He was a Spaniard who had suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Oldfield, some twenty-five years before. No one had any knowledge of him previous to that time, and no one had ever known where he came from. Yet, for some reason never clearly understood, his coming had, nevertheless, been associated from the first with the scattering of the Gulf pirates which had followed the deposing of their last king. It is true that Lafitte was long since gone to render his awful account of the terrible deeds done in the body--with perhaps his desperate service at the battle of New Orleans as the largest item on the other side of the blotted ledger. But the death of Lafitte in 1826 did not immediately free the Gulf from its fearful scourge. The passing of piracy was gradual, very gradual indeed, and even long drawn out, as the traders of the Pennyroyal Region knew only too well, through their close and continual connection with New Orleans by route of the flatboat. There was, therefore, to the minds of the Oldfield people, nothing improbable in the continued existence of numbers of Lafitte's followers, who were younger than himself and consequently not yet really old men. Still, while there was no impossibility or even any improbability in Alvarado's being a comrade of Lafitte, there appeared no actual proof that he ever had been. According to old lady Gordon's account, the principal grounds of suspicion were these: his appearance, which was otherwise unaccounted for, just at the time that the pirates were being driven from the Gulf and out of the Gulf states; his frequent, long, and mysterious absences at sea after his coming to live in the vicinity of Oldfield; the fabulous sums of gold and silver fetched home by him from these voyages, when he was known not to have any visible means of making money; the many curious weapons of marine warfare scattered through his strange house, which was half a fort, half a farmhouse, and wholly barbaric in its rough richness of furnishing; the generally credited rumor that he habitually wore a coat of mail; the well-known fact--open for every passer-by to see--that he kept a horse standing continually at his gate, day and night, for years, saddled and bridled, with pistols in the holsters, apparently ready for instant flight. Many of these things old lady Gordon had seen with her own eyes. Most of them she knew to be true, but she had never gone to his house, although he had at one time received a measure of social recognition, when--according to old lady Gordon--there had been something like real society in Oldfield. He was rather a handsome man after a sinister, foreign fashion, although he had been past youth when he first came to Oldfield, and he had a dashing way with him which fascinated the unobservant. It was in this manner that he was thrown with Alice Fielding, the colonel's prettiest and youngest daughter, so old lady Gordon said.