It was a week before he confided to his mother that when he grew up he intended to marry a lady.  Mrs. Talbot stared, then laughed.  But when he repeated the statement a few evenings later during their familiar hour, she told him peremptorily to put such ideas out of his head, that the likes of him didn’t marry ladies.  And when she explained why, with the brutal directness she thought necessary, John was as depressed as a boy of fourteen can be.  It was but a week later, however, that his mother, upon announcing her determination to emigrate to America, said to him:  “And perhaps you’ll get that grand wish of yours.  Out there I’ve heard say as how one body’s as good as another, so if you’re a good boy and make plenty of brass, you can marry a lady as well as not.”  She forgot the words immediately, but John never forgot them.

Mrs. Talbot died soon after their arrival in New York, and the brother who had sent for her put John to school for two years.  One day he told him to pack his trunk and accompany him to California in search of gold.  They bought a comfortable emigrant wagon and joined a large party about to cross the plains in quest of El Dorado.  During that long momentous journey John felt like a character in a book of adventures, for they had no less than three encounters with red Indians, and two of his party were scalped.  He always felt young again when he recalled that time.  It was one of those episodes in life when everything was exactly as it should be.

He and his uncle remained in the San Joaquin valley for a year, and although they were not so fortunate as many others, they finally moved to San Francisco the richer by a few thousands.  Here Mr. Quick opened a gambling-house and saloon, and made money far more rapidly than he had done in the northern valley—­where, in truth, he had lost much by night that he had panned out by day.  But being a virtuous uncle, if an imperfect member of society, he soon sent John to the country to look after a ranch near the Mission of Santa Ursula.  The young man never knew that this fine piece of property had been won over the gambling table from Don Roberto Ortega, one of the maddest grandees of the Californias.  His grant embraced some fifty thousand acres and was bright in patches with little olive orchards.  John planted with olive-trees, at his own expense, the twelve thousand acres which had fallen to his uncle’s share; the two men were to be partners, and the younger was to inherit the elder’s share.  He inherited nothing else, for his uncle married a Mexican woman who knifed him and made off with what little money had been put aside from current extravagances.  But John worked hard, bought varas in San Francisco whenever he had any spare cash, supplied almost the entire State with olives and olive-oil, and in time became a rich man.

And his ideal?  Only the Indians had driven it temporarily into the unused chambers of his memory.  Not gold-mines, nor his brief taste of the wild hot life of San Francisco, nor hard work among his olive-trees, nor increasing wealth and importance, had driven from his mind that desire born among the tombstones of his native village.  It was the woman herself with a voice as silver as his own olive leaves, who laughed his dream to death, and left him, still handsome, strong, and lightly touched by time, a bachelor at forty.