“William, how long will it take you to get out to the ranch?”

“Twenty miles, miss, over a narrow dirt road, and some of it winds among hills.  I ought to do it handily in an hour without taking any chances.”

“Take a few chances,” she ordered, in a voice meant for his ear alone.  “I’m in a hurry.”

“Forty-five minutes, miss,” he answered, in the same confidential tone.

Kay sat in the front seat with William, while her father and Okada occupied the tonneau.  Within a few minutes, they were clear of the town and rolling swiftly across a three-mile-wide mesa.  Then they entered a long, narrow canon, which they traversed for several miles, climbed a six-per-cent. grade to the crest of a ridge, rolled down into another canon, climbed another ridge, and from the summit gazed down on the San Gregorio in all the glory of her new April gown.  Kay gasped with the shock of such loveliness, and laid a detaining hand on the chauffeur’s arm.  Instantly he stopped the car.

“I always get a kick out of the view from here, miss,” he informed her.  “Can you beat it?  You can’t!”

The girl sat with parted lips.

“This—­this is the California he loves,” she thought.

She closed her eyes to keep back the tears, and the car rolled gently down the grade into the valley.  From the tonneau she could catch snatches of the conversation between her father and the potato baron; they were discussing the agricultural possibilities of the valley, and she realized, with a little twinge of outrage, that its wonderful pastoral beauty had been quite lost on them.

As they swept past the mission, Kay deliberately refrained from ordering William to toss Don Mike’s baggage off in front of the old pile, for she knew now whither the latter was bound.  She would save him that added burden.  Three miles from the mission, the road swung up a gentle grade between two long rows of ancient and neglected palms.  The dead, withered fronds of a decade still clung to the corrugated trunks.  In the adjoining oaks vast flocks of crows perched and cawed raucously.  This avenue of palms presently debouched onto a little mesa, oak-studded and covered with lush grass, which gave it a pretty, parklike effect.  In the center of this mesa stood the hacienda of the Rancho Palomar.

Like all adobe dwellings of its class, it was not now, nor had it ever been, architecturally beautiful.  It was low, with a plain hip-roof covered with ancient red tiles, many of which were missing.  When the house had first been built, it had been treated to a coat of excellent plaster over the adobe, and this plaster had never been renewed.  With the attrition of time and the elements, it had worn away in spots, through which the brown adobe bricks showed, like the bones in a decaying corpse.  The main building faced down the valley; from each end out, an ell extended to form a patio in the rear, while a seven-foot adobe wall, topped with short tile, connected with the ell and formed a parallelogram.