Farther along the road Tia Teresa heard the clatter of the hoofs and saw the animal in its swift stride disappear in the direction of the rancho. She knew now for certain that her surmise was correct, and the first flush of triumph on her fact settled down into an expression of grim satisfaction. “It served him right in any case.” she muttered. “It was just what the young villain deserved.” Then she re-entered the house and passed upstairs. Her young mistress was placidly asleep, smiling in her dreams. The duenna nodded her head in a satisfied sort of way; Merle would learn the news at the proper time, and would not meanwhile be agitated by wild conjectures. So she tiptoed from the room, and was soon busied with domestic duties as if nothing had happened. Dick, emerging on foot from the last steep ascent of the canyon, promptly swung himself again into the saddle and started at a loping canter up the winding roadway through the woods. After rounding the first comer he spied the huddled figure on the ground. Before he turned the body over he knew that the man was dead. But when the dead face looked up at his, it was with a terrible shock of surprise that he recognized Marshall Thurston. Dick stood for a few moments, gazing around in utter bewilderment. One hand of the dead man was shattered and bloody, while a big splurge of red on the shirt showed where the bullet had completed its work. Murder—palpable murder! But who could have done this deed? Who had any valid motive to rid the world of this stray piece of humanity—and in such coldblooded manner, not in the heat of some angry quarrel, but by a deliberate act of assassination in a place so lonely as these pine-clad hills? Dick sat him down by the roadside and pondered these questions. There was no real pity in his heart. Young Thurston had been utterly bad—not big-brained enough to belong to the social dregs, but just equally worthless scum, the more repellent because it made itself visible all the time. He would pass almost without a tear except from the father whose own record had been so foully besmeared that there could be scant sympathy even for him in the hour of his bereavement. Dick just wondered and wondered. For the time being he had quite forgotten that old legend—the Vendetta of the Hills. CHAPTER XIII—Accused AROUND the horse corral at the San Antonio Rancho some half-dozen cowboys were squatted on their heels, cowboy-fashion, swapping the news of the day. They had ridden in from various points of the compass, and two or three of their horses, those of the latest comers, still stood saddled outside the enclosure, the reins dropped loosely over their heads, which for the trained cow-pony is just as effective an anchorage as any stake and rope.