"Then that old Aztec tribe seemed to hear of it on the wind--no one knows. A brown girl was caught by the Indians one night, her long hair cut short to her head; and the next day Estevan was found tied on that altar with the same hair plaited into ropes. The heart had been cut from the body and rested in a little urn or vase carved in the stone of the wall. There were no other mutilations or signs of cruelty--it was more like a pagan ceremony than anything else. The girl's hair was the only clue as to what the cause might have been." "And the wife and the child--what did the man tell you of them?" "Child?" Keith stared at the old man. "I did not mention a child; never heard there was one. The widow of Estevan entered a convent and was never heard of again. The old miner said the priest took charge of the property--for the Church, he supposed! I think of that old temple every time I see the cactus and Aztec sun cut in this gray-green stone of your church here; but I had forgotten the name of Estevan until you mentioned it." "It is a good name," added Alvara again. "Felipe Estevan was wild and a fighter, but he was not a bad man in California. He had no wife, and the girls all wore beads he bought--but why not? He knew we have only one life to live here!" "True, senor; and the story of the tragedy made me forget poor Teddy's comedy--one I can't laugh at yet." "Some day you ask us to a wedding, and you will forget that marriage is a madness," said Alvara. And then Dona Teresa came slowly out on the veranda in her many folds of black. There was a hard glitter in her little black eyes, but her lips curved ever so slightly in a courteous greeting as Keith Bryton bent over her hand. "I hear how you telling that story, senor," she remarked, pleasantly. "You think that it is good to tie a gentleman on a bench, and put his heart on a shelf--no?" "Good? Why, it was the most ghastly heathenish thing I ever heard of. But--" "But you Americanos think most of the women who do such things," she persisted; "you think it better than to let him live where there are the brown girls." "Oh--senora?" He saw that he had irrevocably damned himself in her eyes. She might speak to him courteously through a long lifetime, but one of the institutions of their pastoral life--an institution ignored by the usual guest in the land--had been referred to in a sarcastic manner, and he knew that never again could he expect the good will of Teresa Arteaga. The allusion had been the most distant, the most unintentional, but at the first word the blood of the Mexican was arrayed against the Gringo. "You think it well when that wife put the knife in the heart of the husband?" she continued. "(Yes, Aguada, I will have a cup of orange juice, and you may bring wine for the gentlemen.) You think your American ladies do that same thing--no?"