ek,
'for travelers seldom come as far as San Francisco.'

"'A ship! a ship!' sounded a cry from the plaza. A vessel had been
sighted off Cantil Blanco, the first foreign ship seen since Vancouver's
visit fourteen years before.

"'It is the Russian expedition which Spain has ordered us to treat
courteously,' exclaimed Don Luis, bursting into the house, his face
aglow with excitement. 'Since father is in Monterey and I am acting
Comandante, I must receive these strangers,' he continued as he threw
his serape over his shoulders, his eyes flashing with his first taste of
command.

"'Be careful,' cautioned his mother, 'we have had no word from Europe
for nine months and the last packet boat from Mexico brought a rumor of
war with Russia.'

"But the foreign vessel had come only with friendly intentions. The
Russian Chamberlain Rezanov, in charge of the Czar's northwestern
possessions, had found a starving colony at Sitka and had brought a
cargo of goods to the more productive southland with the hope of
exchanging it for foodstuffs. To be sure, he knew the Spanish law
strictly forbidding trade with foreign vessels, but it seemed the only
means of saving his famishing people and he trusted much to his skill in
diplomacy.

"A few hours later, Concha, on the qui vive with excitement, saw her
brother approaching with a little company of men, among whom was a tall
well-built Russian officer, whose keen eyes seemed to take in every
detail of the little settlement.

"Don Luis conducted his guests to the old adobe building, draped in pink
Castilian roses, and into the cool sala, which, although provided with
slippery horse-hair chairs and plain whitewashed walls ornamented with
pictures of the Virgin and saints, was a pleasing contrast to the ship's
cabin. Here he presented his guests to his mother, a woman whose face
still reflected much of the beauty of her youth in spite of her cares
which had come in the rearing of her thirteen children. Beside her stood
Concepcion. Her long drooping lashes swept her cheeks, but when she
raised her eyes in greeting Rezanov saw that they were dark and joyous.
He was a widower of many years, a man of forty-two, who had given little
thought to women during his wandering life, but now he found himself
keenly alive to the charms of this radiant girl. Simple and artless in
her manners, yet possessing the early maturity of her race, she set her
guests at ease and entertained them with stories of