“Don Mike’s beesiness, she is my beesiness, too, senorita,” he growled.

“Yes; I zink so,” Okada declared.  “I zink I go ’nother room.”

“Murray will prepare one for you, Mr. Okada.  I’m so sorry this has happened.  Indeed I am!”

Pablo hooted.

“You sorry, mees?  Wait until my Don Mike he’s come home and find thees fellow in hees house.”

He closed the gate, returned to the room, and made a critical inspection of the apartment.  Kay could see him wagging his grizzled head approvingly as she came to the door and looked in.

“Where those fellow El Mono, he put my boss’s clothes?” Pablo demanded.

“‘El Mono?’ Whom do you mean, Pablo?”

“El Mono—­the monkey.  He wear long tail to the coat; all the time he look like mebbeso somebody in the house she’s goin’ die pretty queeck.”

“Oh, you mean Murray, the butler.”

Pablo was too ludicrous, and Kay sat down on the edge of the porch and laughed until she wept.  Then, as Pablo still stood truculently in the doorway, waiting an answer to his query, she called to Murray, who had rushed to the aid of the potato baron, and asked him if he had found any clothing in the room, and, if so, what he had done with it.

“I spotted and pressed them all, Miss Kay, and hung them in the clothes-press of the room next door.”

“I go get,” growled Pablo, and did so; whereupon the artful Murray took advantage of his absence to dart over to the royal chamber and remove the potato baron’s effects.

“I don’t like that blackamoor, Miss Kay,” El Mono confided to the girl.  “I feel assured he is a desperate vagabond to whom murder and pillage are mere pastimes.  Please order him out of the garden.  He pays no attention to me whatsoever.”

“Leave him severely alone,” Kay advised.  “I will find a way to handle him.”

Pablo returned presently, with two suits of clothing, a soft white-linen shirt, a black necktie, a pair of low-cut brown shoes, and a pair of brown socks.  These articles he laid out on the bed.  Then he made another trip to the other room, and returned bearing an armful of framed portraits of the entire Noriaga and Farrel dynasty, which he proceeded to hang in a row on the wall at the foot of the bed.  Lastly, he removed a rather fancy spread from the bed and substituted therefor an ancient silk crazy-quilt that had been made by Don Mike’s grandmother.  Things were now as they used to be, and Pablo was satisfied.

When he came out, Kay had gone in to dinner; so he returned to his own casa and squatted against the wall, with his glance fixed upon the point in the palm avenue where it dipped over the edge of the mesa.

VII

At seven o’clock, dinner being over, Kay excused herself to the family and Mr. Okada, passed out through the patio gate, and sought a bench which she had noticed under a catalpa tree outside the wall.  From this seat, she, like Pablo, could observe anybody coming up the palm-lined avenue.  A young moon was rising over the hills, and by its light Kay knew she could detect Don Mike while he was yet some distance from the house.