“May I sit down?” asked Luis, in his pleasant, suave voice, indicating a place beside her. She rose to bring out chairs, but, laughing, he seated himself on a low stone. The moon rose well above the treetops and the young Spanish gentleman looked with something of awe upon the aureole of silver fair hair surrounding the girl’s head. Never had he seen a girl like her. He would not have dared to touch her. She roused all that was best in his nature--and all that was worst, too, struggling passionately in the depths of his being. Everything he had ever wanted he had had without any difficulty, and now that he had outgrown the wants which his doting mother could supply, he _took_ what he wanted, if it were not forthcoming. No girl had ever flouted him. Was he not the young Don Luis Lopez, heir to Don Anabel himself? So there was certainty behind his considered wooing that glamorous night. He must not frighten this silver flower; indeed, he did not want to. He longed passionately to have Hope like him, and tried to amuse her with his broken bits of English. “You-are-jung-and-lowbely,” he said, carefully. She laughed when she saw that it did not hurt his feelings, and tried to follow the few words of Spanish which he repeated for her. Then she grew frightened at this unusual visit and for fear her father would return. Luis, too, felt he had stayed as long as he dared, and rose reluctantly to go. He wheeled his pony in the moonlight with a fine display of horsemanship, and after caracolling around the plazita before the house, swept off into the moonlight at a gallop. Just in time, for James Bragdon came back along the same street within a few minutes. “I have bought this house,” he said, “and am going to take up some land, adjoining. I can make a trade for it and get it cheap, for the title is not clear. Then we shall have no rent to pay and we can raise our own garden stuff next year. We are right on the big ditch, and there is a little river yonder, a stream from the Tesuque.” The next day he was watering his new possessions, having shut down the headgate below in the “sakey,” and the muddy water had already run over his field when an irate Mexican followed by two others came posthaste through the fields, gesticulating and threatening. Bragdon realized that he was in trouble and made no objection when they opened the gates in the ditch below him and went off muttering to shut the water off from his ditch above. Ceran St. Vrain endeavored to explain to the Yankee, that afternoon, that the rules of irrigating in that country were sacred and that only the master of the _acequias_ could say when to open the gates and when not, and where the water was to be distributed. He warned him not to use water until permitted. “But his crops he had bought in the land needed it,” protested the man, indignantly. That might be, St. Vrain conceded, but they knew best what could be used, and it was possible that Bragdon’s place had no right to that water.