“Jove!  I almost wish they had driven us out!  Dear senora—­” Russell and Benicia were walking up and down the corridor—­“we have become friends, true friends, as sometimes happens—­not often—­between man and woman.  Cease to think of me as an officer of the United States navy, only as a man devoted to your service.  I have already spent many pleasant hours with you.  Let me hope that while I remain here neither Commodore Stockton nor party feeling will exclude me from many more.”

She raised her graceful hand to her chin with a gesture peculiar to her, and looked upward with a glance half sad, half bitter.

“I much appreciate your friendship, Capitan Brotherton.  You give me much advice that is good for me, and tell me many things.  It is like the ocean wind when you have live long in the hot valley.  Yes, dear friend, I forget you are in the navy of the conqueror.”

“Mamacita,” broke in Benicia’s light voice, “tell us now when we can have the peek-neek.”

“To-morrow night.”

“Surely?”

“Surely, ninita.”

“Castro,” said Russell, lifting his cap, “peace be with thee.”

VIII

The great masses of rock on the ocean’s coast shone white in the moonlight.  Through the gaunt outlying rocks, lashed apart by furious storms, boiled the ponderous breakers, tossing aloft the sparkling clouds of spray, breaking in the pools like a million silver fishes.  High above the waves, growing out of the crevices of the massive rocks of the shore, were weird old cypresses, their bodies bent from the ocean as if petrified in flight before the mightier foe.  On their gaunt outstretched arms and gray bodies, seamed with time, knobs like human muscles jutted; between the broken bark the red blood showed.  From their angry hands, clutching at the air or doubled in imprecation, long strands of gray-green moss hung, waving and coiling, in the night wind.  Only one old man was on his hands and knees as if to crawl from the field; but a comrade spurned him with his foot and wound his bony hand about the coward’s neck.  Another had turned his head to the enemy, pointing his index finger in scorn, although he stood alone on high.

All along the cliffs ran the ghostly army, sometimes with straining arms fighting the air, sometimes thrust blankly outward, all with life quivering in their arrested bodies, silent and scornful in their defeat.  Who shall say what winter winds first beat them, what great waves first fought their deathless trunks, what young stars first shone over them?  They have outstood centuries of raging storm and rending earthquake.  Tradition says that until convulsion wrenched the Golden Gate apart the San Franciscan waters rolled through the long valleys and emptied into the Bay of Monterey.  But the old cypresses were on the ocean just beyond; the incoming and the outgoing of the inland ocean could not trouble them; and perhaps they will stand there until the end of time.