“Hu!” Doña Katarina laughed till she must hold her sides, and the tears streamed down her cheeks. “Hu-hu! They were held up by Santa Feans, just beyond Raton Pass.” Between her gusts of mirth he learned that as the wagons went bounding over the ruts the axle of one of them broke, and the rim of a wheel came off, disclosing cavities within rim and hub that were filled with silver. No! the Santa Feans did not get it. The Yankees got away, after all. Steve heaved a sigh of satisfaction and returned to his own matters. “But about the painting? And my departure? Did they, did anyone----?” “But yes, I tell you.” Doña Katarina nodded vigorously. “It was the talk of the town. Of course I knew, and Consuelo without a doubt knew, that you had nothing to do with its disappearance.” Steven sat thoughtfully before the fire that night, too tired to go out in search of company, and gave himself over to thought. It was more than a year since the tall, hatchet-faced refugee from Mexico’s perilous presidential chair had walked into his father’s office and commissioned him with an errand which had started him on a twelvemonth of perilous adventuring. What was it, he mused, that should make him stray from the great business in New Orleans that was his by inheritance, to set his heart upon a pioneer undertaking so far from his people? What held Pierre Lafitte and brought him back to his trapping after a lifetime, almost, of solitude, and labor for which he was illy repaid? All the pioneers who dared the desert, the enmity of the Indians, the freezing passage of the Rockies in winter, were not landless and penniless when they started forth. “One might as well ask the buffalo why they migrate, or the birds of passage,” St. Vrain had said. “It’s instinct. Mankind has it almost as strong as the four-footed or the birds. They want land, room to breathe. It’s only the daring and the brave who blaze trails, who strike out for new business where there’s room and they won’t be crowded out. Only the red-blooded can survive against the odds on the frontier.” These words came back to Steven with force as he thought about the agreement he had made with Don Tiburcio de Garcia. Well, he felt fit to tackle the Trail and survive, and he would not be forced from the territory as long as others could hold their own in this New World, held by a handful of haughty Spanish and a horde of red men. No, he would stay, and--and marry, and bring up a family in this land. Mexico? What line across the mountain said that here the English-speaking should stop and forever keep to the other side? The land should belong to those who would build it. And so Steven fell asleep, dreaming of empire and of a piquante face peering over a tipsy balcony in the moonlight. * * * * *