rifle in the sand."
Pablo watched the man start resolutely across the three-mile stretch of
flat ground between the river and the hills to the south. Don Nicolas
Sandoval had remarked that the stranger had come in over the hills to
the south. Very well! Believing himself undetected, he would depart
in the same direction. The Rancho Palomar stretched ten miles to the
south and it would be a strange coincidence if, in that stretch of
rolling, brushy country, a human being should cross his path.
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