questions asked. His speech was almost a different tongue from
theirs; he was thirty-five, he had dogs and a man-servant, instead
of the usual equipment of mother, sisters, and "hired girl," and
he seemed eternally bored and ungracious. This was enough for the
Los Lobos girls, and for most of their mothers, too.

The newcomer bought a small ranch, three miles out of town, and
lounged about it in a highly edifying condition of elegant
idleness. He rode a good horse, drank a great deal, and strode out
of the post-office once a week scattering monogrammed envelopes
carelessly behind him. He had not been long in town before people
began to say that his elder brother was a lord; a duke, Mrs. Chess
Baxter, the postmistress said, because to her question regarding
the rumor he had answered carelessly: "Something of that sort."

Thirty years ago there were a great many detached Englishmen in
California, fourth and fifth sons, remittance men, family
scapegraces who had been banished to the farthest frontier by
relatives who regarded California as beyond the reach of gossip,
and almost beyond the reach of letters. Checks, small but regular,
arrived quarterly for these gentry, who had only to drink, sleep,
play cards, and demoralize the girls of the country. Here and
there among them, to be sure, were pink-skinned boys as fresh and
sweet as the apple-blossoms under which they rode their horses,
but for the most part the emigrants were dissipated, disenchanted,
clinging loyally to the traditions of the older country that had
discarded them, and scorning the fragrant and inexhaustible
richness of the new land that had made them welcome. They were, as
a class, silent, only voluble on the subject of the despised
country of their adoption, and absolutely non-committal as to