At times her father would ask the nurse, "How is Juanetta?" and, at the reply, "The child is well," he would forget that every day she was growing less and less an infant, and needed more and more a mother's care.
Thus things went on until she was eleven years old. She was very tall of her age, with her long black hair hanging over her graceful shoulders, her rich olive complexion deepened by the glowing sun, and her dark eyes, fawn-like in their softness and timidity, she looked like a beautiful child of the wild wood.
Her father would look at her, and say: "The girl is a perfect savage; she must be placed at a convent; the Sisters would soon make a lady of her, for the De Strada blood is rich in her veins;" and then he would smile proudly at her rare beauty.
The summer following brought a change to Don Carlos. Till then he had been prosperous; but there had been no rain, and the grass withered and dried up until the famished cattle died by thousands, and the hills, once covered with animal life, were left bare and desolate. Don Carlos, who lost heavily, became more than ever absorbed in business cares, and again the child was forgotten.
Juanetta saw that her father was greatly troubled, and she thought if she could only find some of the treasures hidden so many years ago by the great Chief of the Tulies, she could make him rich again, and he would smile upon her as he sometimes used to before the cattle died—since then, his dark frowning face had frightened her.
She had often listened to her old nurse, sitting by the clear lake, as she told her how, years ago, a great ship came to Los Angelos filled with fair men, with long flowing beards, golden in the sunshine, and eyes like the blue summer sky, and how there was one among them, taller and nobler than all the rest, who was their Chief.
For days they rode about the country, making their camp by the Lake of the Tulies, and tradition said they brought beautiful shining stones, that glistened like the stars of night, and great sacks of yellow gold to the lake, and buried them there at midnight; then went away in the great ship over the water.
They were seen by an old Indian woman, who was gathering magic herbs, but from that moment it seemed as though a fearful spell had fallen upon her, for when she tried to tell the story, just as she was about to speak of the place where the treasure was hidden, her tongue would cleave to the roof of her mouth, and she could not utter a word; and when she attempted to go to the spot where it was buried, her feet would fasten themselves to the ground, and she could not move. From that night she seemed bewitched, and she soon died, taking the secret of the buried treasure with her to the unknown spirit land.
Juanetta had nothing to do but listen to the wild Indian lore, and roam through the woods and down by the Lake of the Tulies; and it was not strange that with her poetic temperament, she reveled in the marvelous, till it seemed to her the natural and the real.