While the foregoing had been taking place, a lean old man, on foot, had noiselessly joined the circle. Maya Indian he was, pure-blooded, with ribs that corrugated plainly through his parchment-like skin. Only a breech-clout covered his nakedness. His unkempt hair hung in dirty-gray tangles about his face, which was high-cheeked and emaciated to cadaverousness. Strings of muscles showed for his calves and biceps. A few scattered snags of teeth were visible between his withered lips. The hollows under his cheek-bones were prodigious. While his eyes, beads of black, deep-sunk in their sockets, burned with the wild light of a patient in fever. He slipped eel-like through the circle and clasped the peon in his skeleton-like arms. “He is my father,” proclaimed the peon proudly. “Look at him. He is pure Maya, and he knows the secrets of the Mayas.” And while the two re-united ones talked endless explanations, Francis preferred his request to the sackcloth leader to find Enrico Solano and his two sons, wandering somewhere in the mountains, and to tell them that they were free of all claims of the law and to return home. “They have done no wrong?” the leader demanded. “No; they have done no wrong,” Francis assured him. “Then it is well. I promise you to find them immediately, for we know the direction of their wandering, and to send them down to the coast to join you.” “And in the meantime shall you be my guests while you wait,” the haciendado invited eagerly. “There is a freight schooner at anchor in Juchitan Inlet now off my plantation, and sailing for San Antonio. I can hold her until the noble Enrico and his sons come down from the Cordilleras.” “And Francis will pay the demurrage, of course,” Henry interpolated with a sly sting that Leoncia caught, although it missed Francis, who cried joyously: “Of course I will. And it proves my contention that a checkbook is pretty good to have anywhere.” To their surprise, when they had parted from the sackcloth men, the peon and his Indian father attached themselves to the Morgans, and journeyed down through the burning oil-fields to the plantation which had been the scene of the peon’s slavery. Both father and son were unremitting in their devotion, first of all to Francis, and, next, to Leoncia and Henry. More than once they noted father and son in long and earnest conversations; and, after Enrico and his sons had arrived, when the party went down to the beach to board the waiting schooner, the peon and his Maya parent followed along. Francis essayed to say farewell to them on the beach, but the peon stated that the pair of them were likewise journeying on the schooner.