Let us here pause and consider. In the summer of 1769 a dashing, care-free Catalonian soldier in the company of Don Gaspar de Portola, while swashbuckling his way around the lonely sh.o.r.es of San Diego Bay, had encountered a comely young squaw. _Mira, senores_! Of the blood that flowed in the veins of Pablo Artelan, thirty-one-thirty-seconds was Indian, but the other one-thirty-second was composed of equal parts of Latin romance and conceit.

Pablo's great moment had arrived. Lowly peon that he was, he knew himself at this moment to be a most important personage; death would have been preferable to the weakness of having failed to take advantage of it.

"Why I know, Senor Parker?" Pablo laughed briefly, lightly, mirthlessly, his cacchination carefully designed to convey the impression that he considered the question extremely superfluous. With exasperating deliberation he drew forth his little bag of tobacco and a brown cigarette paper; he smiled as he dusted into the cigarette paper the requisite amount of tobacco. With one hand he rolled the cigarette; while wetting the flap with his garrulous tongue, he gazed out upon the San Gregorio as one who looks beyond a lifted veil.

He answered his own question. "Well, _senor_--and you, _senora_! I tell you. _Por nada_--forgeeve; please, I speak the Spanish--for notheeng, those boy he poke weeth hee's thumb the rib of me."

"No?" cried John Parker, feigning profound amazement.

"_Es verdad_. Eet ees true, _senor_. Those boy hee's happy, no? Eh?"

"Apparently."

"You bet you my life. Well, las' night those boy hee's peench weeth his thumb an' theese fingair--what you suppose?"

"I give it up, Pablo."

Pablo wiped away with a saddle-colored paw a benignant and paternal smile. He wagged his head and scuffed his heel in the dirt. He feasted his soul on the sensation that was his.

"Those boy hee's peench--" a dramatic pause. Then:

"Eef you tell to Don Miguel those things I tol' you--_Santa Marias_--Hees cut my throat."

"We will respect your confidence, Pablo," Mrs. Parker hastened to a.s.sure the traitor.

"All right. Then I tol' to you what those boy peench--weeth hees thumb an' thees fingair. _Mira_. Like thees."

"Cut out the pantomime and disgorge the information, for the love of heaven," Parker pleaded.

"He peench"--Pablo's voice rose to a pseudo-feminine screech--"the cheek of"--he whirled upon Mrs. Parker and transfixed her with a tobacco-stained index finger--"Senorita Parker, so help me, by Jimmy, eef I tell you some lies I hope I die pretty queeck."

Both the Parkers stared at the old man blankly. He continued:

"He peench--queeck--like that. He don' know hee's goin' for peench--hees all time queeck like that--he don' theenk. But after those boy hee's peench the cheen of those girl, hee's got red in the face like black-bird's weeng. 'Oh,' he say, 'I am sky-blue eedete-ot,'

an' he run away queeck before he forget heemself an' peench those girl some more."

John Parker turned gravely to his wife. "Old hon," he murmured softly, "Don Mike Farrel is a pinch-bug. He pinched Kay's chin during a mental lapse; then he remembered he was still under my thumb and he cursed himself for a sky-blue idiot."

"Oh, John, dear, I'm so glad." There were tears in Mrs. Parker's eyes.

"Aren't you, John?"

"No, I'm not," he replied savagely. "I think it's an outrage and I'd speak to Farrel about it if it were not apparent n.o.body realizes more keenly than does he the utter impossibility of permitting his fancy to wander in that direction."

"John Parker, you're a hard-hearted man," she cried, and left him in high dudgeon, to disappear into the garden. As the gate closed behind her, John Parker drew forth his pocket book and abstracted from it a hundred-dollar bill, which he handed to Pablo Artelan.

"We have had our little differences, Pablo," he informed that astounded individual, "but we're gradually working around toward a true spirit of brotherly love. In the language of the cla.s.sic, Pablo, I'm here to tell the c.o.c.k-eyed world that you're one good Indian."

Pablo swept his old _sombrero_ to the ground, "_Gracias, _senor_, mille gracias_," he murmured, and shuffled away with his prize.

Verily, the ways of this Gringo were many and mysterious. To-day one hated him; to-morrow--

"There is no doubt about it," Pablo soliloquized, "it is better to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion!"

CHAPTER x.x.x

The following day Don Mike, Pablo and the latter's male relatives, who had so mysteriously appeared on the premises, were early ahorse, driving to El Toro the three hundred-odd head of cattle of all ages and sizes rounded up on the Palomar. The cattle were corraled at a ranch half-way to El Toro the first night, and there watered and fed; the following night they were in the cattle pens at El Toro, and the following day Farrel loaded them aboard the cars and shipped them out to Los Angeles, accompanying the shipment personally. Two days later he was back on the ranch, and the Parkers noticed that his exuberant spirits had not in the least subsided.

"I'd give a ripe peach to know what that fellow is up to," John Parker complained. "Confidentially, I've had him shadowed from the moment he arrived in Los Angeles until the moment he returned to El Toro and started back for the ranch. He has conferred with n.o.body except the stock-yard people. Nevertheless, he has a hen on."

"Yes, and that hen will hatch a young bald-headed eagle to scratch your eyes out," his daughter reminded him, whereat he chuckled.

"Old Bill Conway's drilling away at his dam-site," he volunteered presently, "and his suit against me for damages, due to breach of contract, is set for trial so far down Judge Morton's calendar that the old judge will have to use a telescope to find it. However, I shouldn't charge the judge with a lack of interest in my affairs, for he has rendered a judgment in my favor in the matter of that mortgage foreclosure and announced from the bench that if this judgment doesn't stick he'll throw the case out of court the next time it is presented for trial. I wonder what Farrel's next move will be?"

"I heard him announce that he was going to get ready for the _fiesta_,"

Kay replied.

For two weeks he was busy harrowing, disking and rolling the old race-track; he repainted the weather-beaten poles and reshingled the judge's stand; he repaired the fence and installed an Australian starting-gate, dug a pit for the barbecue and brought forth, repaired and set up under the oaks close to the race-tracks, thirty long wooden tables at which, in an elder and more romantic day, the entire countryside, as guests of the Farrels and Noriagas, had gathered to feast. Farrel worked hard and saw but little of his guests, except at meal-times; he retired somewhat early each night and, insofar as his guests could note, he presented a most commendable example of a young man whose sole interest in life lay in his work.

"When do you plan to give your _fiesta_, Miguel?" Kay inquired one evening as they sat, according to custom, on the veranda.

"In about a month," he replied. "I've got to fatten my steers and harden them on a special diet before we barbecue them. Don Nicolas Sandoval will have charge of the feast, and if I furnished him with thin, tough range steers, he'd charge me with modernism and disown me.

Old Bill Conway never would forget it. He'd nag me to my grave."

"When do we give Panchito his try-out, Don Mike?"

"The track is ready for it now, Kay, and Pablo tells me Panchito's half-brother is now a most dutiful member of society and can get there in a hurry when he's sent for. But he's only a half thoroughbred.

Shall we start training to-morrow?"

"Oh, goody. By all means."

The long and patient methods of education to which a green race-horse is subjected were unknown on the Rancho Palomar. Panchito was a trained saddle animal, wise, sensible, courageous and with a prodigious faith that his rider would get him safely out of any jam into which they might blunder together. The starting-gate bothered him at first, but after half a dozen trials, he realized that the web, flying upward, had no power to hurt him and was, moreover, the signal for a short, jolly contest of speed with his fellows of the rancho. Before the week was out he was "breaking" from the barrier with speed and serenity born of the knowledge that this was exactly what was expected of him; whereupon the other horses that Don Mike used to simulate a field of compet.i.tors, took heart of hope at Panchito's complacency and broke rather well with him.

Those were long, lazy days on the Palomar. June had cast its withering smile upon the San Gregorio and the green hills had turned to a parched brown. Gra.s.shoppers whirred everywhere; squirrels whistled; occasional little dust-devils whirled up the now thoroughly dry river-bed and the atmosphere was redolent of the aroma of dust and tarweed. Pablo and his dusky relatives, now considerably augmented (albeit Don Mike had issued no invitation to partake of his hospitality), trained colts as roping horses or played Mexican monte in the shade of the help's quarters. Occasionally they roused themselves long enough to justify their inroads upon Don Mike's groceries by harvesting a forty-acre field of alfalfa and irrigating it for another crop, for which purpose a well had been sunk in the bed of the dry San Gregorio.

The wasted energies of these peons finally commenced to irritate John Parker.

"How long are you going to tolerate the presence of this healthy lot of _cholo_ loafers and grafters, Farrel?" he demanded one day. "Have you any idea of what it is costing you to support that gang?"

"Yes," Farrel replied. "About ten dollars a day."

"You cannot afford that expense."

"I know it. But then, they're the local color, they've always been and they will continue to be while I have t.i.tle to this ranch. Why, their hearts would be broken if I refused them permission to nestle under the cloak of my philanthropy, and he is a poor sort of white man who will disappoint a poor devil of a _cholo_."

"You're absolutely incomprehensible," Parker declared.