"What's all this?" said she, placidly. "What are you saying to make my little girl so wide-eyed? Remember, she has a fierce old guardian--one that expects every one to 'tend to his own affairs!" Jane spoke jestingly, but the doctor knew he was worsted. Jane had been watching him. "But, _tia_!" interposed Lola, "the doctor was just going to tell me something very important!" "He was maybe going to tell you that you are going to Pueblo next fall! Yes, honey, it's all fixed!" She turned a joyous, defiant face on the doctor, who cast his hands abroad as if he washed them of the whole affair; while Lola, beaming with pleasure, rushed off to tell the news to Señor Juarez. "You'll regret this!" said the doctor, somehow feeling glad of his own failure. "Well, _she_ won't!" cried Jane, watching Lola's flight with tender eyes. "Sometime she is going to find out all this deceit!" he added. "I know," said Jane. "I know. And then she'll quit trusting me forever. But if I'm willing to stand it, nobody else need to worry." With this tacit rebuke she left him, and thereafter the doctor respected her wishes. A month or so after Lola's departure northward, Jane's solicitude was enlivened by an event of startling importance. She was notified by the Dauntless Company that two entries, the fourth and fifth east, had entered her property, in which she had never suspected the presence of coal, and that the owners were prepared to negotiate with her suitable terms for the right of working the vein in question. When the matter of royalties was settled and several hundred dollars paid to Jane's account for coal already taken out, she had a sudden rush of almost tearful joy. Every month would come to her, while the coal lasted, a determinate sum of money. She regarded the fact in a sort of ecstasy, and resolved upon many things. First she banished from her house the shadow of the mortgage. Then, glowing with enterprise, she proceeded to extend and embellish her property in a way which speedily set the town by the ears, and aroused every one to dark prophecies as to what must happen when her money should all be gone, and nothing left her but to face poverty in the palatial five-room dwelling now growing up around the pine homestead of the past. Lola liked adobe houses; and fortunately Enrique Diaz, the blacksmith, had a fine lot of adobes which he had made before frost, and put under cover against a possible extension of his shop, "to-morrow or some time after a while." These Jane bought, and deftly the chocolate walls arose in her _vega_, crowned finally with a crimson roof, which could be seen two miles off at Lynn. There was a porch, too, with snow-white pillars, and an open fireplace, all tiled with adobe, in which might blaze fires of piñon wood, full of resin and burning as nothing else can burn save driftwood, sodden with salt and oil and the mystery of old ocean.