Mexico, he recalled to the boys, used to own California. The best Spanish families lived there on grants of land from the King of Spain which had been passed down from generation to generation.
The estates were huge, and the Dons lived on them pretty much absolute masters of their Indians and peons. It was an easy, gracious sort of existence, without hurry, without the bustle and haste introduced later by the Americans with their multifarious machinery. If the Don stirred abroad, he rode a mount jingling with fanciful and costly trappings, and he himself dressed like a cavalier of old. At night his hacienda would resound to music while the gentry from miles around danced and their carriages and horses filled his ample stables and stood under the drooping pepper trees.
Then came the gold seekers scarring the hills of the northern part of the state with their mines.
And in their wake came the farmers and ranchers with their new-fangled farm machinery. They took the rich valleys where the countless herds of the Dons had roamed in the past, and began making that marvelous soil produce crops of wheat. The old order with its lazy ways could not survive before the new day with its energy and modern business methods. The Dons went to the wall.
“To-day,” said Harlan, in his drawling southern voice, “there are some of their descendants left. But they cut little figure in the present-day California.”
Jack spoke up with unexpected heat.
“Well, I think it’s a shame,” he said. “I know that we are supposed to believe our own ways of living are the best, but I, for one, wish California had stayed the way it was.”
Bob leaned toward Frank and assumed a confidential tone.
“He’s thinking of Senorita Rafaela,” he said.
She was the daughter of Don Fernandez y Calomares, a wealthy Mexican of pure Castilian descent living in a palace in northern Mexico. The Don was leader of the Mexican rebels who, as related in The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border, had captured Mr. Hampton. Jack and Bob in the latter’s airplane had gone to the rescue, and the young Spanish girl had given them valuable aid.