"No, not her brother. I am a distant relative, but my authority is not to be questioned." "Only a distant relative!" said the rider, with a short laugh. "But you stop a man in the road with a pistol under your fingers. If you were a near relative, a brother or a cousin, maybe you would shoot a man if he even looked in the lady's direction? You are too quick for me, young gentleman. Let go my bridle--I must be on my way." He seemed to hold Roberto in little seriousness, in trifling account. His teeth flashed in a quick smile; he sat in a posture of graceful indulgence, one hand on his hip, his bridle reins held high in the other. "Who sent you?" Roberto demanded with all the sternness of his privileged class. "A man with fingers on his hands, and money in them to pay for what he wanted. That's enough for me to know; it will have to be enough for you." "Where do you come from, impertinent scoundrel?" "Have you heard of Monterey, little man?" the cattle-herder asked, patronizingly insolent, as a free man who knows his strength and despises that of another. "Well then, I come from Monterey. I bring letters for the young lady. Whether they are from a lover, that is another thing. Now let go my bridle--permit me." [Illustration] The man leaned as he spoke, laying hold of Roberto's wrist to remove his hand from the rein. His cool insolence, his impertinent disregard of any force that his challenger might use to prevent his going, seemed to Roberto a mighty insult to his new manhood, as it doubtless was intended to be. "Get down!" Roberto commanded, presenting his pistol at the rider's ribs. "Presently--at the lady's door," the messenger replied, his teeth white in the moonlight as he laughed. With the words he set spur to his horse, waking in the agony of the cruel thrust the spirit that seemed beaten out of the weary animal. It bounded forward, the dust of its high-flung hooves in Roberto's face. The chaparral echoed with a sound strange and discordant in the placidity of that night. Don Roberto had snapped his teeth. CHAPTER X THE MAGISTRATE SPEAKS "I only know that Don Roberto has killed a man, that they have brought his body wrapped in tentcloth and laid it near the olive press, under the trees. That is all I know." Doña Carlota was not greatly moved by the event. Dead men had come in her way before, and men who had fallen by violence. She was less agitated in the relation of this news than over the prospect last night that her betrayal of the American's presence on the ranch might be discovered by her niece. She was keen enough to see that the agitation had passed to the other side of the hearth, so to speak. It was Helena's face that grew white, and set in little lines of pain, when this news of Don Roberto's exploit was related. "You didn't hear them say who it was, when, where, it happened?" Helena inquired.