"It was not long before he had used it up. I don't know where he spent it, for there was no money like it, and people would ask where he got it: but somehow he spent it, all but two pesos. Then one day he asked me to come with him to the place again: he wanted to see if the box was there, and if anybody lived in the house. I did not want to see the box, but I wanted to know if any one lived there, so I came with him. It was about a year after we had found the dead men and the money. It was a Sunday, and we got to the place about noon, for we started early. Everything was like we had left it, and it did not look as if any one had been to the house. The box was there, and it was open; and then I noticed that there was some writing on a piece of paper inside the lid. It must have been there when we saw the box before, but we had not noticed it. It was very old and yellow, and torn, too, and we could not read it. They did not seem like Spanish words. We stayed an hour, maybe, and then I said we should go, so as to get back before night. Then Pedro said to me, why shouldn't we come and live here in the house. We each had a few head of cattle of our own by that time, nearly twenty all together, and the range here was very good. He was tired of working on the Escorpion, he said. The place didn't belong to anybody, as far as we could tell, and we could make a good home here and do well with our cattle. "I forgot to say that I had got married a little time before, and I said my wife would not come so far away from her people. They lived at Calabasas. I didn't like the idea of living in that house, though I liked the land and wanted to have a place of my own, now that I was married. So we were talking about it when we got on our horses to ride back. We rode past the sycamore trees, where we had buried the bones of the dead men. Just when we passed the place, my brother's horse jumped at something, and threw him off. He fell against a sharp rock that hurt him in the back. He was quite still, and I thought he was dead. For a long time he did not move, but I could see he was breathing. I got water and threw it on him many times, and at last he opened his eyes. But he could not move, senor, nor speak either: the rock had hurt his backbone, and his legs were like dead. He was a paral'tico, and he has never been able to move, any more than you saw him move, nor talk either.