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Santa Barbara, being the most leeward of the Sugar States, is at the angle of the Continent, with two coasts, one facing north, the other east. The city of Santa Barbara is in a bay at the angle where these two coasts trend from each other.

Those who will look at the map of the State will see that it contains, in all, ten provinces: three eastern, four central, three western, each of which must be briefly described. The visitor sees the land as low-lying coast, growing sugar, with immense ranges of scrub, wild land and pasture behind the sugar country, then foothills above and behind the ranges, and behind the foothills, as the southern boundary of the State, the Sierras of the Three Kings, all forest to the snowline.

The easternmost province of the State is that of Santa Barbara, which contains the capital city. This, Meruel and Redemption, are the three eastern provinces.

Meruel, to the south of Santa Barbara, has a more temperate climate than the western provinces, owing to the cold Southern Drift which follows the prevalent southerly along the coast. Meruel, the capital of the province, stands on a rise of iron outcrop which gives the earth a reddish look. The people of Santa Barbara nicknamed the Meruel land “the Red Country” and the Meruel people “the Reds.”

Redemption, the coal country, lies to the south and west of Meruel. It was formerly a small independent Republic. It was seized by Santa Barbara in 1865, in the war of aggression known as the Redemption War, when a young man, Lopez Zubiaga, the son of a Meruel landowner, “wedded” (as they put it) “the Meruel iron to the Redemption coal.”

The four central provinces are Pituba, near the sea, San Jacinto, in the heart of the State, and the two mountain masses, Gaspar and Melchior.

Pituba, once the home of the warlike Carib race, the Pitubas, is now one of the richest sugar countries in the world. It stretches along the northern coast for nearly two hundred miles, no mile of which is without its plantation, either of sugar or of coffee.

San Jacinto, which lies to the south of Pituba, is the most barren of the provinces; most of it is of that poor soil known as scrubs or burnt land: it is mainly thorny waste, with patches of pasture. In spite of its barrenness, it is most beautiful, because of its expanses. Its chief town, the Mission city of San Jacinto, stands on a peninsula rock above the river of San Jacinto, which rises in the Sierras and comes down in force there, in a raddled and dangerous stream (now controlled so as to be navigable).

Gaspar and Melchior, to the south of San Jacinto, are vast, wild, forested mountain masses.

The three western provinces are Baltazar, Encinitas and Matoche.

Baltazar, to the south, is a mountain mass, forested to the snowline: it is part of the Sierra, like Gaspar and Melchior.

Encinitas, to the north of Baltazar, lies between the San Jacinto River and the Western Bay. Of all the provinces, Encinitas is the most delightful to an English mind. It is mainly an expanse of grass, marvellous to see. It rises from the river into a range of downs or gentle hills, called the Encarnacion Hills, which are crowned with a little walled town, called Encinitas, because the Conquistador, who founded it, came from the village of that name in Spain.

To the north of Encinitas there is a narrow, hilly strip which thrusts out a snout into the ocean. The strip is the western province of Matoche: the snout is the northernmost point of the State, Cape Caliente. The copper found in the hills is smelted and exported at Port Matoche, on the western coast of the snout, in the deep water at the mouth of the Western Bay, the State’s western boundary.

The bay is a deep, dangerous expanse dotted with volcanic islets.

At the time of this story, and for many years afterwards, only seven of the ten provinces ranked as inhabited. The mass of the Sierras, forest to the snowline, were hardly visited by white men: the three forest provinces of Gaspar, Melchior and Baltazar had not been explored. Seasonal rains made the forest unendurable from November until April: the forest fever, to which the Indians burnt copal in copper bowls, was fatal to man and beast from April till November.

At the time of the Spanish Conquest the lowlands were inhabited by small warlike tribes of Caribs who lived in stockaded settlements near the coasts. Of these tribes, the Araguayas, of Meruel, and the Pitubas, of Pituba, were the most important. When the Spaniards landed, Don Manuel of Encinitas, the Conquistador of the State, allied himself to the Pitubas by marrying the daughter of their chief. With the help of his allies he exterminated the Araguayas and drove the survivors of all other tribes into the forests of the south, where a few of their descendants still exist, as forest-Indians; that is, as the shadows of what they were.

After the conquest, vast tracks of land in Encinitas were granted to Don Manuel: other tracts in San Jacinto were granted to a Castilian noble, from whom they passed to a branch of the de Leyvas.

The colony or province of Santa Barbara was administered like all other Spanish possessions in the New World for a little more than three centuries. Jesuit missionaries converted the Indians; the owners of haciendas imported negroes. In the course of the three centuries the northward provinces became sparsely inhabited by horse and cattle breeders, sugar-growers, rum-makers and copper-miners, governed (if it can be called government) by a Viceroy in Santa Barbara city.

In the year 1817, the inhabitants, following the example of other Spanish colonists, broke the link with Spain, by declaring the land to be the Republic of Santa Barbara, with a Constitution partly modelled upon that of the United States. At the time of the foundation of the Republic the State contained, perhaps, one hundred thousand souls, of whom not more than one-third were white.

It happened that a retired English naval lieutenant named William Higgs-Rixon took a prominent part in the capture of Santa Barbara from the Spanish garrison. For this reason, and from the fact that English merchants were the only traders to and from the country, English was taught in the schools, and English people were (as they still are) popular throughout the State. After the War of Independence a good many Englishmen came (and were welcomed) as settlers in the land about Santa Barbara city. In the ’fifties and ’sixties the copper boom brought others, mostly Cornishmen, to Matoche. After the Redemption War a good many more (mostly from the northern Midlands) came to Meruel, to mine iron or coal. In the ’seventies others, from all parts of England, settled as sugar-planters along the northern sea coast in the Pituba country. These men, though they were but a sprinkling, helped profound changes in the land, which in three generations of men multiplied the population tenfold.

It is well, now, to talk of these changes.

Soon after the establishment of the Republic the two political parties in the land became defined as Feudalist and Modernist. In Encinitas and in western San Jacinto, the will of the great landowners was still law: in Santa Barbara City, Pituba and in Meruel a new and vigorous race was demanding freedom from the feudal lords and wider teaching than the priests gave. As the feeling between the two parties ran highest upon the point of Church teaching, the Church party, which was that of the great landlords, came to be known as the Surplices or Whites. For a while, as the Reds were without a leader, the governments of the Republic were White.

Mention was made of one Lopez Zubiaga, who seized the coal country of Redemption in 1865. This Lopez, born in 1840, was the first leader of the Red or forward party to count in affairs. At the time of the Redemption raid, he was a tall, strongly built, masterful and very handsome young man, with a contemptuous manner and savage courage. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, which made some think that he was not the son of the landowner, but of an Englishman, named variously Corbet, Corphitt or Cardiff, about whom there had been talk.

After his success in seizing Redemption, Lopez was elected President of the Republic in place of old General Chavez, the White. As President he rallied the Reds, and carried through what was called “the Liberal Struggle,” which made all Meruel and Redemption places of mines and factories, and took the schools from the control of the Church. After four years of his Presidency, the Whites returned to office, under the hidalgo, Miguel de Leyva, of San Jacinto, a man of burning faith, more ardent than wise, who provoked the forward party almost to the point of civil war. At the next election, the Whites were turned out of office and the Reds put in, with such unanimity that Lopez could rule as he chose. After the election of 1878, which repeated his triumph, Lopez declared himself Dictator, “while his country had need of him.”

Miguel de Leyva, disgusted, retired from politics: the Whites had no other leader, save young General Luis Chavez, who was indolent, and Hermengildo Bazan, who was only a speaker.

The Dictatorship of Lopez was marked outwardly by a great increase in the foreign trade of the eastern provinces, the threefold growth of the city of Santa Barbara, and an improvement of all the ports, harbours and coastwise railways. After 1884, those who studied the land’s politics felt that the real Dictator was no longer Lopez, but old Mordred Weycock, the manager of the United Sugar Company, an unscrupulous business man.

It was at this time that the oddness and brusqueness in Lopez’ character changed to a madness not likely to be forgotten.

The madness began to show itself in a passion for building big and costly public works. He rebuilt the cathedral (a Colonial Renaissance building) on the lines of the temple at Hloatl. He built himself a palace of glass, having heard, though wrongly, that the Queen of England lived in one. He then built himself a summerhouse, roofed with silver plates, and added to it an ivory room inlaid with gold. Being a Red, he caused all the bread used in his palace to be coloured red. He frequented shambles in order to see, as he said, “the divine colour.”

He had two favourites. Livio and Zarzas; two negro servants, Green Feather and the Knife; and one son, the child of his youth, Don José, born in 1860, a depraved youth of sickly beauty, who headed a clique of vicious lads at the court.

Late in the year 1886, the Dictator’s madness began to take other forms, of hatred and suspicion of the Whites, fear of assassination, and the belief that he was god. All these obsessions were fostered by Mordred Weycock, who contrived to win, from each of them, advantages for himself or his firm.

In all his schemes, Mordred was helped by his nephew, Roger Weycock, twenty-seven years of age, who had been in Santa Barbara since 1883, after having failed for the Diplomatic Service. Roger was a tall, polite, brown-haired, fair-bearded man, with a pleasant manner and a pale, inscrutable face. He was the channel through which Englishmen knew Santa Barbara. It was through his able weekly letters to the English press that English opinion was in favour of Lopez for so long. He knew Lopez to be mad; but the Red party favoured his firm and he had no pity for the Whites: old Miguel de Leyva had once kept him waiting in the hall, and had then brushed by to lunch.

Miguel de Leyva was now dead, leaving many children, including his youngest, the girl Carlotta, born in 1868, who even in infancy impressed people as a creature from another world. She comes into this story (as into many others) as a rare thing, whose passing made all things not quite the same. She was of a delicate, exquisite, unearthly charm, which swayed men, women and children: the Indians of San Jacinto used to kneel as she passed: some have said that animals and birds would come to her: at the least she had a beauty and grace not usual.

Nearly all the province of Encinitas was owned by the last descendant of the Conquistador, Don Manuel of Encinitas, who lived at his palace in his town, or in his hacienda below it, with his old mother, whom they called the Queen Dowager.

Don Manuel was born in 1857. He has been so often described, that it need only be said of him that he was a very glorious young man, noble in beauty and in intellect. In the days of this story he was an unmarried man of not quite thirty. In his youth, before his father died, he had had his wild time in the city with other young men. He had been a friend of Don José, Don Lopez’ son, and had practised black magic with Rafael Hirsch. All this ceased when his father died in 1879. Since then he had lived at Encarnacion, breeding horses, for the men of his State, who are among the great horsemen of the world. He took his stature, beauty and masterful fierce eyes from his mother, the Queen Dowager, who had been a Peralta from Matoche.

In October, 1886, Don Manuel met Carlotta de Leyva for the first time: they became betrothed that same month, to the great joy of the Queen Dowager, who had longed to see her son married.

Miguel de Leyva had a sister Emilia, who married a Piranha of Santa Barbara city, and lived there, after her husband’s death, in a house too big for her fortune. She had been much in England with her husband, either for pleasure or the marketing of copper. She spoke English well. She caused her daughter Rosa, who had been for some years a convent friend of her cousin Carlotta, to spend a year in an English household. Rosa returned to Santa Barbara from England some months before this tale begins.

Rosa Piranha was then nearly twenty, being a few months older than Carlotta. She was slight in build and not very strong, but had a mannish spirit, with courage and dash enough for anything. She had no looks: she was very short-sighted: she always wore tinted spectacles, even when indoors. Yet she was amusing, and very attractive: several Englishmen proposed to her during her stay in England; but she would not marry into their Church.

She was brown-haired, not dark like most of her country women. In herself she had that mixture of boyish cheek with feminine grace which one loves in Viola, in “Twelfth Night.”

On New Year’s Day, 1887, Carlotta and Manuel planned to be married at Easter, in the cathedral church of Santa Barbara.

On that same New Year’s Day, Don Lopez, the Dictator, in his palace of Plaza Verde, in Santa Barbara city, gave a lunch to some of the great of the State, the Red ministers, his son Don José, his creatures Don Livio and Don Zarzas, some merchants and English speculators and the Archbishop of Santa Barbara. At this lunch he publicly accused the prelate of using the power of the Church against the Red party. “I have my eyes everywhere, like the Almighty,” he said. “Nor can there be two supreme authorities, here or in heaven.”

To this the Archbishop replied: “There is but one supreme authority: Lucifer has always found that.”

To this Don Lopez answered: “A greater than Lucifer prepares his wings.” Having said this, in tones of threat, he rose from the banquet, told Pluma Verde to call the prelate’s carriage, and invited his other guests to come within, to watch some dancers.

Roger Weycock, who was present at this lunch, has left an account of it in his history, The Last of the Dictators, where he says that, “It made him feel that some explosion within the State was about to occur.” He wrote that evening to the English newspapers that Don Lopez had received information of a White conspiracy against him: “No names were mentioned; but all the great White families, as well as the Church, are said to be involved. It is possible that Don Lopez will be forced to take extreme measures, to end for ever the menace of White reprisals. The Whites have never forgiven and never will forgive his part in ‘the Liberal struggle’ and in the remaking of the land. The Church hates him for his establishment of secular schools: the great landowners hate him for his establishment of a commercial class which out-manœuvres them in Senate and out-votes them in Congress. This must not seem to suggest that either Church or hidalgos would go so far as to employ an assassin; but both parties of the White side control large numbers of violent, ignorant, passionate fanatics, to whom the killing of Lopez would be an act pleasing to God. What Don Lopez seems to expect is a soulèvement générale of the Whites against his government at the time of the Easter celebrations.

“Undoubtedly, with such a ruler as Don Lopez, forewarned is forearmed: we need not doubt that he has the situation well in hand.”

As it happens, another Englishman, without any bias of party or interest, saw Don Lopez on this New Year’s Day, and described him thus: “I watched Don Lopez, while I was with him, very carefully, because of the strange tales I had heard of his extravagance in building, in cedarwood, ivory and silver, etc. I had thought that these were lies or exaggerations, but I am now convinced that they are true. He has built or begun to build such buildings, but not finished them: he never finishes: he begins, then begins something grander, and then begins something new.

“All the time that I was with him some unseen musicians made music upon some Indian instruments, seemingly of some kind of strings and a rattle. It was irritating at first, then perplexing, then troublesome and exciting. I was told that he has this music always in his palace. He listened to what I had to say with attention, and said that what I wished should be done. Then, to my surprise, he said, ‘They are seeking my life. One of them was behind the gateway this afternoon. See there, you see that man passing beyond the gates? He is a murderer, paid by those Whites to kill me. My mission here is not accomplished. It is but begun. What did Jove do in heaven? He forged thunderbolts. He crushed them. But Jove was all-seeing. I, too, am becoming all-seeing. This palace may seem stone to your eyes, but it is not stone. It is all eyes, and this city is all eyes, and I see into their hearts, into their councils, into the pretence of their God. But a little while longer and the world will see that a ruler can be godlike, as in Rome.’

“I was made a little uneasy by his words and by the restless, queer manner in which he uttered them. I had seen him some years before, when I had been much struck by his air of overbearing masterfulness. That air was still on him. He looked masterful and overbearing, but there was something about him now which did not look well. His hair seemed thin and somewhat staring, his skin seemed dry and his eyes both dry and bright. Then his mouth, which had always shown an expression between a snarl and a sneer, seemed permanently caught up at one side, so as to show the teeth. Possibly it was some malformation, possibly some play of muscle, which had become habitual or fixed, but it gave the effect of a state of nerves, never (as I should imagine) quite human, that had become those of a tiger about to bite. I was suddenly reminded of one of the late busts of Nero.

“Seeing me looking through the window at the marble tank surrounding the palace fountain, he said to me, ‘What colour is the water in the fountain?’

“ ‘It looks whiteish.’

“ ‘So has my mercy to the Whites been,’ he said. ‘But let them beware or I will fill that fountain with their blood and their daughters shall come to see it play. If they call too much upon God to help them, God shall reveal Himself. If you have any White friend, tell him that. I am as patient as God. But tell them that.’

“All the time that he spoke his two great negroes stood behind his throne, each holding his sword. They were naked to the waist. People mistook them sometimes for bronzes. That disgusting creature, his son, Don José, stood at another window, killing flies. He was a languid-looking youth, sickly and vicious, with a face of exquisite features, showing neither intellect nor will, nothing but depravity. He turned to me as his father ceased speaking.

“ ‘There will be a baptism of blood,’ he said, ‘to the sound of flutes.’

“It was time at that moment for the Dictator to ride abroad. His Indians entered with his riding costume, a golden head-dress and a tunic of gold chain-mail all set about with the plumes of the scarlet-crested dill-birds.

“ ‘See,’ he said, ‘this is what they force me to wear. I, who am God, the father of this land, have to wear gold mail, lest I be assassinated. Let them see to it.’

“When he had put this on, he looked, as he always did, magnificent beyond description. I understood how it was that his Indians worshipped him as God. They decked him with a scarlet serape and led him out to his horse. It was a white stallion, which he was afterwards said to have fed with human flesh. He and his bodyguard of Indians set out at a gallop. They always galloped at this time from this fear of assassination, which had become an obsession to him. I must say that I was glad when he had gone.

“One of his two negroes, the one with the knife, said, ‘He ride the White horse; that show the Whites he ride them. He ride with spur, too: you see.’ ”

Bill Ridden was an English gentleman who comes a little into this story. In his youth he spent some years in Santa Barbara, where he made a good deal of money in the copper boom at Matoche. He was a very good friend to the Piranhas at this time (and later in the copper crisis). He was a man of strong affections; he kept in touch with his friends in Santa Barbara long after he had returned to England and settled down. He married in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ocle, a loud, fresh-coloured, robust mare of a woman, by whom, as he put it, he “sired some colts and fillies, as well as a darned pup I might have drowned.” This “pup” was his youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, born in 1869, who was not quite eighteen when this tale begins. It was at Bill Ridden’s house that Rosa Piranha spent her year in England.

This house was the Foliats, in Berkshire, where Bill’s mother’s people, the Foliats, had lived. It was a small, red-brick Queen Anne house, with a racing stable at the back and the Downs behind the racing stable. Here Bill bred steeplechasers and rode much to hounds. Bill was an ugly devil, foul-mouthed and rude, something between a publican and a horse-coper in appearance, yet strangely gentle with women and horses. He had a Judge Jeffreys manner on the bench of magistrates. He loved his daughter Bell and hated his youngest son. “If he had been a pup,” he used to say, “I could have drowned him; if he had been a trout, I could have put him back; but being this, by God, there is nothing that I can do, short of pitching him in at the deep end, to see if he’s got guts enough not to sink.”

His wife, Sarah Ridden, was fond of this son, but wished that he would be like others boys, “not always messing about with cog-wheels.” Her children had gone from her into the world, with the exception of her daughter Bell, a year older than the boy. She found life easier with the boy out of the house, “not putting my old man’s back up.” Quiet life, the Liverpool Spring Meeting and asparagus were the things she loved best; but she was a fine rider and understood horses.

Bell Ridden, the daughter, was a lovely, shy girl, worshipped by her father and mother. As she lived at home, she helped her father in the stable: she was clever with horses; the stable boys loved her: she got more out of them than Bill could. It was her instinct that sent the Lilybud to Mandarin, by which Bill got Chinese White, the horse which won him his glory.

The five older children were scattered: Polly and Sally married, Harold in a line regiment, Chilcote and Rowton in the city, in copper.

This brings us to the youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, the Hi of these pages, the lad who had not yet found what he could do. He was of the middling height and build, with brown hair, and a pleasant, freckled face, somewhat puckered at the eyes from his habit of not wearing a hat. His eyes were grey-blue, under eyebrows darker than one would expect from the eyes: his nose was a small pug nose, neatly made and set. His ears were well made and placed. His mouth was wide, pleasant, thin-lipped and firm. He was a nice-looking lad, who would have done well enough under other parents, or with none.

Being the last of the seven, he came at a time when both his parents had had enough of children, but wanted, as they said, “a filly to finish up with.” As Hi turned out to be a colt, or as Bill put it, “another of these buck pups to have about,” he was a disappointment to them from the first.

He went to the school where the other Riddens had been, he got his second eleven colours in his last summer term; but learned nothing; he was “always messing about with cog-wheels.”

In the Christmas holidays Bill called him into his “study,” where he kept two hunting horns, six long hunting-pictures by Henry Alken, seven foxes’ masks (one of them almost white, killed in the winter of the great frost), eleven crops on a rack, three small oil portraits of Moonbird, Sirocco and Peter, much tobacco of all sorts, and many bottles of liqueur, made by himself.

“Now, Highworth,” he said, “you’ve come to an age now when you’ve got to decide what to do. You’ve had a first-rate education; at least, if you haven’t, it’s your own fault, I know it’s cost enough. Now what are you going to be? What do you want to do?”

“Well, sir, as you know, I’ve always wanted to be an engineer.”

“I’ve already gone into that, boy. I thought you knew my mind on that point once for all. But it’s the kind of answer I expected from this last report of yours. You waste your time at an expensive public school messing with toy engines with that young maniac you persuaded us to invite here, and then say you want to be an engineer. A nice thing it would be for your mother and sister to see you a ... mechanic doing the drains with a spanner. By God, boy, you’ve got a fine sense of pride, I don’t think.”

Hi said that engineering was a fine profession and that lots of people went in for it.

“What do you know about its being a fine profession?”

“Because it gives men all sorts of power, sir.”

“Power be damned, boy. Power to stink of paraffin whenever they go out to dinner; though that must be seldom, even now, I’m glad to think.”

“Sir James Russel was a fine man, sir; and so was William Horrocks, who made the Gartishan Dam.”

“Sir James Russel may have been God Almighty, for all I know or care; I never heard of him; but William Horrocks I do know, or at least know of, for his uncle was old John Horrocks, the mealman down at Kill Hill, and a dirtier, old, snuffy scoundrel I never saw out of an almshouse.”

“I don’t know what his uncle was, sir.”

“No, boy, but if you will let me say so, the point is, that I do.”

“Yes, sir, but I am talking of William Horrocks.”

“I think I understand as much. I am merely pointing out to you, in the teeth of a great deal of interruption, that your hero was a man whom no one here would touch with a barge-pole or have inside his house.”

“Sir, a man ought not to be judged by what his uncle is, but by what he is in himself.”

“A man is judged by what his uncle is. In this country, thank God, having respectable relations counts for a good deal, and so it should. You’re a Ridden and a Foliat, and I’m not going to have you messing an honoured name with wheel-grease because you’ve read some damned subversive rag which you’ve neither the sense to drop nor the wit to judge. There are some things which a man can do and keep his self-respect and be asked out to dinner, but going round with a spanner isn’t one of them.”

“I don’t ask to go round with a spanner, sir, nor to be asked out to dinner.”

“What do you ask, then?”

“I would like to learn engineering, sir, because I’ve always enjoyed engines and the application of power, and that sort of thing.”

“What do you call that but going round with a spanner? And how do you propose to learn engineering?”

“I hoped, sir, that you would let me go to an engineering works.”

“Engineering works be damned.”

“I don’t see it, sir. It’s the thing I should do best.”

“Well, I do see it, sir, and it’s the thing I won’t have.”

“But why not, sir? I should work at it. I shouldn’t disgrace you.”

“Your notions of disgrace aren’t mine. Your notions of disgrace are the sort of damned sentiment that will wreck this country and all that’s in it.”

“I don’t see why, sir. I don’t want to argue with you, sir; but it is important to me: what I am to do all my life.”

“It is equally important to me that my son should not make a mistaken choice.”

“But what a man most wants to do, sir, can’t be a mistaken choice.”

“You’re not a man; but a damned young ass. That being so, and it is so, it’s for me to decide. I’ve got to supply the money whatever you do; I suppose you won’t deny that.”

“I was wondering, sir, whether you would advance to me Aunt Melloney’s money, that I’m to have when I’m of age, and let me pay for myself.”

“Pay what for yourself?”

“The fees or premiums, sir, for going through the shops.”

“So that’s what the fellow meant, was it? Now I know. ‘The shops,’ he said. There was a drunken engineer at Newmarket, who said, ‘Let the gentleman keep clear of the shops.’ He was drunk when he said it; but that’s what he meant; now I know; and he showed a fine sense of the situation.”

“Would you advance me the money, sir?”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort. These engineers and fellows are a gang I will not tolerate. They defile God’s country. They’ve already spoiled the hunting, and the racing’s following as fast as it can go. If you’d been a boy with any guts, instead of clockwork, you’d have been glad, I should have thought, to have been at home here, and borne a hand in the stable. Breeding is about the last thing this poor country’s got in these damned days. We’ve still got horses, thank God. We don’t depend on a traction-engine gang, doing a tenth of the work for double the money. Why don’t you take off your coat and come into the stable? It’s a needed job; a pleasant job; and a gentleman’s job, what’s more. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, sir; but I’m not very good at horses. Besides, you’ve got Bell in the stables. I should only be in the way.”

“Ashamed of working with your sister, are you?”

“No, sir; but Bell wouldn’t want me there, and you’d always be swearing at me.”

“Damme,” Bill said, “there are things in you boys that would make any father swear. You go to a prep. school for three years, then to a public school for five years, then you ask to be kept for another seven while you learn a profession, and by God, when you’ve learnt it, you can’t make a living at it. I’ve been talking to your mother about this, as well as to Rosa Piranha before she sailed. You’ll not go back to school, that I’m resolved on, after this last report. You’ll stay here a week or two to get some clothes, and then you’ll do what I did. You’ll go to Santa Barbara and see if you can keep your head above water by your own hands. If you can, well and good. You will have letters to people; a lot better people than I ever had; and you will have time given you to look about you. You ought to be able to make good; I don’t say in copper, that is over, but in a new land there are new things and new opportunities. There are always sugar, tobacco and ranching; there should be timber, cocoa, piacaba, countless things. As I said, you ought to be able to make good. If you can’t, it will be your own lookout. You’ve got to paddle your own canoe, like any other youngest son. Now I’m not going to have any argument about the superior beauties of cog-wheels. I’ve written to people and written about your ticket. Since you won’t work in the stable here and have no choice of your own, except a damned dirty falallery which I won’t have, you’ll go to Santa Barbara. You may count yourself more than lucky to have the chance. Very few youngest sons ever get into the sun at all, but stink in a rotten town, by God, where even the horses puke at the air they breathe.

“You turn up your nose, do you? I wish I was going to Santa Barbara to have my time again. You can turn up your nose as much as you like, but that’s what you’ll do, so make up your mind to it. When you’ve seen the place you’ll thank me for having sent you there. When you’ve been there a few days you’ll thank your stars for your luck.”

Hi did not answer his father, knowing that thumbs were down. His heart sank at the thought of the foreign country, yet leaped again at the thought of liberty from school and life beginning. He had still one little ray of hope, which his mother extinguished.

“Your father’s got his back up,” she said. “Between you and me, Hi, he has had a bad year. Newmarket was nearly a finisher. So be a good old sport and go; there’s a dear. There’s far more scope there than here; everybody says so. Besides, your Aunt Melloney’s money went into Hicks’s. I don’t know that you could get it out, even if your father agreed.”

*******

There was a brief delay, in spite of Bill’s speed, because the first letter from Rosa Piranha brought the news that Santa Barbara politics were somewhat unsettled. Bill had to pause to make some enquiries, through his sons in the copper business and his friends in the United Sugar Company. “It’s probably nothing much,” he said, when he had heard the reports. “These Reds and Whites are always at each other, in the way these foreigners always are. It won’t concern the boy, if he’s got the sense to keep out of it. Let him go and learn sense in the only school for it.” After this, there was a second brief delay for farewell visits to relations. When Hi returned from these, his clothes, of drill and flannel, were ready in their ant-proof tin trunks. Towards the end of February, he sailed for Santa Barbara city in the Recalde.

During the week in which he left home, Don José, the son of the Dictator, caused his favourite, Lucas Zanja, to be beheaded in the ivory room, “so that he might enjoy,” as he said, “the beauty of the blood upon the ivory.” Don Lopez’ papers called this a

DASTARDLY ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE

OUR PRESIDENT’S SON

and added in smaller type