was not for him. Indeed, the threatened
invasion of the San Gregorio by Japanese rendered imperative an
immediate decision to that effect. He was the first of an ancient
lineage who had even dreamed of progress; he _had_ progressed, and he
could never, by any possibility, afford to retrograde.

The Farrels had never challenged competition. They had been content to
make their broad acres pay a sum sufficient to meet operating-expenses
and the interest-charges on the ancient mortgage, meanwhile supporting
themselves in all the ease and comfort of their class by nibbling at
their principal. Just how far his ancestors had nibbled, the last of
the Farrels was not fully informed, but he was young and optimistic,
and believed that, with proper management and the application of modern
ranching principles, he would succeed, by the time he was fifty, in
saving this principality intact for those who might come after him, for
it was not a part of his life plan to die childless--now that the war
was over and he out of it practically with a whole skin. This aspect
of his future he considered as the train rolled into the Southland. He
was twenty-eight years old, and he had never been in love, although,
since his twenty-first birthday, his father and Don Juan Sepulvida, of
the Rancho Carpajo, had planned a merger of their involved estates
through the simple medium of a merger of their families. Anita
Sepulvida was a beauty that any man might be proud of; her blood was of
the purest and best, but, with a certain curious hard-headedness (the
faint strain of Scotch in him, in all likelihood), Don Mike had
declined to please the oldsters by paying court to her.

"There's sufficient of the _manana_ spirit in our tribe now, even with
the Celtic admixture," he had declared forcibly. "I believe that like
begets like in the human family as well as in the animal kingdom, and
we know from experience that it never fails there. An infusion of pep
is what our family needs, and I'll be hanged if I relish the job of
rehabilitating two decayed estates for a posterity that I know could no
more compete with the Anglo-Saxon race than did their ancestors."

Whereat, old Don Miguel, who possessed a large measure of the Celtic
instinct for domination, had informed Don Mike that the latter was too
infernally particular. By the blood of the devil, his son's statement
indicated a certain priggishness, which he, Don Miguel, could not
deplore too grea