Chapter One

Hidden Valley Ranch, also known as Rancho Arroyo Escondido to true initiates, was a unique place in many ways. It had been in the family of its current mistress, Estela Hidalgo Franklin, since nearly a century before the Mexican War whose settlement brought California into the United States around 1850. Back then, the ten-mile-long arroyo arising from a year-round spring producing a hundred gallons a minute of the sweetest water imaginable was a miraculous oasis in the otherwise dry Central California hills inland of the decaying mission of San Luis Obispo. The Hidalgo family had the land in grant from the Governor of Mexico since just before the American Revolution. This happened as a payback for the services of the original Patron against the local bandidos who had been haunting the nearby stretch of El Camino Real until subjected to frontier justice (ie, summary hangings) by the intrepid settler. He had accepted the grant with some reluctance, in that it was a good day's ride from the nearest outpost of civilization. But the unique quality of the land won him over, as it had every family member who had accepted the legacy over the next dozen generations.

It was called Rancho Arroyo Escondido for the first century of its existence, and for good reason. If a traveler didn't know exactly where to look, the narrow entrance to the mouth of the valley was all too easy to miss, even though it contained the only perpetually flowing creek within twenty miles. This hiddenness had everything to do with California geology, as the San Andreas Fault cut sharply across the mouth of the creek, forcing it into a narrow canyon between hundred foot cliffs of the rocky fault scarp. Once the Rio emerged into the broad sandy wash leading towards the Pacific, its waters rapidly disappeared into the gravel expanse to flow underground to the aquifer (or perhaps the sea itself nearly a hundred miles away). Thus, it was little wonder that no one realized what an earthly paradise was contained in the nominally paltry grant of twenty square miles of apparently desolate territory to Hector Hidalgo for his yeomanlike decimation of the ragged highwaymen that had been plaguing the infrequent travelers up the Camino.

But once the narrow pathway through the gorge had been negotiated for a sometimes harrowing half mile (if the river was high), the astonished visitor would round a rocky corner to behold a verdant gently sloping mile-wide valley nearly ten miles long, with fertile meadows next to a meandering willow and laurel lined creek. The original Casa Grande had been built on a slight knoll overlooking the entrance from the East, where a musket-wielding sharp shooter with a spare rifle and a loader could hold off a small army indefinitely (and had, on more than one occasion). The great house's adobe construction mirrored that of