you've been crying."

Jessica blushed as guiltily as if she had been accused of some crime.

"I know it. I'm sorry."

"So am I. I know why. Because you're shut up here like a dormouse when
you've lived like a lark. On with your little red Tam and come with
me. Our work is getting on famously, famously. If I could get hold of
one person that I've hunted this and every other city near for I'd
have the matter in a nut shell and the guilty man in--a prison. I've
found--three or four more of those links I mentioned, Hale, and every
man of them is another witness to the uprightness of one, Cassius Trent,
late of Sobrante. I began this job for little Jess, but I confess I'm
finishing it for the sake of a man I never saw. He was a trump, that
fellow. One of the great-hearted, impracticable creatures that keep my
faith in humanity. If we could only find that Antonio!"

"Yes. _If!_ But when he rode away from Sobrante that day he seems to
have ridden out of the world, so far as any trace he left behind. I'm
getting discouraged, for without him all the rest falls to the ground."

"Well, discouraged? We'll just step out and find him, won't we, Lady
Jess?"

She had hastened to ask permission to go out with her friend and had
come back radiant, now, at prospect even of so brief an outing. It was
quite as the reporter had judged; the close confinement of the hospital,
after the out-of-door life at Sobrante, was half the cause of Jessica's
depression, and she was ready now to fall in with the gay mood of Ninian
Sharp and answered, promptly:

"Oh, yes. We'll find 'him,' since you wish it. But I don't happen to
know which 'him' you want?"

"Why, our fine Senor Bernal. Who else?"

"Then let us go to the old Spanish quarter."

"I've been, many times. Sent others also. No. He's a wise chap and
if he is in this town frequents no haunt where he'll be looked for so
surely. No matter. It's a picturesque corner of the town and maybe a
sight of some old adobes would do your homesick eyes good."

"Or harm," suggested Mr. Hale.

But they did not stop to hear his objections and were speedily on the
car which would take them nearest to the district Jessica had heard of,
both from Antonio at home and now from others here. A relic of the old
California, whose history she loved to hear from the lips of Pedro, Fra
Mateo, or even "Forty-niner" himself.

But once arrived there she was disappointed. They were old adobes,
true enough, and the