essor."

"Hang the professor!" I ejaculated. "I don't care a rap for HIM."

"Then I differ with you," said Mrs. Saltillo, with precision. "He is
distinctly an able man, and one cannot but miss the contact of his
original mind and his liberal teachings."

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 rumin