Two boys ride out of a California mission ranch in the last years of Mexican rule, hunted by a lieutenant who wants them for the army, and cross the coast ranges with a price on their heads. Atherton grew up in that California and used the recollections of the old Spanish families before they were lost. It is her only book for boys, and it is franker about the conquest than most adult novels of its date. Fifty-four plates, among them Remington's A Dash for the Timber and Whitefield's Montreal from the Mount Royal, carry the wide western horizon the runaways ride toward.