It was part of the romance that a year later his child-wife, as passionately loving as he, should have died, leaving him a baby. It was said that Black Dan Gracey had never recovered this sudden severing of the dearest tie of his life. He certainly was proof against the wiles that many sirens in San Francisco and elsewhere had displayed for his subjugation. It was after this, anyway, that the adjective Black had been prefixed to his name. Most people said it had arisen because of his swarthy coloring--he was of an almost Indian darkness of tint--but there were those who declared it was a tribute to his moody taciturnity, for Black Dan Gracey was a man of few words and rare smiles. Now, standing in the brilliant evening light, the watcher could not but be impressed by the appearance of the two brothers. A fine pair of men, the Gracey boys, muscular, broad-shouldered, and tall; out-door men whose eyes were far-seeing and quiet, who felt cramped in cities, and returned from them with a freshened zest to the stream-bed and the cañon. Rion was obviously many years his brother’s junior. He was a more normal-looking person, not so darkly bearded and heavily browed, more full of the joys and interests of life. As he slid from his saddle to the ground he was laughing, while his elder, the lower part of his face clothed in a piratical growth of black hair, lowered somberly from under a gray sombrero. In their rough and dust-grimed clothes, they still showed the indefinable air of the well-born and educated man, which curiously distinguished them from Barney Sullivan, their companion. Barney was as tall and well set up as either of them, but beyond a doubt he was what Mitty had called a “tarrier,” in other words an Irish laborer. He, too, was laughing, a laugh that showed strong white teeth under a short red mustache. His hat, pushed back from his forehead, revealed the same colored hair, thick and wiry. He had a broad, turned-up nose, plenteously freckled as were his hands, raised now to assist Miss Gracey from her horse. Upon the one feminine member of the party the Colonel’s eyes had been fixed, as were those of every man in the vicinity. He calculated that she was nearly sixteen. For a girl with Spanish blood that would mean a young woman, full-grown and marriageable. She still, however, retained a look of childhood that was extremely charming, and in some vague, indistinct way, pathetic, he thought. Perhaps the pathos lay in the fact that she had never had a mother, and that the best care an adoring father could lavish upon her was to hire expensive nurses in her childhood, and send her to still more expensive boarding-schools when she grew older.