“Years ago.  The basin comes to a bottle-neck between two high hills; all you have to do is dam that narrow gorge, and when the Rio San Gregorio is up and brimming in freshet time, you’ll have a lake a hundred feet deep, a mile wide, and five miles long before you know it.  Did you ever consider the possibility of leading a ditch from the lake thus formed along the shoulder of El Palomar, that forty-five-hundred-foot peak for which the ranch is named, and giving it a sixty-five-per-cent. nine-hundred-foot drop to a snug little power-station at the base of the mountain.  You could develop thirty or forty thousand horse-power very easily and sell it easier; after your water had passed through the penstock and delivered its power, you could run it off through a lateral to the main ditch down the San Gregorio and sell it to your Japanese farmers for irrigation.”

“By Jupiter, I believe you would have done something with this ranch if you had had the backing, Farrel!”

“Never speculated very hard on securing the backing,” Don Mike admitted, with a frank grin.  “We always lived each day as if it were the last, you know.  But over in Siberia, far removed from all my easy-going associations, both inherited and acquired, I commenced dreaming of possibilities in the Agua Caliente basin.”

“Well then, since you insist, let’s go over there and have your curiosity satiated,” Parker agreed, with the best grace possible.

[Illustration:  Here amidst the golden romance of the old mission, the girl suddenly understood Don Mike.]

While the Parkers returned to the hacienda to change into their riding-clothes, Miguel Farrel strolled over to the corral where Pablo Artelan, wearing upon his leathery countenance the closest imitation of a smile that had ever lighted that dark expanse, joined him and, with Farrel, leaned over the corral fence and gazed at the horses within.  For a long time, neither spoke; then, while his glance still appraised the horses, Don Mike stiffened a thumb and drove it with considerable force into Pablo’s ancient ribs.  Carolina, engaged in hanging out the Parker wash in the yard of her casa, observed Don Mike bestow this infrequent accolade of approbation and affection, and her heart swelled with pride.  Ah, yes; it was good to have the child back on the rancho again.

Carolina and Pablo had never heard that the ravens fed Elijah; they had never heard of Elijah.  Nevertheless, if they had, they would not have envied him the friendship of those divinely directed birds, for the Farrels had always fed Pablo and Carolina and their numerous brood, now raised and scattered over the countryside.  At sight of that prod in the ribs, Carolina dismissed forever a worry that had troubled her vaguely during the period between old Don Miguel’s death and the return of young Don Miguel—­the fear that a lifetime of ease and plenty had ended.  Presently, she lifted a falsetto voice in a Spanish love-song two centuries old.