more
than they did me," Miss Kate told him, with the saucy tilt to her chin
that usually accompanied her impudence.

He had lived in Chihuahua three years as a mining engineer, so that he
spoke and read Spanish readily. The old Don wrote a stiff angular hand,
but as soon as he became accustomed to it Dick found little difficulty.
Some of the letters were written from the ranch, but most of them
carried the Santa Fe date line at the time the old gentleman was
governor of the royal province. They were addressed to his son Alvaro,
at that time a schoolboy in Mexico City. Clearly Don Bartolome intended
his son to be informed as to the affairs of the province, for the
letters were a mine of information in regard to political and social
conditions. They discussed at length, too, the business interests of the
family and the welfare of the peons dependent upon it.

All afternoon Gordon pored over these fascinating pages torn from a dead
and buried past. They were more interesting than any novel he had ever
read, for they gave him a photograph, as it were projected by his
imagination upon a moving picture canvas, of the old regime that had
been swept into the ash heap by modern civilization. The letters
revealed the old Don frankly. He was proud, imperious, heady, and
intrepid. To his inferiors he was curt but kind. They flocked to him
with their troubles and their quarrels. The judgment of their overlord
was final with his tenants. Clearly he had a strong sense of his
responsibilities to them and to the state. A quaint flavor of old-world
courtesy ran through the letters like a thread of gold.

It was a paragraph from one of the last letters that riveted Dick's
attention. Translated into English, it ran as follows:

"You ask, my dear son, whether I have relinquished the great grant
made us by Facundo Megares. In effect I have. During the past two
years I have twice, acting as governor, conveyed to settlers small
tracts from this grant. The conditions under which such a grant
must be held are too onerous. Moreover, neither I nor you, nor your
son, nor his son will live to see the day when there is not range
enough for all the cattle that can be brought into the province.
Just now time presses, but in a later letter I shall set forth my
reasons in detail."

A second and a third time Dick read the paragraph to make sure that he
had not misunderstood it. The meaning was plain. There could be no doubt
about