EXCEPT for the help of Carmena's presence by her side, Ramona would never have had courage to remain during this long hour in the . As it was, she twice resolved to bear the no longer, and made a movement to go. The chance of Alessandro's encountering at Hartsel's the men sent in pursuit of him and of Baba, in her thoughts into a more and more danger each moment she reflected upon it. It was a most unfortunate suggestion for Alessandro to have made. Her excited fancy went on and on, picturing the possible scenes which might be going on almost within stone's-throw of where she was sitting, helpless, in the midnight darkness,—Alessandro seized, tied, treated as a thief, and she, Ramona, not there to him, to terrify the men into letting him go. She could not bear it; she would ride boldly to Hartsel's door. But when she made a motion as if she would go, and said in the soft Spanish, of which Carmena knew no word, but which yet somehow conveyed Ramona's meaning, “I must go! It is too long! I cannot wait here!” Carmena had clasped her hand tighter, and said in the San Luiseno tongue, of which Ramona knew no word, but which yet somehow conveyed Carmena's meaning, “O beloved lady, you must not go! Waiting is the only safe thing. Alessandro said, to wait here. He will come.” The word “Alessandro” was plain. Yes, Alessandro had said, wait; Carmena was right. She would obey, but it was a fearful . It was strange how Ramona, who felt herself preternaturally brave, afraid of nothing, so long as Alessandro was by her side, became and wretched the instant he was lost to her sight. When she first heard his steps coming, she quivered with terror lest they might not be his. The next second she knew; and with a glad cry, “Alessandro! Alessandro!” she bounded to him, dropping Baba's .
Sighing gently, Carmena picked up the reins, and stood still, holding the horse, while the lovers clasped each other with breathless words. “How she loves Alessandro!” thought the widowed Carmena. “Will they leave him alive to stay with her? It is better not to love!” But there was no bitter envy in her mind for the two who were thus blest while she went . All of Pablo's people had great affection for Alessandro. They had looked forward to his being over them in his father's place. They knew his goodness, and were proud of his superiority to themselves.
“Majella, you tremble,” said Alessandro, as he threw his arms around her. “You have feared! Yet you were not alone.” He glanced at Carmena's motionless figure, by Baba.
“No, not alone, dear Alessandro, but it was so long!” replied Ramona; “and I feared the men had taken you, as you feared. Was there any one there?”
“No! No one has heard anything. All was well. They thought I had just come from Pachanga,” he answered.
“Except for Carmena, I should have ridden after you half an hour ago,” continued Ramona. “But she told me to wait.”
“She told you!” repeated Alessandro. “How did you understand her speech?”
“I do not know. Was it not a strange thing?” replied Ramona. “She in your tongue, but I thought I understood her, Ask her if she did not say that I must not go; that it was safer to wait; that you had so said, and you would soon come.”
Alessandro repeated the words to Carmena. “Did you say that?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered Carmena.
“You see, then, she has understood the Luiseno words,” he said delightedly. “She is one of us.”
“Yes,” said Carmena, gravely, “she is one of us.” Then, taking Ramona's hand in both of her own for farewell, she repeated, in a tone as of prophecy, “One of us, Alessandro! one of us!” And as she gazed after their retreating forms, almost immediately swallowed and lost in the darkness, she repeated the words again to herself,—“One of us! one of us! Sorrow came to me; she rides to meet it!” and she crept back to her husband's grave, and threw herself down, to watch till the dawn.
The road which Alessandro would naturally have taken would carry them directly by Hartsel's again. But, wishing to avoid all risk of meeting or being seen by any of the men on the place, he struck well out to the north, to make a wide circuit around it. This brought them past the place where Antonio's house had stood. Here Alessandro halted, and putting his hand on Baba's , walked the horses close to the pile of ruined walls. “This was Antonio's house, Majella,” he whispered. “I wish every house in the valley had been pulled down like this. Old Juana was right. The Americans are living in my father's house, Majella,” he went on, his whisper growing thick with rage. “That was what kept me so long. I was looking in at the window at them eating their supper. I thought I should go mad, Majella. If I had had my gun, I should have shot them all dead!”
An almost inarticulate was Ramona's first reply to this. “Living in your house!” she said. “You saw them?”
“Yes,” he said; “the man, and his wife, and two little children; and the man came out, with his gun, on the doorstep, and fired it. They thought they heard something moving, and it might be an Indian; so he fired. That was what kept me so long.”
Just at this moment Baba tripped over some small object on the ground. A few steps farther, and he tripped again. “There is something caught round his foot, Alessandro,” said Ramona. “It keeps moving.”
Alessandro jumped off his horse, and kneeling down, exclaimed, “It's a stake,—and the fastened to it. Holy ! what—” The rest of his ejaculation was inaudible. The next Ramona knew, he had run swiftly on, a rod or two. Baba had followed, and Capitan and the ; and there stood a splendid black horse, as big as Baba, and Alessandro talking under his breath to him, and clapping both his hands over the horse's nose, to stop him, as often as he began whinnying; and it seemed hardly a second more before he had his saddle off the poor little Indian pony, and striking it sharply on its sides had turned it free, had saddled the black horse, and leaping on his back, said, with almost a in his voice: “My Majella, it is Benito, my own Benito. Now the saints indeed have helped us! Oh, the , the idiot, to stake out Benito with such a stake as that! A rabbit had pulled it up. Now, my Majella, we will ! Faster! faster! I will not breathe easy till we are out of this cursed valley. When we are once in the Santa Margarita Canon, I know a trail they will never find!”
Like the wind Benito,—Alessandro half lying on his back, stroking his forehead, whispering to him, the horse snorting with joy: which were gladder of the two, horse or man, could not be said. And neck by neck with Benito came Baba. How the ground flew away under their feet! This was companionship, indeed, of Baba's best powers. Not in all the California could be found two superber horses than Benito and Baba. A wild, almost reckless joy took possession of Alessandro. Ramona was half terrified as she heard him still talking, talking to Benito. For an hour they did not draw rein. Both Benito and Alessandro knew every inch of the ground. Then, just as they had into the deepest part of the canon, Alessandro suddenly sharply to the left, and began climbing the precipitous wall. “Can you follow, dearest Majella?” he cried.
“Do you suppose Benito can do anything that Baba cannot?” she retorted, pressing on closely.
But Baba did not like it. Except for the of Benito ahead, he would have given Ramona trouble.
“There is only a little, rough like this, dear,” called Alessandro, as he leaped a fallen tree, and halted to see how Baba took it. “Good!” he cried, as Baba jumped it like a deer. “Good! Majella! We have got the two best horses in the country. You'll see they are alike, when daylight comes. I have often wondered they were so much alike. They would go together splendidly.”
After a few rods of this steep climbing they came out on the top of the canon's south wall, in a oak forest comparatively free from underbrush. “Now,” said Alessandro, “I can go from here to San Diego by paths that no white man knows. We will be near there before daylight.”
Already the keen salt air of the ocean their faces. Ramona drank it in with delight. “I taste salt in the air, Alessandro,” she cried.
“Yes, it is the sea,” he said. “This canon leads straight to the sea. I wish we could go by the shore, Majella. It is beautiful there. When it is still, the waves come as gently to the land as if they were in play; and you can ride along with your horse's feet in the water, and the green cliffs almost over your head; and the air off the water is like wine in one's head.”
“Cannot we go there?” she said . “Would it not be safe?”
“I dare not,” he answered regretfully. “Not now, Majella; for on the shore-way, at all times, there are people going and coming.”
“Some other time, Alessandro, we can come, after we are married, and there is no danger?” she asked.
“Yes, Majella,” he replied; but as he spoke the words, he thought, “Will a time ever come when there will be no danger?”
The shore of the Pacific Ocean for many miles north of San Diego is a succession of rounding , walling the mouths of canons, down many of which small streams make to the sea. These canons are green and rich at bottom, and filled with trees, chiefly oak. Beginning as little more than in the ground, they deepen and widen, till at their mouths they have a beautiful crescent of shining beach from an eighth to a quarter of a mile long, The one which Alessandro hoped to reach before morning was not a dozen miles from the old town of San Diego, and commanded a fine view of the outer harbor. When he was last in it, he had found it a nearly impenetrable of young oak-trees. Here, he believed, they could hide safely all day, and after nightfall ride into San Diego, be married at the priest's house, and push on to San Pasquale that same night. “All day, in that canon, Majella can look at the sea,” he thought; “but I will not tell her now, for it may be the trees have been cut down, and we cannot be so close to the shore.”
It was near sunrise when they reached the place. The trees had not been cut down. Their tops, seen from above, looked like a solid bed of filling in the canon bottom. The sky and the sea were both red. As Ramona looked down into this soft green pathway, it seemed, leading out to the wide and sparkling sea, she thought Alessandro had brought her into a fairy-land.
“What a beautiful world!” she cried; and riding up so close to Benito that she could lay her hand on Alessandro's, she said solemnly: “Do you not think we ought to be very happy, Alessandro, in such a beautiful world as this? Do you think we might sing our sunrise here?”
Alessandro glanced around. They were alone on the breezy open; it was not yet full dawn; great masses of were floating upward from the hills behind San Diego. The light was still burning in the light-house on the walling the inner harbor, but in a few moments more it would be day. “No, Majella, not here.” he said. “We must not stay. As soon as the sun rises, a man or a horse may be seen on this upper coast-line as far as eye can reach. We must be among the trees with all the speed we can make.”
It was like a house with a high, thick roof of oak tree-tops, the shelter they found. No sun it; a tiny of water still remained, and some grass along its was still green, spite of the long drought,—a meal for Baba and Benito, but they ate it with in each other's company.
“They like each other, those two,” said Ramona, laughing, as she watched them. “They will be friends.”
“Ay,” said Alessandro, also smiling. “Horses are friends, like men, and can hate each other, like men, too. Benito would never see Antonio's , the little yellow one, that he did not let fly his heels at her; and she was as afraid, at sight of him, as a cat is at a dog. Many a time I have laughed to see it.”
“Know you the priest at San Diego?” asked Ramona.
“Not well,” replied Alessandro. “He came seldom to Temecula when I was there; but he is a friend of Indians. I know he came with the men from San Diego at the time when there was fighting, and the whites were in great terror; and they said, except for Father Gaspara's words, there would not have been a white man left alive in Pala. My father had sent all his people away before that fight began. He knew it was coming, but he would have nothing to do with it. He said the Indians were all crazy. It was no use. They would only be killed themselves. That is the worst thing, my Majella. The stupid Indians fight and kill, and then what can we do? The white men think we are all the same. Father Gaspara has never been to Pala, I heard, since that time. There goes there now the San Juan Capistrano priest. He is a bad man. He takes money from the starving poor.”
“A priest!” ejaculated Ramona, horror-stricken.
“Ay! a priest!” replied Alessandro. “They are not all good,—not like Father Salvierderra.”
“Oh, if we could but have gone to Father Salvierderra!” exclaimed Ramona, involuntarily.
Alessandro looked . “It would have been much more danger, Majella,” he said, “and I had no knowledge of work I could do there.”
His look made Ramona at once. How cruel to lay one feather-weight of additional burden on this loving man. “Oh, this is much better, really,” she said. “I did not mean what I said. It is only because I have always loved Father Salvierderra so. And the Senora will tell him what is not true. Could we not send him a letter, Alessandro?”
“There is a Santa Inez Indian I know,” replied Alessandro, “who comes down with nets to sell, sometimes, to Temecula. I know not if he goes to San Diego. If I could get speech with him, he would go up from Santa Inez to Santa Barbara for me, I am sure; for once he lay in my father's house, sick for many weeks, and I nursed him, and since then he is always begging me to take a net from him, whenever he comes. It is not two days from Santa Inez to Santa Barbara.”
“I wish it were the olden time now, Alessandro,” sighed Ramona, “when the men like Father Salvierderra had all the country. Then there would be work for all, at the Missions. The Senora says the Missions were like palaces, and that there were thousands of Indians in every one of them; thousands and thousands, all working so happy and peaceful.”
“The Senora does not know all that happened at the Missions,” replied Alessandro. “My father says that at some of them were dreadful things, when bad men had power. Never any such things at San Luis Rey. Father Peyri was like a father to all his Indians. My father says that they would all of them lie down in a fire for him, if he had commanded it. And when he went away, to leave the country, when his heart was broken, and the Mission all ruined, he had to fly by night, Majella, just as you and I have done; for if the Indians had known it, they would have risen up to keep him. There was a ship here in San Diego harbor, to sail for Mexico, and the Father made up his mind to go in it; and it was over this same road we have come, my Majella, that he rode, and by night; and my father was the only one he trusted to know it. My father came with him; they took the swiftest horses, and they rode all night, and my father carried in front of him, on the horse, a box of the sacred things of the altar, very heavy. And many a time my father has told me the story, how they got to San Diego at daybreak, and the Father was rowed out to the ship in a little boat; and not much more than on board was he, my father standing like one dead on the shore, watching, he loved him so, when, lo! he heard a great crying, and shouting, and of horses' feet, and there came down to the water's edge three hundred of the Indians from San Luis Rey, who had found out that the Father had gone to San Diego to take ship, and they had ridden all night on his track, to fetch him back. And when my father to the ship, and told them he was already on board, they set up a cry fit to bring the very sky down; and some of them flung themselves into the sea, and swam out to the ship, and cried and begged to be taken on board and go with him. And Father Peyri stood on the deck, them, and saying farewell, with the tears running on his face; ............