“I have already forgotten it, my friend,” the urbane Don Nicolas replied graciously, and Bill Conway departed forthwith for the Hotel de Las Rosas.

“Got a Jap name of Okada stopping here?” he demanded, and was informed that Mr. Okada occupied room 17, but that he was ill and could not be seen.

“He’ll see me,” quoth Bill Conway, and clumped up the stairs.  He rapped peremptorily on the door of room 17, then tried the knob.  The door opened and the old contractor stepped into the room to find the Potato Baron sitting up in bed, staring at him.  Uttering no word, Bill Conway strode to the bed, seized the Japanese by the throat and commenced to choke him with neatness and dispatch.  When the man’s face was turning purple and his eyes rolling wildly, Conway released his death-grip and his victim fell back on the mattress, whereupon Bill Conway sat down on the edge of the bed and watched life surge back into the little brown man.

“If you let one little peep out of you, Okada,” he threatened—­and snarled ferociously.

“Please, please,” Okada pleaded.  “I no unnerstan’.  ’Scuse, please.  You make one big mistake, yes, I zink so.”

“I do, indeed.  I permit you to live, which I wouldn’t do if I knew where to hide your body.  Listen to me, Okada.  You sent a countryman of yours from the La Questa valley over to the Rancho Palomar to kill Don Miguel Farrel.  I have the man’s name, I know the hour you telephoned to him, I know exactly what you said to him and how much you paid him to do the job.  Well, this friend of yours overplayed his hand; he didn’t succeed in killing Farrel, but he did succeed in getting himself captured.”

He paused, with fine dramatic instinct, to watch the effect of this broadside.  A faint nervous twitch of the chin and the eyelids—­then absolute immobility.  The Potato Baron had assumed the “poker face” of all Orientals—­wherefore Bill Conway knew the man was on his guard and would admit nothing.  So he decided not to make any effort to elicit information, but to proceed on the theory that everything was known to him.

“Naturally,” he continued, “that man Pablo has ways and means of making even a stubborn Jap tell everything he knows.  Now listen, O child of Nippon, to the white man’s words of wisdom.  You’re going to depart from El Toro in a general northerly direction and you’re going to do it immediately if not sooner.  And you’re never coming back.  The day you do, that day you land in the local calaboose with a charge of conspiracy to commit murder lodged against you.  We have the witnesses to prove our case and any time you’re tried by a San Marcos County jury before a San Marcos County judge you’ll rot in San Quentin for life.  And further:  If Miguel Farrel should, within the next two years, die out of his own bed and with his boots on, you will be killed on general principles, whether you’re guilty or not.  Do I make myself clear or must I illustrate the point with motion pictures?”