FIESTA DAY Dade, rolling over in bed and at the same moment opening his eyes reluctantly upon the new day, that he hated, beheld Jack half-dressed and shaving his left jaw, and looking as if he were committing murder upon an enemy.

Dade watched him idly; he could afford the luxury of idleness that morning; for rodeo was over, and he was lying between linen sheets on a real bed, under a roof other than the branches of a tree; and if his mind had rested as easily as his body, he would have been almost happy.
But this was the day of the fiesta; and with the remembrance of that vital fact came a realization that on this day the Picardo ranch would be the Mecca toward which all California was making pilgrimage; and, he feared, the battle-ground of the warring interests and prejudices of the pilgrims themselves.
Dade listened to the voices shouting orders and greetings without as the vaqueros hurried here and there in excited preparations for the event.
He judged that not another man in the valley was in bed at that moment, unless sickness held him there; and for that very reason he pulled a blanket snugger about his ears and tried to make himself believe that he was enjoying to the full his laziness.

He had earned it; and last night had been the first one of deep, unbroken sleep that he had had since that moonlit night when Manuel and Valencia rode in haste to meet this surly-browed fellow before him.
Jack did not wipe off the scowl with the lather, and Dade began to observe him more critically; which he had not before had an opportunity to do, for the reason that Jack had not returned to the ranch the night before until Dade was in bed and asleep.
"Say, you don't want to let the fellows outside see you looking like that," he remarked, when Jack had yanked a horn comb through his red-brown mop of hair as if he were hoeing corn.
"Why ?" Jack turned on him truculently.
"Well, you look a whole lot like a man that expects a licking.

And I don't see any excuse for that; you're sure to win, old man.

I'd bet my last shirt on that." Which was Dade's method of wiping off the scowl.
"Say, Dade," Jack began irrelevantly, "I'm going to use Surry.