[CHAPTER XIII]
THE MILLION DOLLAR RANCH GIRL
One summer day a beautiful Mexican girl was sitting motionless on horseback gazing across the ranch of which her adopted father was the owner, when a young man, tall, of good appearance, and pleasant address, came up and respectfully raised his cap. The girl instantly smiled a welcome, for in that remote region strangers were few, and it was the custom of the country to welcome and entertain them. But this young man had no desire to be taken to the ranch house. He wanted to have a chat with the beauty, and as he was handsome and ingratiating the impressionable girl readily consented to give him half an hour of her time.
James Addison Beavis, for that was the stranger's name, told a wonderful story to the dark-eyed damsel, who listened as if spellbound.
"This is not the first time I have seen you," he said in a pleasing, confidential manner that was delightfully intimate and brotherly. "I have often watched you galloping about on the ranch, but I wanted to be quite certain that you are the person I have been looking for for years before I spoke."
"Looking for me!" she exclaimed in wonderment.
"Yes," he said quickly, and dropped his voice. "Do you know that your real name is Peralta, and that with my help you will soon be the owner of lands in Arizona and New Mexico worth one hundred million dollars?"
She gasped. Could it be possible? She was half-Spanish, half-Mexican, and therefore hot-tempered and romantic, and it was easy for her to persuade herself that she was something better than the adopted daughter of a Mexican ranch-owner, who had taken her into his house out of pure charity. Dolores felt that she had been meant for something better.
Beavis, who was a cute man of the world, and possessed of an eloquent tongue, sat beside her on the trunk of an old tree, and explained why it was that a huge tract of land was awaiting an owner, land which would make its eventual possessor a multi-millionaire. He said that hundreds of years ago a Spanish king had made over the rich lands of Peralta to a certain Spanish nobleman, whose descendants had enjoyed the revenues, until, owing to various misfortunes, there seemed to be a lack of heirs. The property had then been taken charge of by the United States Government, and its revenues had been, and still were, accumulating, but he had been inspired to make an independent research, and he could now prove by legal documents that Dolores was the only living descendant of the last owner of the huge estate. He promised to produce the necessary birth and marriage certificates which established his contention that Dolores Peralta was the legal proprietor of an estate half the size of Great Britain.
Dolores herself had only a vague idea as to how she had become an orphan, but the fascinating and persuasive Beavis had the whole story at his finger-ends. He declared that when she was an infant her parents had been drowned whilst crossing a river, and that Dolores had been rescued by an Indian squaw, who had later on abandoned her. After passing through various hands she had come into the keeping of the Mexican who had adopted her, and with him she had spent the last fifteen of her eighteen years, passing as his daughter, and generally understood to be his heir.
But now that she was told by Beavis that she had only to trust her affairs to him to become worth £20,000,000, the ranch seemed but a poor and sordid affair and unworthy of her. She wanted to obtain her rights and to take her place in society, and the more she listened to Beavis the more inclined she was to give him not only charge of her affairs, but also the keeping of her heart. For Beavis was an expert talker, and Dolores was not the only victim of his honeyed tongue.