"Of true hidalgo blood, mark you," he had said oracularly.

"Wherefore was his father sacrificed by mongrels! As to the others, believe me,--bah!" He stood there, sombrero in hand, murky and confidential, steaming through his soaked serape and exhaling a blended odor of equine perspiration and cigarette smoke.
"It was, perhaps, as the master had noticed, a brigand's own day! Bullying, treacherous, and wicked! It blew you off your horse if you so much as lifted your arms and let the wind get inside your serape; and as for the mud,--caramba! in fifty varas your forelegs were like bears, and your hoofs were earthen plasters!" Clarence knew that Incarnacion had not sought him with mere meteorological information, and patiently awaited further developments.
The vacquero went on:-- "But one of the things this beast of a weather did was to wash down the stalks of the grain, and to clear out the trough and hollows between, and to make level the fields, and--look you! to uncover the stones and rubbish and whatever the summer dust had buried.

Indeed, it was even as a miracle that Jose Mendez one day, after the first showers, came upon a silver button from his calzas, which he had lost in the early summer.
And it was only that morning that, remembering how much and with what fire Don Clarencio had sought the missing boot from the foot of the Senor Peyton when his body was found, he, Incarnacion, had thought he would look for it on the falda of the second terrace.

And behold, Mother of God it was there! Soaked with mud and rain, but the same as when the senor was alive.

To the very spur!" He drew the boot from beneath his serape and laid it before Clarence.
The young man instantly recognized it, in spite of its weather-beaten condition and its air of grotesque and drunken inconsistency to the usually trim and correct appearance of Peyton when alive.