“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 competitors, 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.  Grasshoppers 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.