“They came this far. Let them stay.” It was after dark when they arrived at the hotel and with the faint dawn they left. No one had noticed them. The old Chinaman who shufflingly served them a good and plentiful breakfast, gave never a second glance to the pretty youth and the younger boy who ate so much and paid so promptly. There were plenty of beautiful boy faces in Mexico, soft-eyed, long-lashed. So no one questioned them, no one detained them. The conscientious American officials of the great mining company at Nacozari never knew that an American girl had passed right under their noses down into a hornet’s nest of banditry and revolution, nor did Raquel suspect the forces that were already drawing in around her and Georgie. She loved the increasingly tropical look of the country as they trotted and loped, and walked and cantered, over palm-covered mesas, through palmetto groves by streamlets shrunken with the heat, until they came at dusk upon the approach to El Rancho Escondido. It was then that the spell of old Mexico fell upon Raquel, wrapping her in romance. Even Georgie was not indifferent to the charm of the picture before them--crumbling walls laden with purple bougainvillea, with creamy roses, caressed by a mellower moonlight than northern nights know. And that night as she lay in her balconied bedroom, cool linen sheets inviting rest, Raquel went dreamily over the welcome given them by their host, the courtly Don Nestor Torreon. The fine flavor of Spanish courtesy she knew--it was a possession of peon and prince--but this was an aristocrat, who kept here on this isolated estate the customs and manners of other times. The carven table, laden with ancient, hand-hammered silver; the quiet unobtrusive service. There was a servant to every task, it seemed, a thing to which the sturdy young Americans were unaccustomed. Although there was decay about El Escondido, disrepair and cobwebs, the linen was spotless, the silver shining, the food delicate and delicious. Don Nestor, his fine old head courteously inclined, listened attentively to Raquel’s statement of her mission. “I have cattle indeed,” he told them, “I do not even know how many. They are scattered in the hills, out of the way of revolution. For two years we have never rounded them up; they have been branded in lots, as they were found. Some were never branded. “Discounting losses by theft, banditry, accidents, and then taking away ten per cent, I estimate, Señoritos”--he bowed first toward Raquel and then toward Georgie, who swelled with manliness--“I estimate that I have at least thirty-five thousand head of cattle here in Sonora, bearing the brand of El Rancho Escondido.”