him."

Saxon remembered her school geography, and with her mind's eye
she saw a certain outline map of a continent with jiggly wavering
parallel lines that denoted coast.

"Oh," she cried, "then you are South American."

Mercedes shrugged her shoulders.

"I had to be born somewhere. It was a great ranch, my mother's.
You could put all Oakland in one of its smallest pastures."

Mercedes Higgins sighed cheerfully and for the time was lost in
retrospection. Saxon was curious to hear more about this woman
who must have lived much as the Spanish-Californians had lived in
the old days.

"You received a good education," she said tentatively. "Your
English is perfect."

"Ah, the English came afterward, and not in school. But, as it
goes, yes, a good education in all things but the most
important--men. That, too, came afterward. And little my mother
dreamed--she was a grand lady, what you call a
cattle-queen--little she dreamed my fine education was to fit me
in the end for a night watchman's wife." She laughed genuinely at
the grotesqueness of the idea. "Night watchman, laborers, why, we
had hundreds, yes, thousands that toiled for us. The peons--they
are like what you call slaves, almost, and the cowboys, who could