His door opened into the wide patio between the wings of the house, where an immense pepper tree rose high above the roof, its softly draped foliage blue-tinted in the moonlight like a vast, still smoke. There was no light in the house as Roberto stood a little while in the patio drowned in the gloom of the great tree's shadow; if Helena's conscience troubled her on account of this night's rebellion, she hid the shame of it in the dark. That was as it should be, Roberto thought. It would have been satisfying to him to know that she was bowed in remorseful shame at her prayers; he suspected, with resentful anger, that she was asleep in her bed. All was as quiet outside the house as within. The men who had ridden from the ranch, but few in number, mean-spirited fellows all, excepting Simon alone, had found places to stretch themselves and sleep. It was nothing to them whether Gabriel Henderson went free or was taken, nothing to them whether the power and dignity of Don Abrahan's house rose or fell. Vengeful, bitter, contemptuous of them all, Roberto went to the front of the house and into the broad road that passed before it, the fire of his passion burning the desire for sleep. [Illustration] Along this road a little way toward the north he walked, striding rapidly, his spurs clicking at his heels. The land in this valley was sandy, soft, almost white as snow in the bright moonlight, far different from the black, tenuous adobe of his father's homestead. Between the little groves of robles which grew in this rich valley the erratic highway ran, the royal road, the king's highway, of the old mission days. The Indians made it first between their villages, long before the zeal of the Franciscan fathers brought them to that shore; the traffic of the missionaries broadened it, and gave it the dignity of its name. Roberto felt that his heart was nested in this valley, toward which he had yearned sometimes among the dissipations of the capital. He had intended, all the years of his betrothal to Helena, to establish the dignity of his house here on the land that the Yankee captain, who had been accepted as an equal of the best in that country, had acquired by grant for some service to the Mexican government, real or contrived, which was forgotten now. But the land remained, no matter for the evanescent memory of those who gave it or him who received. It yielded as no other ranch in that part of the country under the wise management of John Toberman, who had given up herding ships on the sea for the herding of cattle on the land.