When the mirror had told her that the necklace of tawny topaz was prettier with white than was the opal chain, she lingered till the sound of horses and a company of men so excited her curiosity that she had to pull back the _persianas_ and peer out. Herded by the shouts of the _arrieros_, a caravan of a hundred mules and burros was being crowded into the plaza. Had they brought her new satin shoes and brocaded skirt? There was Don Tiburcio! In the high hat, a wrought leather jerkin over a gold-embroidered vest, a wide copper-studded belt, and as he dismounted a bit stiffly from his lathered horse Consuelo took note of beautiful tight-fitting trousers, fawn-colored, over which were riding leggings of Mexican leather. All this in a flash, then Consuelo’s eyes swept to the travel-worn face of the southern Don. A true son of the Conquerors of the New World was Don Tiburcio de Garcia y Mendoza. A dark, lean man of thirty, who looked ten years older, he was tall, and hatchet-jawed, with a nose of perfect aquilinity, and a thin mouth made somewhat prominent by large even teeth. The mouth seemed harsh, cruel even, till it broke into a smile. His brow was high and narrow, and his well-cut ears lay close to his aristocratic head. Don Tiburcio was filled with the adventurous spirit of his forbears or he would not himself come trading at the head of his caravans up the Cordilleras from Mexico, enduring every sort of physical hardship and running the gantlet of fiercely treacherous Indian tribes. His father, Don Diego Alvar Roybal de Garcia, never left his broad estates in Guadalajara not even to travel north to the immense cattle ranches of the Garcias in Chihuahua. The supervision of all that he left to his son, and as the caravan journeys to the north proved highly gainful, he made no objection to them. Romance called to the young man. The lure that first brought the Spanish Conquistadores up through this country had drawn him--gold and gain, perhaps undiscovered treasure waiting there--and, indeed, at the end he had found beauty, too. Nowhere in the southern provinces had Don Tiburcio seen a face to compare in his estimation with that of the little hoyden who had slapped him the summer before. And to speak truthfully, it was the conquest of that untamed child which had lured him back this time over the hot stretches of desert between Santa Fe and Chihuahua as urgently as the money to be gained in trade.