t and the west, which
had once belonged to the missions of San Fernando and Bonaventura;
and after all the claims, counter-claims, petitions, appeals, and
adjudications were ended, she still was left in undisputed possession of
what would have been thought by any new-comer into the country to be a
handsome estate, but which seemed to the despoiled and indignant Senora
a pitiful fragment of one. Moreover, she declared that she should never
feel secure of a foot of even this. Any day, she said, the United States
Government might send out a new Land Commission to examine the decrees
of the first, and revoke such as they saw fit. Once a thief, always a
thief. Nobody need feel himself safe under American rule. There was
no knowing what might happen any day; and year by year the lines of
sadness, resentment, anxiety, and antagonism deepened on the Senora's
fast aging face.

It gave her unspeakable satisfaction, when the Commissioners, laying out
a road down the valley, ran it at the back of her house instead of
past the front. "It is well," she said. "Let their travel be where it
belongs, behind our kitchens; and no one have sight of the front doors
of our houses, except friends who have come to visit us." Her enjoyment
of this never flagged. Whenever she saw, passing the place, wagons
or carriages belonging to the hated Americans, it gave her a distinct
thrill of pleasure to think that the house turned its back on them. She
would like always to be able to do the same herself; but whatever she,
by policy or in business, might be forced to do, the old house, at any
rate, would always keep the attitude of contempt,--its face turned away.

One other pleasure she provided herself with, soon after this road was
opened,--a pleasure in which religious devotion and race antagonism were
so closely blended that it would have puzzled the subtlest of priests to
decide whether her act were a sin or a virtue. She caused to be set
up, upon every one of the soft rounded hills which made the beautiful
rolling sides of that part of the valley, a large wooden cross; not a
hill in sight of her house left without the sacred emblem of her faith.
"That the heretics may know, when they go by, that they are on the
estate of a good Catholic," she said, "and that the faithful may be
reminded to pray. There have been miracles of conversion wrought on the
most hardened by a sudden sight of the Blessed Cross."

There they stood, summer and winter, rain