In his softly lit library in his great house at Menlo Park another man was at that time also thinking of Mariposa. He had been thinking of her off and on ever since he had bidden her good by that afternoon at Mrs. Willers’. As the train had whirled him over the parched, thirsty country, burnt to a leathern dryness by the summer’s drouth, he had no thought for anything but his newly discovered daughter. His glance dwelt unseeing on the tanned fields with their belts of olive eucalyptus woods, and the turquoise blue of the bay beyond the painted marsh. Men descending at way stations raised their hats to him as they mounted into the handsome carriages drawn up by the platform. His return to their salutes was a preoccupied nod. His mind was full of his child--his splendid daughter. Jake Shackleton had not forgotten his first wife and child, as Dan Moreau and Lucy had always hoped. He was a man of many and secret interests, pulling many wires, following many trails. He knew their movements and fortunes from the period of their marriage in Hangtown. At first this secret espionage was due to fear of their betraying him. He had begun to prosper shortly after his entrance into the state, and with prosperity and the slackening of the strain of the trip across the desert came a realization of what he had done. He saw quickly how the selling of his wife would appeal to the California mind in those days fantastically chivalrous to women. He would be undone. With stealthy persistence he followed the steps of the peaceful couple who had it in their power to ruin him. Serenity began to come to him as he heard that the union was singularly happy; that Moreau, confident no one would molest them, had gone through a ceremony of marriage with Lucy, and that the child was being brought up as their own. As wealth came to Shackleton he thought of them with a sort of jealous triumph. With his remarkable insight into men he knew that Dan Moreau would never make money; that he was one of the world’s predestined poor men. Then as riches grew and grew, and the emigrant of the fifties became the bonanza king of the seventies, he wondered if the time might not come when they would turn to him. He would have liked it, for under the cold indifference of his manner the transaction at the cabin in the Sierra forever haunted him with its savage shamelessness. It was the one debasing blot on a career which, hard, selfish, often unprincipled, had yet never, before or after, sunk to the level of that base action.