n think of, sir; so, unless the captain
has some further use for me, I shall be jogging along."

"Farrel," the captain declared, "if I had ever had a doubt as to why I
made you top cutter of B battery, that last remark of yours would have
dissipated it. Please do not be in a hurry. Sit down and mourn with me
for a little while."

"Well, I'll sit down with you, sir, but I'll be hanged if I'll be
mournful. I'm too happy in the knowledge that I'm going home."

"Where is your home, sergeant?"

"In San Marcos County, in the southern part of the state. After two
years of Siberia and four days of this San Francisco fog, I'm fed up on
low temperatures, and, by the holy poker, I want to go home. It isn't
much of a home--just a quaint, old, crumbling adobe ruin, but it's home,
and it's mine. Yes, sir; I'm going home and sleep in the bed my
great-greatgrandfather was born in."

"If I had a bed that old, I'd fumigate it," the captain declared. Like
all regular army officers, he was a very devil of a fellow for
sanitation. "Do you worship your ancestors, Farrel?"

"Well, come to think of it, I have rather a reverence for 'the ashes of
my fathers and the temples of my gods.'"

"So have the Chinese. Among Americans, however, I thought all that sort
of thing was confined to the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers."

"If I had an ancestor who had been a Pilgrim Father," Farrel declared,
"I'd locate his grave and build a garbage-incinerator on it."

"What's your grouch against the Pilgrim Fathers?"

"They let their religion get on top of them, and they took all the joy
out of life. My Catalonian ancestors, on the other hand, while taking
their religion seriously, never permitted it to interfere with a
_fiesta_. They were what might be called 'regular fellows.'"

"Your Catalonian ancestors? Why, I thought you were black Irish, Farrel?"

"The first of my line that I know anything about was a lieutenant in the
force that marched overland from Mexico to California under command of
Don Gaspar de Portola. Don Gaspar was accompanied by Fray Junipero
Serra. They carried a sword and a cross respectively, and arrived in San
Diego on July first, 1769. So, you see, I'm a real Californian."

"You mean Spanish-Californian."

"Well, hardly in the sense that most people use that term, sir. We have
never intermarried with Mexican or Indian, and until my grandfather
Farrel arrived at the ranch and refused to go away until my