E-text prepared by Al Haines Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 16674-h.htm or 16674-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/6/7/16674/16674-h/16674-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/6/7/16674/16674-h.zip) THE PRIDE OF PALOMAR by PETER B. KYNE Author of Kindred of the Dust, etc. Illustrated by H. R. Ballinger and Dean Cornwell Cosmopolitan Book Corporation New York MCMXXII [Frontispiece: The man--Don Miguel Farrel.] DEDICATION FRANK L. MULGREW, ESQ. THE BOHEMIAN CLUB SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA DEAR FRIEND MUL.-- I have at last finished writing "The Pride of Palomar." It isn't at all what I wanted it to be; it isn't at all what I planned it to be, but it does contain something of what you and I both feel, something of what you wanted me to put into it. Indeed, I shall always wish to think that it contains just a few faint little echoes of the spirit of that old California that was fast vanishing when I first disturbed the quiet of the Mission Dolores with infantile shrieks--when you first gazed upon the redwood-studded hills of Sonoma County. You adventured with me in my quest for local color for "The Valley of the Giants," in Northern California; you performed a similar service in Southern California last summer and unearthed for me more local color, more touches of tender sentiment than I could use. Therefore, "The Pride of Palomar" is peculiarly your book. On a day a year ago, when the story was still so vague I could scarcely find words in which to sketch for you an outline of the novel I purposed writing, you said: "It will be a good story. I'm sold on it already!" To you the _hacienda_ of a Rancho Palomar will always bring delightful recollections of the gracious hospitality of Senor Cave Coutts, sitting at the head of that table hewed in the forties. Little did Senor Coutts realize that he, the last of the dons in San Diego County, was to furnish copy for my novel; that his pride of ancestry, both American and Castilian, his love for his ancestral _hacienda_ at the Rancho Guajome, and his old-fashioned garden with the great Bougainvillea in flower, were the ingredients necessary to the production of what I trust will be a book with a mission.