“John, I can’t help it.  Naturally, I’m curious to know the thoughts in the back of that boy’s head, but when he turns that smiling innocent face toward me, all I can see is old-fashioned deference and amiability and courtesy.  I watch him when he’s talking to Kay—­when he cannot possibly know I am snooping, and still, except for that frank friendliness, his face is as communicative as this old adobe wall.  A few days ago he rode in from the range with a great cluster of wild tiger-lilies—­and he presented them to me.  Any other young man would have presented them to my daughter.”

“I give it up, Kate, and suggest that we turn this mystery over to Father Time.  He’ll solve it.”

“But I don’t want Kay to fall in love with Don Mike if he isn’t going to fall in love with her,” she protested, in her earnestness raising her voice, as was frequently her habit.

The patio gate latch clicked and Pablo Artelan stood in the aperture.

“Senora,” he said gravely.  “Ef I am you I don’ worry very much about those boy.  Before hee’s pretty parteecular.  All those hightone’ senorita in El Toro she give eet the sweet look to Don Miguel, jus’ the same like thees—­” Here Pablo relaxed his old body, permitted his head to loll sideways and his lower jaw to hang slackly, the while his bloodshot eyes gazed amorously into the branches of the catalpa tree.  “But those boy he don’ pay some attention.  Hee’s give beeg smile to thees senorita, beeg smile to thees one, beeg smile to that one, beeg smile for all the mama, but for the querida I tell to you Don Miguel hee’s pretty parteecular.  I theenk to myself—­Carolina, too—­’Look here, Pablo.  What he ees the matter weeth those boy?  I theenk mebbeso those boy she’s goin’ be old bach.  What’s the matter here?  When I am twenty-eight anos my oldes’ boy already hee’s bust one bronco’.”  Here Pablo paused to scratch his head.  “But now,” he resumed, “by the blood of those devil I know sometheeng!”

“What do you know, you squidgy-nosed old idol, you?” Parker demanded, with difficulty repressing his laughter.

“I am ol’ man,” Pablo answered with just the correct shade of deprecation, “but long time ago I have feel like my corazon—­my heart—­goin’ make barbecue in my belly.  I am in love.  I know.  Nobody can fool me.  An’ those boy, Don Miguel, I tell you, senor, hee’s crazy for love weeth the Senorita Kay.”

Parker crooked his finger, and in obedience to the summons Pablo approached the bench.

“How do you know all this, Pablo?”

Let us here pause and consider.  In the summer of 1769 a dashing, care-free Catalonian soldier in the company of Don Gaspar de Portola, while swashbuckling his way around the lonely shores of San Diego Bay, had encountered a comely young squaw. Mira, senores!  Of the blood that flowed in the veins of Pablo Artelan, thirty-one-thirty-seconds was Indian, but the other one-thirty-second was composed of equal parts of Latin romance and conceit.