red a trail through the chaparral, and
started his upward climb to the crest of the range that hid the San
Gregorio. Suddenly he paused.

Had the girl's unfamiliarity with Spanish names caused her to confuse
Palomar with Palomares? And why was Panchito to be sold at auction?
Was it like his father to sacrifice his son's horse to any fellow with
the money to buy him? No! No! Rather would he sell his own mount and
retain Panchito for the sake of the son he mourned as dead. The
Palomares end of the San Gregorio was too infertile to interest an
experienced agriculturist like Okada; there wasn't sufficient acreage
to make a colonization-scheme worth while. On the contrary, fifty
thousand acres of the Rancho Palomar lay in the heart of the valley and
immediately contiguous to the flood-waters at the head of the
ghost-river for which the valley was named.

Don Mike, of Palomar, leaned against the bole of a scrub-oak and closed
his eyes in sudden pain. Presently, he roused himself and went his way
with uncertain step, for, from time to time, tears blinded him. And
the last of the sunlight had faded from the San Gregorio before he
topped the crest of its western boundary; the melody of Brother
Flavio's angelus had ceased an hour previous, and over the mountains to
the east a full moon stood in a cloudless sky, flooding the silent
valley with its silver light, and pricking out in bold relief the
gray-white walls of the Mission de la Madre Dolorosa, crumbling
souvenir of a day that was done.

He ran down the long hill, and came presently to the mission. In the
grass beside the white road, he searched for his straw suitcase, his
gas-mask, and the helmet, but failing to find them, he concluded the
girl had neglected to remind her father's chauffeur to throw them off
in front of the mission, as promised. So he passed along the front of
the ancient pile and let himself in through a wooden door in the high
adobe wall that surrounded the churchyard immediately adjacent to the
mission. With the assurance of one who treads familiar ground, he
strode rapidly up a weed-grown path to a spot where a tall
black-granite monument proclaimed that here rested the clay of one
superior to his peon and Indian neighbors. And this was so, for the
shaft marked the grave of the original Michael Joseph Farrel, the
adventurer the sea had cast up on the shore of San Marcos County.

Immediately to the left of this monument, Don Mike saw a gr