Here she was joined by one of the ladies, and I lounged away.  I dare say it was very mean and very illogical, but the unsatisfactory character of this interview made me revert again to the singular revelation I had seen a few hours before.  I looked anxiously for Professor Dobbs; but when I did meet him, with an indifferent nod of recognition, I found I could by no means identify him with the figure of her mysterious companion.  And why should I suspect him at all, in the face of Mrs. Saltillo’s confessed avoidance of him?  Who, then, could it have been?  I had seen them but an instant, in the opening and the shutting of a door.  It was merely the shadowy bulk of a man that flitted past my door, after all.  Could I have imagined the whole thing?  Were my perceptive faculties—­just aroused from slumber, too insufficiently clear to be relied upon?  Would I not have laughed had Urania, or even Enriquez himself, told me such a story?

As I reentered the hotel the clerk handed me a telegram.  “There’s been a pretty big shake all over the country,” he said eagerly.  “Everybody is getting news and inquiries from their friends.  Anything fresh?” He paused interrogatively as I tore open the envelope.  The dispatch had been redirected from the office of the “Daily Excelsior.”  It was dated, “Salvatierra Rancho,” and contained a single line:  “Come and see your old uncle ’Ennery.”

There was nothing in the wording of the message that was unlike Enriquez’s usual light-hearted levity, but the fact that he should have telegraphed it to me struck me uneasily.  That I should have received it at the hotel where his wife and Professor Dobbs were both staying, and where I had had such a singular experience, seemed to me more than a mere coincidence.  An instinct that the message was something personal to Enriquez and myself kept me from imparting it to Mrs. Saltillo.  After worrying half the night in our bizarre camp in the redwoods, in the midst of a restless festivity which was scarcely the repose I had been seeking at Carquinez Springs, I resolved to leave the next day for Salvatierra Rancho.  I remembered the rancho,—­a low, golden-brown, adobe-walled quadrangle, sleeping like some monstrous ruminant in a hollow of the Contra Costa Range.  I recalled, in the midst of this noisy picnic, the slumberous coolness of its long corridors and soundless courtyard, and hailed it as a relief.  The telegram was a sufficient excuse for my abrupt departure.  In the morning I left, but without again seeing either Mrs. Saltillo or the professor.

It was late the next afternoon when I rode through the canada that led to the rancho.  I confess my thoughts were somewhat gloomy, in spite of my escape from the noisy hotel; but this was due to the sombre scenery through which I had just ridden, and the monotonous russet of the leagues of wild oats.  As I approached the rancho, I saw that Enriquez had made no attempt to modernize the old casa, and that even the garden