It was the last week of January when the Administrator first called his fellow landowners together to consider what could be done. They gathered in his sitting room. Graybeards they were, the most of them, and rich in the wisdom of many years, as well as in landed possessions.
Long they smoked the cigarros of the provident Administrator and sipped his rare wines, the while exchanging polite remarks on the nothings of the day. This was their way while waiting to begin attack on some weighty subject. Finally Señor Mendoza ordered the serving peons to bring on his choicest cognac, a select French product.
"The Administrator is vastly disturbed over this rainless winter," whispered Don Pedro Zelaya, of the rancho San Lorenzo, to Don Fulgencio Higuera, of the rancho Aguas Calientes. "Paris knows no better cognac than I see here. I divine his anxiety by the quality of his liquors. Last year when renegade Indians threatened he furnished our meeting here with a Portuguese cordial mild as milk. Much as he fears the prowling Yoscolo and Stanislaus, he measures them not high in comparison with this drought."
The leonine-appearing Señor Higuera squared his yard-wide shoulders to attention as he sat in his high-backed chair. His eye ran slowly over the slender and dapper Señor Zelaya. A trace of humor stole into his eyes, then over his bearded face. "Brandy in the head seldom lends swiftness to the feet. Is it not so?"
Pedro Zelaya was the swiftest foot-racer in the province of California. He was also a lover of good eating and drinking. When training for his famous races he must forego the delicacies of his French cook, and the bouquet of imported wine, which deprivations he relished not over well.
"A thimbleful of brandy is given even to a bull-fighter before the contest," replied Señor Zelaya, bowing politely and suavely smiling.
Years before the doughty Señor Higuera had seized and held by the horns an infuriated bull which, maddened by eating the dreaded rattleweed, a venomous plant then common, had left the herd and rushed up on Higuera, who was standing, with his wife and children, in the open before the courtyard of his hacienda house.
The peons served the cognac in long, slender-stemmed goblets. Señor Mendoza raised his glass, looked for a moment at the amber liquid, then sipped it gently. Lowering the glass he glanced around at the assembled company. Each man, following the example of the host, tasted the contents of his own glass, and then allowed his eyes to rest on the Señor Administrator.
This process was repeated once, twice, three times, until each had finished his beverage.
Señor Mendoza's aquiline features, garnished by mustache and imperial, and embellished by a waving iron-gray hair, fell into severer mold.