He obeyed, not knowing whom she meant. In the bright light of the after-glow he saw four figures on horseback--three men and a girl--approaching down the deserted street. Behind them a pack burro, his back laden with bags and valises, plodded meekly through the dust. The Colonel recognized the men as the Gracey brothers and their superintendent, Barney Sullivan. The girl he had not seen for a year or two, and she was at the age when a year or two makes vast changes. He knew, however, that she was Black Dan Gracey’s daughter, Mercedes, who was expected at the dance. The cavalcade came to a stop outside the window. From the piazza the front legs of the loungers’ chairs striking the floor produced a series of thuds, and the thuds were followed by a series of hails such as had greeted the Colonel. But the loungers made no attempt to go forward, as they had done in his case. An access of bashfulness in the presence of beauty held them sheepishly spellbound. It remained for Forsythe to dash out with his duster and welcome the new arrivals with the effusion of a mining camp Boniface. The Colonel, unseen, looked at them with perhaps not as avid a curiosity as Mitty, but with undisguised interest. He had long known the Gracey boys, as they were called, though Dan was forty-three and Rion twelve years younger. He had often heard of their mining vicissitudes, not only from men similarly engaged, but from themselves on their occasional visits to San Francisco. The society of that city had not yet expanded to the size when it fell apart into separate sets. Its members not only had a bowing acquaintance, but were, for the most part, intimate. The Gracey boys had, as the newspapers say, “the entrée everywhere,” though they did not, it is true, profit by it to the extent that San Francisco would have liked. They were not only educated men, who had come from Michigan in their boyhood, but Black Dan Gracey was a figure distinguished--at any rate, to the feminine imagination--by an unusual flavor of romance. Seventeen years before the present date he had met, while mining in Mexico, a young Spanish girl of fourteen, had fallen madly in love with her, and when her parents placed her in a convent to remove her for ever from the hated Gringo, with six of his men, had broken into the convent and carried her off.