The priests receive him with open arms. They are glad for news of their brother of the Sierras. Maxime installs himself as a guest of the priests. Some current of life will bear him onward--whither he knows not. Idle days run into weeks. A motley five or six hundred whites have gathered. The alcalde begins to fear that the town limits are crowded. None of the wise men of the epoch dare to dream that in less than three years two hundred vessels will lie tossing, deserted in the bay; that the cove will be filled with ships from the four corners of the earth in five years. Frowning hills and rolling sand dunes are to be thrown bodily into the reentrant bay. They are future coverings for sunken hulks. Where for twenty square miles coyote and fox now howl at night, the covert oaks and brambles will be shaved off to give way to a city, growing like a cloud-land vision. Active and energetic, Valois coasts down to Monterey. He finds Fremont gone, already on his way east. His soldier wrists are bound with the red tape of arrest. The puppet of master minds behind the scenes, Fremont has been a "pathfinder" for others. Riding moodily, chafing in arrest, at the rear of the overland column, the explorer receives as much as Columbus, Pizarro, or Maluspina did--only obloquy. It is the Nemesis of disgrace, avenging the outraged and conquered Californians. A dark shade of double dealing hangs around the glories of the capture of California. The methods used are hardly justified, even by the national blessings of extension to this ocean threshold of Asian trade. The descent was planned at Washington to extend the domineering slave empire of the aspiring South. The secret is out. The way is clear for the surplus blacks of the South to march in chains to the Pacific under the so-called "flag of freedom." Valois discovers at Monterey that no man of the staff of the "Pathfinder" will be made an official pet, They are all proscribed. The early fall finds him again under the spell of the bells of the Mission Dolores. Whither to turn he knows not. Averse to manual labor, like all Creoles, the lad decides to seek a return passage on some trader. This will be hardly possible for months. The Christmas chimes of 1848 sound sadly on his ears. With no home ties but his uncle, his memories of the parents, lost in youth, fade away. He feels the bitterness of being a stranger in a strange land. He is discouraged with an isolated western empire producing nothing but hides and tallow. He shares the general opinion that no agriculture can succeed in this rainless summer land of California. Hardly a plough goes afield. On the half-neglected ranchos the owners of thousands of cattle have neither milk nor butter. Fruits and vegetables are unattainable. The mission grapes, olives, and oranges have died out by reason of fourteen years' neglect. The mechanic arts are absent. What shall the harvest of this idle land be?