marked the resting place of an early Indian convert and an almost
obliterated inscription on a broken headstone revealed the name of a
Spanish grandee. Shattered columns, loosened by the hand of time and
overthrown in recent years, lay upon the ground, while great willow and
pepper trees spread out protecting arms, as if to shield the silent
company from the inroads of modern enterprise. We picked our way along
vine-latticed paths, past graves over which myrtle and roses wandered in
untrimmed beauty, to where a white shaft marked the resting place of Don
Luis Argüello, comandante of the San Francisco Presidio for twenty-three
years and the first Mexican governor of California.

"How splendidly strong he looms out of the past," I said. "His keen
insight into the needs of this western outpost and his determined
efforts for the best interests of California will forever place him in
the front rank of its rulers. I wonder if his young wife, Rafaela, is
buried here also?" I drew aside the tangled vines from the near-by
headstones. "She was always a little dearer to me than his second wife,
the proud Dona Maria Ortega, perhaps because Rafaela belonged
pre-eminently to San Francisco. Her father, Ensign Sal, was acting
comandante of the Presidio when Vancouver visited the Coast, and Rafaela
and Luis Argüello grew up together in the little adobe settlement."

"Go on," said the skeptic, leaning comfortably against a tree trunk.
"This old Mexican governor seems to have had an interesting romance."

"He wasn't old," I protested, "only forty-six when he died. He was a
splendid type of a young Spanish grandee, tall and lithe of form, with
the dark skin and hair of his race. He combined the freedom born of an
out-of-door life with the courtly manners inherited from generations of
Spanish ancestry. To Rafaela Sal, watching the soldiers file out of the