He walked more
erect and with less of a shuffle in his gait; but whether this was
owing to his having cast the old skin of garments adapted to his
slouch, and because he was more securely shod, or whether it was
from the sudden straightening of some warped moral quality, it
would have been difficult to say. The expression of his face
certainly gave no evidence of actual and prospective good fortune;
if anything, the lines of discontent around his brow and mouth were
more strongly drawn. Apparently, his interview with his father had
only the effect of reviving and stirring into greater activity a
certain dogged sentiment that, through long years, had become
languidly mechanical. He was no longer a beaten animal, but one
roused by a chance success into a dangerous knowledge of his power.
In his honest workman's dress, he was infinitely more to be feared
than in his rags; in the lifting of his downcast eye, there was the
revelation of a baleful intelligence. In his changed condition,
civilization only seemed to have armed him against itself.
The fonda, a long low building, with a red-tiled roof extending
over a porch or whitewashed veranda, in which drunken vaqueros had
been known to occasionally disport their mustangs, did not offer a
very reputable appearance to the eye of young Guest as he
approached it in the gathering shadows. One or two half-broken
horses were securely fastened to the stout cross-beams of some
heavy posts driven in the roadway before it, and a primitive trough
of roughly excavated stone stood near it.
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