"There were tears in her eyes."
He crossed the tracks, climbed a fence, and after traversing a small
piece of bottom-land, entered 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.
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