Why, he could not have explained.

It was not from any feeling of jealous suspicion or contemplated revenge--that had passed with the presence of Patterson; it was not from any vague lingering sentiment for the woman he had wronged--he would have shrunk from meeting her at that moment.

But it was full of these and more possibilities by which he might or might not be guided, and was at least a movement towards some vague end, and a distraction from certain thoughts he dared not entertain and could not entirely dismiss.
Inconceivable and inexplicable to human reason, it might have been acceptable to the Divine omniscience for its predestined result.
He left the road at a point where the marsh encroached upon the meadow, familiar to him already as near the spot where he had debarked from the Chinaman's boat the day before.

He remembered that the walls of the _hacienda_ were distinctly visible from the _tules_ where he had hidden all day, and he now knew that the figures he had observed near the building, which had deterred his first attempts at landing, must have been his wife and his friend.

He knew that a long tongue of the slough filled by the rising tide followed the marsh, and lay between him and the _hacienda_.