do you plan to give your _fiesta_, Miguel?" Kay inquired one
evening as they sat, according to custom, on the veranda.

"In about a month," he replied. "I've got to fatten my steers and
harden them on a special diet before we barbecue them. Don Nicolas
Sandoval will have charge of the feast, and if I furnished him with
thin, tough range steers, he'd charge me with modernism and disown me.
Old Bill Conway never would forget it. He'd nag me to my grave."

"When do we give Panchito his try-out, Don Mike?"

"The track is ready for it now, Kay, and Pablo tells me Panchito's
half-brother is now a most dutiful member of society and can get there
in a hurry when he's sent for. But he's only a half thoroughbred.
Shall we start training to-morrow?"

"Oh, goody. By all means."

The long and patient methods of education to which a green race-horse
is subjected were unknown on the Rancho Palomar. Panchito was a
trained saddle animal, wise, sensible, courageous and with a prodigious
faith that his rider would get him safely out of any jam into which
they might blunder together. The starting-gate bothered him at first,
but after half a dozen trials, he realized that the web, flying upward,
had no power to hurt him and was, moreover, the signal for a short,
jolly contest of speed with his fellows of the rancho. Before the week
was out he was "breaking" from the barrier with speed and serenity born
of the knowledge that this was exactly what was expected of him;
whereupon the other horses that Don Mike used to simulate a field of
competitors, took heart of hope at Panchito's complacency and broke
rather well with him.

Those were long, lazy days on the Palomar. June had cast its withering
smile upon the San Gregorio and the green hills had turned to a parched
brown. Grasshoppers whirred everywhere; squirrels whistled; occasional
little dust-devils whirled up the now thoroughly dry river-bed and the
atmosphere was redolent of the aroma of dust and tarweed. Pablo and
his dusky relatives, now considerably augmented (albeit Don Mike had
issued no invitation to partake of his hospitality), trained colts as
roping horses or played Mexican monte in the shade of the help's
quarters. Occasionally they roused themselves long enough to justify
their inroads upon Don Mike's groceries by harvesting a forty-acre
field of alfalfa and irrigating it for another crop, for which purpose
a well had been sunk in the bed of the dry San Gre