LITMIR.BIZ

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Señor! Oh, Don Ricardo! Not last year! Many years ago! We are doñas grown these five years!"

      The Colonel bore down on them, bowed low, and bending forward in his most courtly fashion stopped their protests by thrusting between their lips one apiece of the celebrated peppermints. Then he bowed again gravely and turned away, leaving them giggling, their dignity all gone.

      The two men now approached the heart and centre of all this activity. Behind three tables of a construction more substantial than those just visited was enclosed a large open space. Here several fires were burning. Over some of these fires kettles had been suspended. Others had been built under grills or grates, and were being plied with oak and willow fuel in order to establish beds of coals. The pits had been heated, and even now contained the bull's head, the huge joints, and the mutton of the main barbecue. All this was presided over by a very sleek, stout good-looking Californian, who was perspiring freely even thus early, and who wore a look of busyness, responsibility, and care evidently out of his usual character. He seemed to have two official assistants—young swarthy chaps: at least, two young men of the many present seemed to be doing something. One was whetting a finishing edge to a pile of long, thin butcher knives. The other was mixing something in a bowl. Of the rest a few squatted about on their heels, staring rather vacantly and in general at the preparations; a few more seemed engrossed in some sort of game about a blanket; but most were, though idle, very much interested in what was passing—especially girls. Two of them had guitars on which they strummed as a sort of sweet and plaintive undertone to their conversation. Every few moments they, or two or three of the others, or even all the group together, would catch a few bars of the lilt and sing it forth full voiced—a few bars only, so that it seemed almost as though a passing breeze had lifted and let fall melody. To one side, on rough trestles, rested two aromatic barrels. A single old one-eyed man sat on a camp stool by them. Two laughing youths, their hands on each other's shoulders, stood before him.

      ​"Not one drop, José, most worthy José, when we tell you that our throats are dry from the telling of your praises? And see, we have ridden across the arroyo trail since last evening. It is a long ride, as you well know. Ours is not a case like all of these others. If Don Ricardo were to know of us he would instantly command us refreshments."

      "He can easily know of it. Tell him yourself. Here he comes," growled José, with considerable relish.

      The two youths took one glance of consternation over their shoulders and fairly ran right and left like scattered quail, pursued by delighted laughter from all those who had heard.

      After a word with the grim old guardian of the wine, the Colonel passed to the open-air kitchen. The young men instantly arose to their feet, offered and received a stately greeting, and as instantly slid back into their strenuous occupations.

      "How is the meat, Benito?" the Colonel asked the cook. "Does it meet with your approval? Will it be worthy of our guests and of your skill?"

      Benito's smooth, brown moon-face took on an expression of ludicrously painful consideration.

      "The beef, Don Ricardo," he replied, "is the best we have had since the year when the blessed Virgin sent the October rains. Especially is that true of the roasting beef; which is, of course, as it should be. But the mutton——" he turned half away in an eloquent movement, as though abandoning the whole question in despair.

      "The mutton is as good as the beef," struck in Manuelo. "I myself gave orders for it to come from the hills on Los Quitos. I myself saw it both before and after killing. The mutton is good."

      "It is undoubtedly as the Señor says," replied Benito politely, conveying quite the opposite opinion.

      "We have good mutton at Los Quitos," said the Colonel, "and both Mariano and Manuelo should know how to select. What is the matter with this, Benito?"

      "The mutton is good, I do not deny, Señor. It is in prime condition, it is tender. But the mutton of the Island is better. There is a flavour, very faint to be sure, but which one can ​distinguish—it would have been better to have brought the Island sheep, as always, instead of going afield to this Los Quitos——"

      "Fortunately we have Benito with his knowledge of the old days to make up the difference, " said the Colonel. "This rascal Benito," he addressed the saturnine Manuelo, "would be relieved of all trouble. He could make a delicious carne of a burro."

      The Colonel's little convoy had by now succumbed to various temptations and had scattered. Only remained to him Manuelo and two solemn hounds. The former he dismissed. The latter accompanied him on his return journey.

      At the edge of the live oak grove he stopped for a moment and looked abroad, removing his Stetson to allow the wandering breeze to play across his high, narrow forehead and to lift his rather long, silky white hair. Beyond the village of his retainers, beyond the wide low barns and sheds and the whitewashed corrals, beyond the green of the Cathedral Oaks, spread the broad acres of the Rancho. Hill after low hill they rolled, oak dotted like a park, green with the grasses of an abundant year or washed bravely with the brilliant colour of flower-masses as though a gigantic brush had been swept across the slopes. At last they climbed into foothills, and then into the milky slate of mountain ramparts against the sun. But the Colonel knew that they climbed those ramparts and descended part way the other side—thirty thousand of them, these acres. In the opposite direction, across the flat of the valley, across the King's Highway, across the waving of a broad tule marsh, was yet another low rim of hills, also oak-dotted like a park. And over their crest the Colonel could make out a flash which was the sea. Beneath the oaks it was safe to vision the cattle slowly gathering for shade—the Colonel's cattle: and he could only have guessed at the number of them. Up in those sagebrush hills shining gray, up in the chaparral, of the rampart mountains, sheep were moving slowly like something molten that flows—the Colonel's sheep.

      As the Colonel stood his eye rested on only two evidences of human occupation other than his own. Against the base of a ​hill five miles away—or ten—one could not tell, the air was so diamond clear—amid the green of trees gleamed white buildings. These were of the Rancho de las Flores belonging to the Colonel's friend and neighbour, Don Vincente Cazadero. At one time the Rancho de la Corona del Monte had also belonged to Don Vincente, indeed the two properties had been part of the same original grant, but there had been various perplexing matters of borrowings, and extravagance and mortgages and some disputed titles and squatters and a whole host of vexatious stinging little matters. It seemed on the whole simpler to get rid of them at a bite. The bite was Del Monte. Las Flores still comprised forty thousand acres; and Don Vincente and the Colonel had become in the course of thirty years wonderful cronies. So that was all right. The second evidence of human occupation was nearer at hand, in fact a scant half-mile distant. It was a brown little house, and it lay half hidden in the entrance to a cañon. Nothing much but the roof could be distinguished. This was the property of a man named Brainerd and, with its hundred and sixty acres, had once belonged to Del Monte. The Colonel had sold it, right from the heart of his own property, and it was the only bit of original Del Monte not still in his hands. The story is too long to tell here. But Brainerd was a gentleman, and a "lunger," and a widower, and the father of a little girl, and down on his luck, and proud enough to struggle for appearances, and intelligent, and a number of similar matters. To clinch matters he had read and could moderately quote Moby Dick. This seemed at the time of his coming the only available land. Indeed, with the sea on one side, the Sur mountains on the other, the rich walnut and orange farms occupying the third, and Del Monte and Las Flores on the fourth, the little town of Arguello might be said to be pretty well surrounded. To be sure, there were the sagebrush foothills of the Sur, but they were dry, desert, fit only for sheep and quail. Take it all around, a man of moderate means, ordered to live in Arguello valley if he would live at all, would be puzzled to find a little ranch unless he went far out. Then the Colonel happened along. Somehow Brainerd found himself in the little brown house.

      ​But if the Colonel had cared to turn around he could have seen the houses of Arguello only a mile away, with the white Mission on the hill, and again the gleam of the sea, where the coast swept back almost at right angles to form the harbour.

      The

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