Isidro

XVI

IN WHICH ISIDRO COMES TO A CONCLUSION

THE place from which Isidro and the tracker looked on Las Chimineas was a thinly wooded hill, its coastward slope in the spaces between the pine boles well grown with stiff-stemmed manzanita and lilac now waning in its bloom. It lay directly opposite the head of the gorge, and the track ran around it, and over a low barrier running transversely of the rift that turned it sharply to the east. Beyond the barrier, which was clothed with wide low oaks, the gray chimneys began to rise, clustered thickly together. They parted in files, leaving the meadow space clear, and met in a jumble at the head of the cañon. The hill on which the two men stood butted into the left wall of the cañon, and made easy passage to a point above the crowd of chimneys. The whole trend of the cañon and encompassing hills was south of southeast. The wood marched up to the crest of the west wall, leapt over, began again midway of the opposite slope, which was higher, and went on in an orderly and constant growth far east and south. On the down throw of the bare west wall, where the chimneys piled high and disjointed, Arnaldo judged the renegade must be if he were to be found at all.

Las Chimineas lay gray and lonely in the brooding light, squirrels chattered and leapt, a striped snake slid by them in the grass, jays screamed and quarreled in the oaks. Presently Arnaldo held up his hand; the two men had proceeded almost without sound, for the habit of his trade was upon one, and heavily on the other the desire of slaughter. A jay steering a flight across the cañon veered suddenly near a group of tall chimneys; another, watching, wheeled toward the point, and avoided it with a volley of shrill abuse. Rabbits that ran in the meadow halted and pricked up their ears.

“We have him,” said the tracker. He dropped from his horse, and began to work back on the trail to put the brow of the hill between them and Las Chimineas. Isidro was no fool to stay the action with question; he took off his spurs, which clinked softly on the stones, and did as he saw the tracker do. In a ring of pines, screened by lilac, they made the horses fast.

“Go back and watch,” said Arnaldo; “ when you hear three quail calls, low and quick, and in the same key, I have news for you.”

He pressed back against the thicket as he spoke; it seemed to spring aside to give him room; there was a little trepidation in the branches, a twig snapped, a bird started, the warm silence of the wood closed in again. Isidro looked at the places where the man might be supposed to be, but saw not so much as the glint of the sun on bare skin. He did not do quite as he had been told; he went back to the hill and over it, and by dint of all the Indian craft he knew, pressed down to the lower barrier and then up to the top of that, until he looked full on the meadow of Las Chimineas. In a secret place where the grass grew tall against the rooted rocks he saw a pinto pony a-graze at the end of a stake rope. This and the smooth spread of open meadow gave him a hint and food for thought that lasted until he judged the tracker might have returned. He took a longer way back to the horses, looking for the tracks by which Mascado had presumably come into the meadow, and heard the signal given twice from the thicket on the hill before he came quite up to it.

“ Well ? ” he said. Arnaldo the tracker was the man for such business; he handed you up the facts without discursiveness, and spared comment until the adventure was achieved.

“Mascado,” he said. “He harbors below that one of the chimneys that has a red stain of moss upon it. The boy lies bound to a log of oak. Mascado mends the fire and goes about to cook a rabbit.”

“Has he arms?”

“He has a knife about his neck, but neither bow nor spear. The rabbit was caught in a snare; I saw it hanging on a rock.”

“Good,” said Isidro; “I have seen his horse; the meadow is between it and him. Good again. Look you, Arnaldo, this is my game. Take this,” — it was a pistol from his saddle holster, — “and go back to the chimneys and watch until I have called Mascado out to me. If he so much as lays a hand on the lad, kill; but if not, then do as I say. When Mascado has come out to me in the meadow, unbind the boy, and bring him here. If I happen to any mischance, take him safely to the Father President.”

“What will you do?”

“Do? Ah, there is much to do. You shall see.” Isidro was coiling and recoiling the riata which hung at every saddlebow in those days of Alta California. He ran it through his hands and rehung it to his satisfaction. The tracker observed him with a dawning grin.

“Mascado knows a trick of a rope,” he said.

“I also,” said Escobar; “now go.”

He waited in the scrub until he judged the Indian close in to Mascado’s cover; then, mounting, he drew cautiously around the end of the hill and rode freely into the meadow. He sat lightly in the saddle, and swung the noose of his riata with irrepressible cheerfulness. Escobar was his own man again.

“Oh, ho, Mascado,” he cried; “come out to me!” His voice, high and pleasant, went searchingly through the rocks. The jays heard it, and replied with screaming; the squirrels heard, and stayed in midmotion as gray and quiet as the boulders; El Zarzo heard it, and sat up thanking God for a miracle. She knew the voice, and knew at once that in her heart she had always expected he would come.

“Oh-ee! Mascado, come out to me!” Isidro rode up and down in the meadow swinging his rope. Mascado’s muscles sprang to attention; he had his knife at the girl’s throat; it was to say in its own fashion that Escobar should not have her. She looked up and smiled.

“Do,” she breathed, “for after that he will but kill you the quicker.”

Arnaldo judged it time for interference. He dropped like a cat from the rocks, his pistol cocked.

“Mascado, you dog,” he said, “the Señor Escobar calls you.”

The renegade was not without some sparks of manhood or philosophy; he stood up, dropped his knife into its sheath, dropped his arms at his sides, and went out walking straight and softly to Escobar. Isidro looked him over with some amazement, which did not, however, abate his cheerfulness.

“What is that on your breast, Mascado ? ” he said.

“Scratches, señor.”

“Sacramento! but they look to be the marks of deer’s hooves, and not a month old at that.”

The mestizo looked down at his scars with something of a smile.

“So it would seem, señor.”

“It appears, then, that we have met before.”

“So it would seem.”

“On which occasion I did you a favor and got scant thanks for it.”

Mascado had a wintry look. “For which later you did me harm enough, Señor Escobar.”

“What harm, you dog?” quoth Escobar.

Mascado’s face was bleak, but his eyes glinted. “El Zarzo,” he whispered dryly.

“Now by God and His Christ!” said Isidro, “but that word is likely to cost you dear. But I cannot kill a dog standing. Get horse, Mascado; I have heard you can throw a rope.” Isidro’s circling rawhide hummed in the air; he threw it up and kept it there by the whirling force of motion. He ran it out, and bid it follow the mestizo like a questing snake. It was an exercise in which his perfect attune of body and temper made him excellent. It had been said of him at Las Plumas that he won in such contests because he did not particularly care for honors where the eagerness of others shook the hand.

Mascado got his horse. Certainly Escobar had saved his life in the affair of the buck under the oak, but this did not mend his disposition; unquestionably Isidro had exceeded the requirements in permitting him honorable contest of a sort not uncommon in the country, but it did not lessen his hate. However, and it was much more to the purpose, the consciousness which he could hardly escape, that his private meditation did not fit very well with the circumstances, lent him a touch of shame that mitigated his skill. Vengeance burned in him sickeningly. The rogue was for murder if the chance allowed. The mestizo took pains and time with his rope, fretted to see it a little touched by the dampness of the meadow. Isidro kept his swinging to a kind of wordless tune. Arnaldo and the girl had come out of the rocks and watched them from the hill.

“Come on, Mascado, come!” cried Isidro.

Mascado came; riding at full gallop he threw the rope, dipped as he rode and slipped from his horse’s back to the belly. Escobar’s noose slipped smoothly from his shoulder; in fact, neither rope found lodgment. The sod of the meadow was wet and springy; it gave to the horses’ feet; not the best ground for trying a duello of riatas, but there was advantage to neither side. They wheeled, recoiled, and rode. At the second cast Isidro’s rope went neither far nor wide, but there was threatening in its hum. He bent backward as he threw; to Arnaldo, watching, it seemed that he went clean off his horse to avoid the flying loop that hovered a moment and settled on the horn of his saddle. It appeared that was the moment Isidro waited for; without casting off he stood with his horse at tension, and his rope, which had gone but a noose length from him, shot out from his long right arm, dropped over Mascado, and with a jerk Escobar had him from his saddleless pony. The mestizo had his feet under him in the moment of lighting; if Isidro drew in fast Mascado came faster. One arm was pinioned, but the other was free from the shoulder; he had out his knife. He came in great bounds like a cat, rising from the springy meadow; rage foamed in him like unbridled waters. His own horse, with feet spread and planted, held Escobar at the end of a taut rope. Isidro fumbled at it to cast off, but not before Mascado got in a blow above the shoulder. Isidro set spurs and set them deep with the impact of the knife. The mestizo had a moment of check as the horse sprang away from him, but the tug of the rope brought him sprawling. His body rose in the air, thudded on the sod, rose again, and the knife, struck from his hand, whirled a gleaming flight across the meadow. By this Arnaldo came running from the hill and cried out to Escobar in God’s name. The spurt of Isidro’s anger, which took him the width of the meadow, lasted no longer than the knife smart, and went out of him as the blood went, leaving him drained and faint. Arnaldo got his rope around Mascado’s legs, and so bound and disarmed drew him up to them.

“See to him,” said Isidro.

“And not to your wound, señor?”

“It will wait. It may be I have other scores to settle with this rascally halfbreed.” He turned his horse toward El Zarzo on the hill. On the way to Las Chimineas he had worked himself into a cool distaste for this meeting, but the affair with Mascado, the rage at treachery, the smart and indignity of his wound had the effect of a hiatus. He had a shock, therefore, to come face to face with the Briar, looking haggard and large-eyed, with red marks of bonds upon her wrists. The qualm of meeting warned him how dear the lad had been. Isidro trembled as he got down from his horse. They were both pale, and shook, came close and stood by each other, but did not touch.

“Has he hurt you?” cried Escobar; “ has he laid hands upon you ? If he has wronged you I shall kill him.” Ah, ah! they were both red enough now, she in a tide of maiden shame that swept up to the dark crescent of her hair and confessed her what his words implied, he with shame for her shame. Well, at any rate, the mischief was out.

“Has he hurt you, señorita?” Isidro said again more collectedly.

“He did not dare,” cried the girl.

“ He will never have the chance again,” said the young man. “I will deal with him as you wish.” But the girl had a more pressing concern.

“You bleed, señor, you are hurt,” she trembled.

“A flesh cut merely,” he said; “Arnaldo will dress it.” He meant nothing more than to reassure her, but to El Zarzo it signified the change in their relations. This month past he would have had no other do for him. She hung her head; there was no blinking the fact of his knowledge, though she did not ask him then, nor until long afterward, how he came by it. She was boyish enough to look at, lithe and slim, with hair, straight as the fine slant wires of rain, falling on either cheek below the round, firm chin. But he knew her for a maid, and found the certainty confusion enough. It was all of an hour, and that for a man of his temper was a long time, before he was cheerful and cool again. Manlike he made her pay for his aberration, — put her miles from him by an exquisite politeness, made her miserable by proffered duty, in short, brought the trappings of good breeding to serve his own wounded susceptibility.

There was no question of going on that night. The horses were fagged, the riders, too, for that matter, and Isidro needed time to consider his affairs. The shadow of the west cañon wall, that had spread in the meadow and up as far as the edge of the wood on the east while Isidro and Mascado wheeled together, had by now reached the ridge and gone on deepening and darkling through the forest. Stars came out above it low and white. A troop of does and fawns running nose to flank came out of the oaks at the end of the barrier and passed on to the lower meadow. Higher up a bobcat mother led out her young and played with them among the rocks; night hawks hurtled across the damp and musky meadow.

They lit a fire among the chimneys; three of them got little sleep. Isidro, nursing his hurt; Mascado, trussed like a fowlfor the spit; Jacintha,for so she must be called, too much a maid not to want the relief of tears, too much a boy to know the use of them; Arnaldo, — but there was really no reason why Arnaldo should not sleep, therefore he did; and he being refreshed, the others in need of refreshment, they were up and stirring betimes. Isidro had settled with himself that he could not take the girl back to Carmelo, but must first find her harborage and see Saavedra. Something, also, he purposed toward Peter Lebecque, who was possibly most to blame for the girl’s assumption.

“How do we stand toward Carmelo ?” he said to the tracker.

“East by south.”

“ And how toward the other Missions ? ”

“We might fetch San Antonio by a hard day’s riding; there is a trail hereabouts which leads directly into it. All the others are best reached from El Camino Real.”

“And this trail, could you find it? Then to San Antonio I will go, but first I must dispose of this gentleman.”

“The Father President,” said Arnaldo, “ would be glad of him.”

“No doubt,” said Isidro, “but we do not travel toward Carmelo, and, besides, we have but three horses.”

“The world,” said the tracker, “would wag as well without such cattle.” Arnaldo was a free man from the south and had the scorn of the full blood for the admixture; besides, he had pricked up his ears to hear Escobar address the boy as señorita, and surmised how matters stood.

“A true word,” said Isidro, “but I am in no mood for killing.”

“Leave him to me.” Arnaldo tied the mestizo by a great variety of knots to a tree, leaving his hands free; his knife he laid on a rock out of reach. “ If he is diligent he may be free of his bonds by this time to-morrow; now we will ride.”

“Let me not see him again,” said Isidro. “Twice I have spared his life; the luck turns on odd numbers.” They left him with black looks and stolid; he had not so much as raised his hand to wipe off the blood of yesterday’s scratches. Isidro lifted the girl upon Mascado’s horse. She could very well have sprung there, but it was part of the punishment he designed by way of alleviation for his hurt esteem; she had claims upon — just what he could not say precisely, but claims which he would satisfy handsomely, though he had no notion of putting her too soon at ease. He grew less assured of his position, seeing how she went staidly and with bent head, except for quietness the very boy that he had brought up from the Grapevine. But she was plainly no Indian; the more he looked at her the more he knew it; hands, feet, and high, straight nose pointed the assurance.

If Escobar was satisfied with the adequacy of his intention toward her, the girl was not, wanting the assurance of it.

“ Señor,” she said when, after an hour’s riding, Arnaldo left them in a pleasant place of flowers while he cast about for the trail, “sñnor, what will you do with me ? ”

“I will take you to San Antonio.”

“ And then ? ”

“Tell me the truth, — are you an Indian?”

“I do not know; Peter Lebecque has told me that I am not, but the woman I called mother, she was an Indian.”

“ What was Mascado to you ? ”

“ Peter Lebecque’s friend. At least he came often to our place at the Grapevine. Lebecque hunted and trapped with him, but I cannot think that he liked him. It was after Mascado had been with us that the old man would tell me to remember that I was no Indian.”

“ Why was that ? ”

“Señor, I did not know at that time. I think now it was because Mascado wished to have me.”

“He knew, then, that you were a maid?”

“He has known it for two years; he says that Lebecque told him, but it must have been when they were at wine, for Lebecque was very angry.”

“Why is it that you dress in this fashion?”

“ Señor, I have known no other. It was my mother’s wish, her that I called mother. I think she fancied I was safer so; it was a rough life.”

“And you know nothing of your real parents ? ”

“ Nothing. At the time I left the Grapevine Peter Lebecque gave me a packet which he hinted would have placed me rightly.”

“What became of it?”

“I left it with the Padres at Carmelo.”

“And nothing came of it?”

“Nothing, señor.” There was no untruth nor evasion here, but if she had told him how long she kept the packet by her, and how disposed it, she must needs have told him why, and for that she had no words.

Hearing Arnaldo call they rode forward briskly. After that the talk was more at ease, all of the wood and the road and the wild things that crossed their trail.

“It is strange,” said Isidro, “that we meet no Indians; I had thought the hills were full of them.”

Said Arnaldo, “Report has it that they gather to Urbano in the Tulares.”

“Think you he means raiding?”

“Against the mission beeves, — no worse,” said the tracker.

Jacintha said little of any sort, but that to the point.

“Señor,” she said again when they came to an open grassy valley riding side by side, “when you have me at San Antonio what will you do with me?”

“Marry you,” said Isidro with the greatest cheerfulness.

One guesses the marriage of convenience to be the procurement of more than simple living; the earthborn admits no inducement but the drawing of lip to lip and eye to eye, the seeking of each for each in its degree. One must go far from the well of nature to allow other reason; even the mating beasts know better. Jacintha knew nothing of scandal, nothing of caste except as by her love she put Escobar above all others, and, therefore, nothing of social expedients. Marriage was a great mystery, but needing love for its excuse; that much she knew. Though Isidro spoke of marriage he had not spoken of love, no, nor looked it, and against a loveless marriage her maidenhood cried out. She would be hot when he was cold, shaken when he was steady; as often as he touched her, flooded with shame of her full pulse beating against his still one. How should she endure marriage with such a one, even though he be rated a god or among the Blessed Personages. It seemed a greater indignity than Mascado would have put upon her, for the first would but have held her body and this one had her soul. Plainly love sickens of desire if it be not the flower of love. All this Jacintha raged over formlessly, without speech. Of the chivalry which prompted the young man’s intent she understood nothing; but seeing him smiling and well pleased with himself, judged that she was of even less account, and sickened, poor girl, even while she beheld him glorious in the young day and the flooding light. She could not dare, though she thought of it a hundred times, slip her horse and run hiding in the hills, trapped by her own weakness and his lordly will.

In such tides the spirit ripens fast, quicker if it houses in Latin blood. Isidro was like to find little of the lad left by the time they came to the Mission San Antonio de Padua. In the meantime he smoked cigarettes and discoursed pleasantly of many things.

XVII

A WEDDING AT SAN ANTONIO

Of the resident Padres at San Antonio, Tomas de las Peñas and Relles Carrasco, Padre Tomas at least was no causationist. What he believed he believed and that was the end of it. If Holy Church said a thing was good for you it was good for you. Any failure in the application lay in yourself, or in the inscrutable wisdom of God, who often ordered things contrariwise to our expectation the better to increase the merit of belief. Holy Church had prerogatives of cursings and exorcisms and cuttings off, power against men and Legion and evil beasts. For it was not to be supposed that her children would be safe against persons and Powers of the Air, and be given over to the ravages of wildcats and bears.

There was a reason for you if you were so contumacious as to require one, though a greater merit if you were able to believe it, whether it looked reasonable or not. Further than that, San Antonio himself had preached to the fishes, and Padre Tomas preached to the bears.

Something may have been wanting in the administration, for the Padre preached in the mission church while the bears visited the calf-pens by night. These depredations continuing, Padre Tomas went farther, and cut them off from the company of the elect as you shall hear.

The Superiors of the Order of St. Francis of Assisi had a wonderful keenness for parts. They put a man to his best use with seldom a mistake in the selection. This accounts for their being at once the least covetous and most materially successful of Holy Brotherhoods. Padre Carrasco had a knack with cattle and the soil, Padre Tomas of the Stripes, a gift for the cure of souls. They got on admirably together, but, though their spirits seemed equal to their labors, it appeared at times that their bodies were ill set. Padre Carrasco was a lean man with a thoughtful cast; Padre Tomas was most mortifyingly rotund, comfortable, soft, and rosy. It was his particular affliction that if he ate no more than a handful of peas with cold water, it stuck to his ribs and made him fat. Such being the case, there was no merit in abstemiousness, and the Padre did not practice it. He was a strict ritualist, especially observant of high feasts and festivals, very tender in confessional, mild as to penances, much loved by his people. His project of arraigning the powers of the Church against the bears was favorably looked upon by the neophytes. Holy water was efficacious in so many things. Upon this conclusion the day chosen was that same one upon which Isidro and his party were riding in from Las Chimineas. Toward the end of afternoon all San Antonio was out in procession, priest and priest’s boy, cope and stole, censers, candles, and banners, and, to crown all, a picture of the patron of the Mission in a gilt frame; after these the choir and several hundred Indians, more or less naked, interested and sincere.

The procession skirted the fields, winding to avoid wet pastures and unclean thickets; the candles starred out under the gloom of the bearded oaks, and paled again in the sun; blue smoke of incense curled across the meadows. The mellow voices of the choir set the time for the feet of the elder Indians, who shuffled and crooned melodiously behind them. Their bodies swung; they beat their hands together; it needed but a hint to set them off in the rhythmic ceremonial dances of their pagan times. Your native Indian is devoutly a lover of ritual; the neophytes of San Antonio were enjoying themselves highly. Padre Carrasco signed the cross in the air and sprinkled holy water on the tasseled grass. The voice of Padre Tomas rose solemn and unctuous.

“I adjure you, O bears, by the true God, by the Holy God, by the most blessed Virgin Mary, by the twelve apostles, and by our most reverend saint and patron, to leave the field to our flocks, not to molest them or come near them.”

“In nomine patris,” droned the procession behind him. Isidro and Jacintha came up with them at the northeast corner of the mission inclosure.

Padre Tomas loved guests and the exercise of hospitality, but he had other affairs. He waved the party of riders aside and proceeded with his holy office. They fell in, with children and dogs tailing the procession, and so rode to the Mission, saw the candles, censers, and effigy of the patron disposed and Padre Tomas restored to his normal use.

“Padre,” said Escobar, when he had introduced himself and been well received, “I desire you to give lodgment to this lady.” The Padre stared, seeing only a slim lad with a sullen air. “I wish, also, that she may be suitably clothed as becoming her condition, and in the morning you shall marry us.”

Isidro thought it well to be forward with any business once decided upon. He saw a hundred doubts, questions,protests, trembling in the Padre’s countenance. He went on to forestall them. “No doubt there are many things, Padre, which seem to you to want explaining, but the first account of this matter I owe the Father President at Carmelo, to whom I am bound. After that I shall be pleased to make all things clear. For myself, I want nothing of you but a meal; we have eaten nothing since morning.” This was to Padre Tomas a predicament as serious as for a maid to be riding about in man’s clothing; moreover, a matter within his province, and remediable. He felicitated himself that he had planned something by way of addition to his evening meal, — a little matter of stuffed fowl, a dish of curried eggs, a pasty of wild strawberries.

Isidro’s plan to marry the girl he had known only as El Zarzo was not so much out of hand as it appeared. It had come out of him all at once like a shot, but there had been a night’s meditation back of it. Once out, it was sure to be followed up in fact, for the youngster had great respect for his own judgments, and honored them with the act as often as possible. His attitude toward women was informed by the evidence of his time, — that they did not know very well how to take care of themselves. The girl was pure, — he was sure of that, — but in the common estimate besmirched; that was hardly fair, and Isidro loved fairness; otherwise he would hardly have allowed Mascado his horse and a rope. In much the same spirit he lent the girl the succor of his name. He had a high and mighty notion that scandal could not stick on the skirts of an Escobar. Well, not if he was at hand to see to it. As for the girl, she was hardly in case to be consulted, having no one to take her part, equally no one to forbid the banns; and, being a girl, probably did not know what was best for her.

So far, good; he had yet to face his dedicate calling and the will of Saavedra, in whose jurisdiction he stood. That checked him; but as he had never felt the need of a wife, the obligation of having one sat lightly, and he reflected that there had been those who had arrived at saintship through a virgin marriage. He was honest enough toward Saavedra to admit that virgin it must be until he had heard the Superior’s will in the matter. He looked to the sacrament to restore the girl’s esteem, but he glozed over the inference that, as a good Catholic, if marriage made no impediment to his priestly career, the girl would still be bound. If he did not have her himself, no other could. If he thought of this at all he was not visibly moved to commiserate her estate; by which you will perceive that there was more in the youth’s heart, whether it was in his head or not, than he was rightly aware. Of all his contraptious obligations, that of providing for the girl stood uppermost; so he out with his proposal, and the thing once shaped, stood to it.

Padre Tomas was more than fluttered by the circumstance. He had a very simple way of arranging marriages among the neophytes. Every year he stood the marriageable youths and maidens in two lines, and if neither found any objection to the party opposite, he married them then and there, after which he delivered a homily. He had prepared one for this occasion overnight, but found himself put out of calculation by the high airs of Escobar, and the confession before communion of both parties. They had a difficulty just at the last, for the girl had no name by which she could properly be married. But as she was sure upon the point of baptism, and well grounded in the Christian observances, — Isidro’s work, — it was settled by registering her under the name of her foster father, Lebecque, with the place left vacant for her Christian name until Isidro had come back from the hut of the Grapevine, where he purposed going.

Escobar had half an hour with his wife in the mission garden before he set out. The elevation of the sacrament was still upon him, that and the consciousness of having behaved much more handsomely than could reasonably have been expected of him. It lent him sufficient grace to get smoothly through with what might have been an embarrassing interview with a very pretty girl whom he had known as a boy, married without consulting, and was about to desert without compunction. The girl hardly came off so well, being in bondage, poor child, to a harder master than the marriage vow. But she was very pretty, as Isidro found space in the preoccupation of his affairs to admit. The clothes that had been provided for her were all that the Mission afforded, — in fact, the holiday dress of the Señora Romero, wife to one of San Antonio’s three soldiers, — a chemise of white linen, a neckerchief of fine drawnwork, a cloth skirt, and the universal rebozo. The smoke-black hair was drawn back under a comb, and revealed the slow, soft oval of the cheek and chin, so fine and transparent and richly warmed, running into the pale brownness of the brow, the black, deep-lighted eyes, invariably fine in her type, under the delicately meeting brows. She had a trapped look, — the look of a small hunted thing at bay, and the curve of the mouth was pitiful. Isidro admitted the haggardness as well as the good looks, but it struck no spark out of him.

“Wife,” he said, for in fact he knew not what else to call her, “you seem to have fallen into good hands. The Señora Romero is no doubt an excellent lady. This leads me to believe you will be quite comfortable while I am about other affairs. I will go first to Peter Lebecque; there must be things which he should say to me necessary to your proper establishment. Also I must see Father Saavedra, for my leave-taking was something uncourteous. I doubt not the good Padre thinks me mad or dead. After that I cannot tell what will become of me, but you being my wife need have no concern. I will come again and see you safely and honorably bestowed, but the manner of it I cannot at this time tell. It will be somewhat as circumstance and the Father President direct. In the meantime, I commend you to God and Our Lady, to St. Francis our patron, and to the hospitality of Padre Tomas.”

This was the substance of his speech, delivered at length in the pomegranate walk of San Antonio’s garden. Jacintha was dumb under it. Such was not the custom of bridegrooms; this much she would have known without the excellently voluble discourse on the nature of marriage bestowed upon her by the corporal’s wife with the wedding clothes. She was the daughter of a proud, sensitive man and a sensitive, passionate woman, and, with her forest breeding, had the instinct of a wild pigeon for straight cuts. So she had arrived at some very mortifying conclusions. First, that by her boy’s trappings, which she had never thought to question, she had lost esteem of very many people, among them Escobar; next, that much as he disapproved of those, she was much more acceptable to him as Peter Lebecque’s lad than as what she now showed to be; most of all, that not now or at any time had he acknowledged one pulse of the hot tide that flooded her at the mere thought of him. She had lain all night with quick heart, clinched hands, and a maze of thought in which one thing only seemed clear, — the wild creature’s instinct to seek cover and dissemble, never to let him know; the phrase had an echo to it as of some far receding wave in the crypts of consciousness, — the heartbreak of Ysabel crying in her child. All her energies were bent on that. She would have liked to run away into the hills, to the free life where she might never have word of Escobar, but she knew that she would run back again in sheer hunger for a sight or sound of him. One question she allowed herself in the mission garden; all the pride of the Castros rose up and braved her for it.

“Señor,” she said, “when we rode with Mariana’s sheep toward Pasteria you told me that you were to become a priest and priests may not marry.”

“Why, as to that,” said the young man, still going smoothly on in the consciousness of irreproachable intent, “the Church is very explicit as to continuing in the married estate, but many of the apostles, I understand, and of the saints not a few, have been married before taking orders, notably St. Paul and St. Peter and Santa Cecilia; but that is a matter within the province of the Father President.”

“And what will become of me?” was the cry that rose in the girl’s heart and broke in a thin bubble upon her lips; she went dumb, — answered by nods only, with dropped eyes and folded hands. Isidro commended her discretion, when the poor child was only miserable. He kissed her hand at parting and found it chill.

To say that Padre Tomas was astounded to see the bridegroom ride away on his wedding morning was to say only half. He was even affronted, and stood choking and staring to receive Escobar’s last instructions, delivered with the smooth, courteous air which sat so well on the personable youth. No doubt, thought the Padre, it was commendable to show one’s self subservient to the Superior of the Order, and continence was a virtue; but if all men practiced it, how else would there be souls to save and God be glorified in the multitude of his saints ? Padre Tomas was reputed to have contributed something to that end.

Jacintha lay on her bed shaken with dry sobbing. Hot flushes sickened through her as she recalled the Señora Romero’s pointed advice and sly allusions. In the weeks that followed she was likely to learn the use of blushes and tears and other woman’s gear.

Isidro rode straight, with Arnaldo at his back, to the place of the Grapevine, reaching it on the afternoon of the second day’s riding. He meant to have some plain talk with the old trapper, get a name for his wife and some satisfaction for his chafed dignity over the affair of Juan Ruiz, in which you will remember Lebeeque was named a witness.

Trusting to Arnaldo’s knowledge of trails, they left the traveled road, El Camino Real of that time, and went easily by a scantly wooded hill and a wide mesa, windy and high. This saved horseflesh, but gained them nothing in time, for, arriving early in the afternoon, they found Lebecque from home. Isidro sat in the shade of the vines and smoked cigarettes. The place and the hour gave him a touch of homesickly longing for the spirited, shy lad, mixed with the haunting reminder of pale beauty in a frame of smoke-black hair.

XVIII

A COLD TRAIL

When Delgardo left Monterey he went straight to Santa Barbara, carrying urgent letters from Saavedra and the Commandante. With these he quartered himself at the Mission, and set about providing a daughter for Castro, an heir for the Ramirez fortune, and a wife for himself.

It was a cold trail. The occasion of Doña Ysabel’s death was sixteen, nearly seventeen years gone, and had occurred at a time when every man dealt with trouble at his own door, with little attention to spare for the affairs of his neighbors. Doña Ysabel kept the matter close, leaning much on the woman Elisa, who had been her nurse and followed her up from Mexico. Jesus Castro was not at that time Commandante, and his family not so much in the public eye. Of the few matrons then at the Presidio some surmised that Señora Castro had a child, but believed it to be stillborn, as might easily have been the case, for the poor lady was known to be ailing. It appeared, finally, there were but two persons who had personal knowledge of the girl, if girl it was, born to Doña Ysabel: Padre Bonaventura, at that time resident at Santa Barbara, now at San Gabriel, and an Indian woman, Louisa, who with Elisa constituted Doña Ysabel’s household. Elisa was dead in the same month and of the same disorder as her mistress; the other woman was, if alive, nobody knew where. Delgardo went and looked at the tall cross which Castro had caused to be erected over his wife’s grave, but got nothing from that; went and talked with as many as remembered the beautiful and unhappy Ysabel; got plentiful comment on the relations of Castro and his wife, butnothing more; then, by Padre Garcia’s advice, went to San Gabriel.

Padre Victorio Garcia, resident at Santa Barbara, was an astute man, and knew his neophytes very well.

“You can do nothing here,” he said to Delgardo; “this people cannot be made to stand and deliver in a court of inquiry. They are like the quicksands that lie up the coast. You throw a stone and it goes quickly out of sight; the surface is smooth as cream, but underneath the sand it works — works; if you wait long enough it will cast up your stone again. So with my people. Get you to Padre Bonaventura; I will cast a few stones. In time something may be brought to light, but you must leave it to me.”

Delgardo went south, a brilliant figure trailing along the hard wide path of the King’s Highway. He saw Padre Bonaventura, and heard from him what he already knew from Castro, but with more color and detail. How, during the time of the pestilence, there had come a cry in the night — “ though, indeed, the nights were like the days for labor,” said the Padre — to come to a newborn child that might not live. He found the child at Doña Ysabel’s and baptized it, saw it carried out of the room by an Indian woman, and never laid eyes on it again. The mother he found very ill, judged that she had the fever upon her at that time. Some days later he was at her deathbed, but her confession was so strange that, believing it mixed with delirium, he gave it insufficient heed, — “for I was much worn with watching, and my people died like sheep,” said the Padre, — and in the midst of confession she died. The nurse Elisa had died the same month without the holy office, as too many died in that pestilent time. Afterward it was discovered that no one knew about the child, not so much as that there had been one.

Delgardo felt he had helped himself very little, but he stayed a while and looked about him in the city of Our Lady Queen of the Angels, even at that time shortened to Los Angeles.

That accounts for eight of the nineteen days of his journeying. Returned to Santa Barbara, he found that some of Padre Garcia’s castings had come up again. During the time of the pestilence many small parties of neophytes had taken to the hills, hoping to escape it, but, carrying the infection with them, spread it in the wilds. Later the remnant came back again. It was now reported that the woman Louisa had been one of these fugitives.

“Had she a child?” cried Delgardo.

“No,” said the Padre, — “no child, but her sister had.”

“Well” — began the youth.

Padre Garcia held up his hand. “I have examined the records of the Mission, which were regularly kept except for the time that the fever raged highest, and I find that this sister, Juana her name was, had indeed a child of her own, a boy; but I find that about ten days before the death of Señora Castro that child also died, at the age of four months.”

“You think, then” — Delgardo began.

“I think, my son, we will wait; the stones are not all in.”

Delgardo waited and looked about him. It seemed impossible that the child could be alive, or if alive that they could find it again, or if found, it should prove Ysabel’s child, — three good chances that he must make another cast at fortune; and while he looked at the mission stock and fields, speculating what pickings there would be when these were removed from the care of the Franciscans to the civil power, Padre Garcia brought him news. One of the neophytes, who had been a renegade in the hills three years since, reported having seen the woman Juana with a French trapper in the wooded regions of the Salinas.

“Stale news,” said Delgardo. “And the child?”

The Indian remembered to have seen none.

“Bad news,” said Delgardo again; but with it he made an end of Padre Garcia’s meddling with the affair, and set out with an Indian packer and a guide, to look for a French trapper with an Indian wife northward in the Salinas hills. He meant to find a daughter for Castro in any event. There were not so many people answering to that description that he was likely to go far afield. He left the main road, struck into white, shallow trails, followed them until they ran into springs or melted in wind-shifted sand; went large and wide of any trail, inquired of chance-met Indians, slept one night at the Mission San Luis Obispo, slept seven in the open, struck false trails and followed them to confusion. He saw the young quail come trooping down to springs in the gray morning, saw the young fawns hidden by their mothers in long grass, saw a great tawny cougar laid asleep on a limb above a slaughtered deer; he grew saddle-weary and sore, tore his finery in the scrub, wet it at roaring fords, and came out at last at the hut of the Grapevine and Peter Lebecque. His dress was much the worse; he had lost the air and affectation of the capital; he had a network of fine wrinkles about his eyes from much staring in the sun, all of which helped him with the trapper. Delgardo had the wit to deal openly with the old man, told him straightly who he was, what he sought, and all his intent except marriage, upon which he would in no wise commit himself until he had seen the girl. Lebecque heard him, peering shrewdly from the shaggy pent of his brows, but made no offer to open his own budget until they had eaten and had two thirds of a bottle between them.

“It is true,” he said, “I am a French trapper, and I had a woman from the Mission Santa Barbara.”

“And she had a child, not yours ?”

“She had a child.”

“A girl?”

“A girl.”

“Where is she now?”

“At Monterey.”

“Monterey! Since when, señor?”

“A month since.”

Delgardo began to fret visibly at the maddening, slow dribble of the old man’s talk. “Monterey, a month, impossible! It is not three weeks since I left there, and neither Saavedra nor the Commandante had an inkling of it.”

“Listen,” said Lebecque; “it is a long story, but if good comes to the girl by it, let it be. Forty years I have trapped and hunted north and east in the country of deep snows. But I grow old, and my bones ache, so I have come to this land where the pelts are not so good but the living easier. Seventeen years ago I found me these hills; then I looked for a woman and a place to build me a house. I took my time for that.” The old man spoke slowly, his words dropped from him like the dropping embers of his fire, as if each phrase lit for a moment some picture glowing for him in the ashes of remembrance. The fashion of his speech altered as he talked from past to vivid present and into the past again as the picture faded. “At that time I passed through the hills that rise up behind the Channel Waters. I was two days out from Santa Barbara, meaning to go no nearer, for I had heard a waif word that they had a fever there. The Indians were afraid and ran to the mountains, but the pestilence camped upon their trail. I went still in the woods and kept close, for I had no wish to meet with them. Toward the end of one day I heard afar off a strange mewling cry. Up to that time I have thought to know the cry and the talk of all creatures in the wood, but this is new to me. All that place was thick with flowering scrub making slow going. I kept on in it, following that cry, for I am a fool and know not the cry of my own kind. It grows dusk, and I come out at last in a cleared place under a madroño, and see something move on the grass which makes that cry. I look and find it is a babe. Sacredam ! Well, I look about, and across the open place is a dead woman. One sits beside her that has her head sunken on her knees, her hair is fallen forward and has ashes smeared upon it. I am not sure she is not dead also, but I put my hand upon her and she looks up. I think she has the fever upon her, but presently she makes the sign to me for food, and I see that she is starved. I had not the speech of the Channel Indians, but she had a few words of Spanish, and we made out with that. After she had eaten she crawled to the child and put it to her breast, and so told me a little of her condition. She was of the Mission Santa Barbara, she and the dead woman, her sister, and five others who had come away from the plague. They had tried the God of the Padres, but now that the sickness had come on them they knew that it was not good. So they would go back to their own gods, but the Wrath followed them. Her sister had sickened, and the rest of the party had run on in a greater fright. But Juana, my woman, stayed by her sister three days until she died. Now she said she would not go back to the Padres lest the anger of her gods should bring a worse thing upon her. The God of the Padres, she said, was a great God, but He could not keep off the fever. It may be so; myself I have no God. I take my chances with the beasts of the field; gods are for women and priests. Well, I buried the dead woman, and Juana, when she had eaten again, followed on my trail with the child ravening at her shrunken breast; for I said, if the fever will not drive her from her sister, will she not be faithful to me ? ”

“What else ?”

Lebecque left off his story to sit with his hands between his knees; all that showed of him was the red spark of his cigarette winking in the dark. Outside the moon, nearing her prime, flooded the swale, and made a long bright splash through the door, but no smallest ray pierced the tight roof of leaves. The dogs whined in dreams upon the floor, no shrill night insect rippled the silence, no leaf stirred the surface of the great lake of light that lapped this lonely isle of shade.

Delgardo began to move uneasily.

“The child?” he said.

“Oh, the child” — the old manfell into the drone of reminiscence. “It was a puling brat; I saw soon enough that it was no Indian, but I supposed its father might have been one of the gentes de razon; but as I have said, the woman and I had not much speech together. I was so much the better suited, I saw that Juana wished not to go near the Mission again, and thought it was for fear of the Padres, but afterward I understood that it was on account of the child. By degrees, when the girl was growing up, she told me about it. Juana’s husband was employed at the Presidio, and they did not live in the Mission. They had a child, and a sister of my woman worked at the house of one of the officers. When the fever came on Juana lost her husband and child, and at that time her sister bade her not let the fountain of her breast dry up, as her mistress was about to become a mother, and there was reason to believe she could not nurse her child. Afterwards her sister came in the night, for the child was born untimely, and the mother had the plague. They laid a vow upon her never to tell from whence she had the brat, nor to speak its name. So when they came away to the mountains, for the mother died, her sister put a double vow upon her never to tell, never to speak the name; and she never did.”

“But did you never think?”

“Think? What should I think ? I had my traps to think of. Juana, I know, thought it a love child, whose portion was disgrace. I remember she said the lady’s husband was from home. But at the last my woman was troubled in mind in her dying sickness; it was then she told me most; she wished to have a priest, but before an Indian could be found to fetch one she was dead.”

“And the child?” insisted Delgardo.

“The child. Yes. As she knew her to be baptized, Juana would never give her another name, only such foolish woman’s talk as Sweetwater, Bright Bird, Honeyflower, but as she grew and proved to have a pricking tongue we called her the Briar. It was a good name. Well, she grew into a slim maid, and a month since I sent her to Monterey to the Father President.”

“The Father President is at Carmelo,” said Delgardo. “But were there no marks, nothing by which she should be known?”

“There was a packet, papers, I think, but in the Spanish, which if I make shift to speak I have no skill to read. She is in Monterey by now.”

That was as much as Lebecque would say and as much as Delgardo wanted. He itched to be on the road. If the girl had gone to Saavedra, she would by him be made known to Castro, and the young man lose that advantage. He must be forward now with his corroborative narrative if he wished to continue in the affair. There must be two or three young men in Monterey ready to pay court in any promising quarter if Delgardo were not there with his modish airs to put them out of countenance. He was silent a long time, considering his advantage. As for Lebecque, it had given him a start to learn that the girl had not been heard of in Monterey, particularly that he had gotten out of the young man unawares that Escobar had arrived, and Delgardo had met him there. If the girl was Castro’s daughter, and, putting the young man’s account with his, it looked to be a fact, why had not the papers revealed it ? Long practice of cunning against suspicious creatures of the wood had made the trapper cunning with his own kind. Escobar had not known when he left the Grapevine that El Zarzo was a maid. But how if he had found it out ? Or Saavedra might be keeping the girl in the background for jesuitical purposes of his own. Priests, thought Lebecque, might be caught at such tricks. Again, it might be that the packet had told nothing, or that the girl, who was not without wit, might have reasons of her own for keeping a still tongue. The old trapper had knowledge that the girl would not be helped by Delgardo’s knowing that she had traveled up to Monterey with Escobar in a boy’s disguise, — good enough reason for saying nothing. Better reason, if reason were wanting, in not knowing how matters really stood with the girl. More business was marred by too much talking than by too little. The trapper shrugged his shoulders, and next morning watched Delgardo strike out toward the mission road, and San Antonio de Padua, where he would sleep that night. Lebecque was glad to see him go. Since El Zarzo had left him the old trapper had the minding of the flocks, and found it little suited to a man of his quick and restless habit. His natural grumpiness, startled out of him by Delgardo’s news of the night before, returned upon him with the light, and prompted him to one rankling shaft which, though it was directed toward establishing the girl’s identity, was planted in Delgardo’s mind.

“Señor,” he said, when Delgardo was up in saddle, and the flock fretting for the start, “if the girl is not immediately found, inquire of Señor Escobar; he may be able to tell you somewhat.”

“Now, what in the saint’s name do you mean by that?” cried Delgardo; and he was half in mind to stop and force an explanation; but the blether of the sheep rose up and cut off his words.

Escobar, working across the hills by a little used trail, failed to meet Delgardo, and dropped from it into the cañon of the Grapevine the day following, in the early afternoon. Lebecque was out with the flock. Isidro sat in the shadow of the hut, and recalled how he had first seen it and in what company. As often as he thought of the Briar his heart warmed toward the lad, — always the lad, — never the cold, still girl by the pomegranate hedge in San Antonio. Toward evening he heard the sheep working up by the creek, — soft bleating and the barking of the dogs, mixed with the noise of the water roaring out of the gap. It served to cover the light, accustomed step of Lebecque as he came around the corner of the hut and stood looking down at him with beady, querulous eyes. The contained, curt speech of trappers, mountaineers, and such folk as live much out of doors, is not always to be accounted for as lack of breeding, but rather the gain of that swift sense that seizes upon realities; not requiring the accustomed approaches of polite greetings, Lebecque did not use them. His glance took in the handsome, indolent length of the young man, and much more beside. Said he, —

“What have you done with her?”

“Married her,” said the youth.

“By the Sacrament?”

“By the offices of Holy Church,” said Isidro.

Said Lebecque, “When?”

“This morning at Mission San Antonio.”

“Where is she, then?” asked the old man.

“There, at San Antonio.”

“And you — are here” —

Lebecque looked him up and down. Then he took off his cap, which was of wild skin with the tail hanging down; he made a low bow.

“Señor,permit me,” he said; “you are a beautiful fool.” With that he turned heel and was off to his flock. Isidro’s good humor was proof against this. He smoked cigarettes and waited for the sun to go down. Lebecque came back after a while and raked up the ashes of his fire.

“Since when have you known her a maid ? ” said he.

“Since Mascado ran away with her.”

“What — what! Did he dare? The rascally half-breed, the” — Lebecque’s epithets were, no doubt, permissible in his time. He choked and gasped. “Did he harm her? Did he lay hands on her?”

“I saw to it that he did not.”

“Tell me,” said Lebecque.

Isidro gave him an account of the affair at Las Chimineas. The old man shook with laughter between fits of rage.

“But you did wrong, señor; you should have killed him,” said he.

Isidro let him believe that he had first discovered the boy to be a girl in the meadow of the chimneys. Now that she was his wife he shrank from mentioning the encounter with Delfina.

Lebecque warmed to him so much for his victory over Mascado that he out with Delgardo’s story and his own, putting them together convincingly. Isidro took it all easily enough, as one accustomed to the favor of gods; no doubt he thought he deserved it. His marriage took on the color of romance, to which his facile mind shaped itself. He began to picture how he should deliver the girl to the Commandante, with what circumstance and what an air. Lebecque, watching him, began to snort with impatience.

“Señor,” he said, “permit me again; you are a fool. Here is Don Valentin gone to Monterey with the news to spread it all abroad. Here are you departed, by your own account with scant leave, into the hills with the girl. Who knows that she is still a maid ? Who knows that you have married her, — and deserted her at the altar ? You, also, by your own account, in the way of being a priest. All Monterey will be humming like a hive. Think you Castro will thank you for this, or Saavedra ? Best get you back to your wife and to Monterey with all speed. By the mass, but you will find a hornet’s nest if you are overlong on the road.”

Escobar saw the force of that. If he would make this marriage perform the service he intended in saving the girl’s good name, he must be forehanded with his news. By the break of day he was out with Arnaldo beating about for a trail which should take them a short cut to Monterey. His wife he thought safe in person at San Antonio. To save her reputation he rode to Saavedra at Carmelo.

XIX

THE CAPTURE

From Peter Lebecque’s hut and the Cañada de las Uvas Isidro and the tracker climbed up steadily by the swelling hillfront, seeing the isle of vines dwindle and shrink at the bottom of the swale. The spring, which had been a lusty beauty when Isidro rode first through that country, was now running fast to seed. No rains would come that way again for a good three quarters of a year. Wild oats and alfilaria curled sun-cured on the eastward slopes; stubbly growth of shrubs on the west, favored a little by far-blown dampness of the sea, hinted at their ashy midsummer hue. Streams rippled shallowly at the fords; young of wild creatures of that season’s litter began to run freely in the chaparral. The trail went sidling on the flanks of the hills, and at each upward turn flung them a wider arc of boss and hollow, drowned by a blue mistiness that thickened on level mesas to the waters of mirage. The crests of the hills were mostly bare to the windy flood of cooler air, but a wood of oaks, buckeye, and madroño swept about their bases and lapped upward in sheltered coves along the water courses. Their outlines showed dim and indistinguishable through the haze, like clumps of weed at the bottom of full, still bays of sea water. Out of one of the pools of leafage which lay below them, and yet overlooked in its turn a considerable stretch of sunken rolling land, rose up a column of thin smoke, pale against the dark blueness of the wood.

“Indians at last,” said Isidro. “I began to think it true, what I heard at San Antonio, that they had left this country to harbor with Urbano in the Tulares. And look, another.” Faint and far the second wisp of smoke rose up straightly and fanned out into the still atmosphere. The next turn of the trail showed them a third.

“Signal fires,” said Arnaldo. “Now what the devil will they be about ? ”

By the middle of the hot morning the riders had sighted five pillars of white smoke, that neither increased nor grew less, but welled up from steadily tended fires, wagged a little at the impulse of an unfelt wind, broke high up against a level of cooler air, and rolled out along the sky. Later in the day Arnaldo pointed out a party of Indians in hunting gear on the trail below them, but when the two men came up to the place the hunters had melted like quail into the chaparral.

They rode all that breathless morning, following the looping and sagging of a shallow trail, but in the main rising toward the crest of the Salinas hills, and then laid by for a long siesta while the horses fed. They made it long by intention, purposing to ride by the light of the moon, which was nearing its prime and rose early on the red track of the sun. With this in mind they kept saddle in the pure pale twilight of high altitudes, and on until the full yellow orb rose up and walked along the hills.

They rode through a longish shallow valley, open in the middle by a blind sunken water course, but having a thick strip of wood along the bases of the hills. Shortly before moonrise, while the earth underfoot still melted into dusk, and the sky whitened to the nearing light, they became aware of a flutter and a hint of motion, a whisper and beat translating itself to the sense without sound. It came out of the wood ahead of them on their right; it seemed to roll along the earth, and underlaid, yet was a part of, the multitudinous small noises of the night. It grew as they gave it attention, and came sensibly from a close - grown tongue of wood that ran into the open hollow, and resolved itself into a wailing croon, supported by a soft pounding pulse of sound. The wail flared and waned and fell off like the flame of wood fire, glints of which began to show between the close stems of trees. The padding was muffled and incessant. The two men dropped their spurs on the saddle-bow; they crept forward until they found a peephole in the screen of leaves. In a cleared grassy place lit by a brushwood flare figures came and went like puppets in a showman’s box. Figures of Indians, naked except for trappings of beads and feathers and stripings of gaudy-colored earths. Huge coronets of feathers of the chaparral cock, the corredor del camino, surmounted their heads and streamed down the naked backs. They wore kilts woven of fine feathers of water fowl; necklaces of beads, bears’ claws, elks’ teeth, and bits of bright shell hung down over painted ribs and glittered intermittently with flashes of the fire. The earth under their feet was beaten to an impalpable dust.

“Big Medicine,” whispered Arnaldo under the click of rattles and the steady drum of heels. Flashes from the fire showed, besides the dancers, circles of squatting savages whose spirits, raised by the hypnotic movement and beat of the ceremonial dance, fluttered in their throats. Arnaldo the tracker drew Isidro softly by the sleeve and backed away toward the horses.

“What do you think?” whispered Escobar.

“Devil’s work,” said Arnaldo, and crossed himself as a good Christian; after which he delivered himself as a man of sense. “It is not the time of their regular dances. If they do it now it is because they have some business afoot.”

“Think you they were Urbano’s men ? ”

“Who else? One was the renegade Manuel; I knew him; and he that had the feather coat on his shoulders was a Channel Indian. Three others were Tuolumnes. Where else will you find the slum of all the tribes except with Urbano ? They are not drawn together by love of each other, but for love of mischief.”

“What can they do?”

“Set on some silly shepherds with their sheep, run off a few of the mission beeves, entice a few neophytes from the Missions.” Arnaldo had not a great opinion of the native tribes of Alta California. They let the priests sit too easily on their necks, and were frightened by the popping of firecrackers.

The two men rode on in the trail, and the moon rose new washed from the sea. The trail lay mostly in open ground and was not hard to seek. Twice in the fringe of the woods they saw lights low and twinkling on the ground.

“We must by all means keep on until we have crossed the ridge out of this country,” said Arnaldo. “To-night they are busy with dancing, but to-morrow they may take a notion to stop us, particularly if they mean raiding in the direction of Soledad or Santa Cruz.”

Isidro had no mind for such an interruption to his affairs. They kept on after this until they struck the wood again and the beginning of rising ground. Here they dismounted, for the trees were low and grew all abroad with gnarly boughs. The trail went faintly among them with many windings. Isidro whistled softly to himself while the tracker puzzled out the way.

“No noise, señor,” said the tracker. Isidro stopped short. They went on for a quarter of an hour in the hot dark. Outside of the fence of trees the earth was gloriously light. Arnaldo began to halt at intervals and make signs of listening.

“ Heard you anything ? ” he whispered.

“A cricket chirp and a wakeful bird.”

“Nothing else ?”

“Nothing else.”

“Move on a little.”

Presently Isidro heard. Out of the dark a slow padding on the fallen leaves seemed to follow them. They stopped, it stopped; they went on, it began again, — a mere whisper of sound.

“Man or beast?” Isidro asked.

“Dios sabe,” shrugged the Indian. They went on steadily for another quarter of an hour and heard no more of it.

“It must have been a bobcat or cougar,” said Escobar.

“Perhaps so; keep as much in the shadow as you may.”

Where the wood was thin and straggling it was clearly no night for men who must make way cautiously to be abroad in. Rounding a blunt cape of hills they came suddenly on a camp of a dozen savages asleep, or smoking and a-doze. Arnaldo’s horse knew the trick of stillness following a certain touch on his shoulder; but the other, winded a little, for the ground rose steeply, drew in his breath until the saddle-girth creaked. Several of the Indians sat up alert, but a ruffle of wind among the leaves smothered all smaller sounds and covered the retreat of the horsemen. Now they were forced out of the trail and went heavily through the brush, smelling trouble on all sides. A group of ponies feeding in a meadow snorted recognition to their horses, and got a smothered whinny in return. Arnaldo swore. Isidro, never so merry as when he had need of all his wits, laughed under his breath.

“No laughing matter,” said the tracker; “ there must be threescore of the swine hereabouts. They might object to you getting on to Monterey.”

“What will we do ?”

“What we can; just ahead of us is a good level stretch; make the most of it.”

They put their horses at a jogging trot; this lasted until the close growth of scrub and trees forced them to a slower pace. Instantly the long padding tread came out of the dark, following. It was light on the grass, but not so light that no twig snapped under it and no leaf rustled. Now and then they heard the swish of a bent bough springing back to place.

“Bungling work,” said the tracker; then he laid hand lightly on the other’s arm. Forward a stone-cast, the moon glinted on what was neither leaf, nor bark, nor stone. Across the grass the broken and dappled light through the latticed shadow of the trees was cut off and reappeared as under a sliding screen.

“The devil! ” said Isidro.

“Evidently,” shrugged the tracker.

The wood was full of hints of presence, sense of movement, little prickings of the flesh, uneasy sniffs of the horses. The trail ran here in an easy swale narrowly between two great bluffs of stony earth. The wood, pinched to a file of scantlimbed pines, ran between them and spread into a pool of dark beyond. The defile opening toward the moon was searched and rifled by the light. It was not a bowshot wide from wall to wall. Beyond this a little way lay an open country, affording no cover for spies and the chances of swifter travel for the horses. Riding toward it Isidro and the tracker started a herd of deer, does with young fawns, feeding by a spring. The does threw up their heads to snuff the tainted wind, and began to trot steadily toward the pass. But here their fine sense served them, and the men behind them, an excellent turn. At the mouth of the defile they swerved, halted, and wheeled, struck a brisker pace, avoided the pass, and disappeared in a dry gully leading toward the hills.

“Where the deer will not go there is no going for us,” said Arnaldo; “wait.”

He flung off his horse into the thickest shadow. Isidro held both bridle reins and waited, heard a night bird call and the wind tread lightly on the creaking boughs of pines, saw the shadows shrink as the moon rode higher, saw small furry things come out in the light and play; at last saw the tracker rise up out of the dark without a sound.

“Well?”

“Señor, you wish to get to Monterey with all speed ? ”

Isidro thought of the case in which he stood, — of his breach of behavior to Saavedra, of Delgardo hurrying to the Commandante, of Delfina — “ By the mass, yes!” he cried.

“Do as I say, then,” said Arnaldo; “the moon is too much for us.” He led the horses with unconcern back to the spring where the deer had been drinking and threw off the saddles.

“Make as if to camp,” he said, “and lie down as if to sleep, but do not sleep; keep your pistol close.”

They lay down to watch the ebb of the moonlight and the slow oncoming of the tide of shadow that reached its flood some hours before dawn. They heard no more of any Indians, but no deer came that way, by which they judged there must be men about in the cañon below them and in the pass above. When the moon was low and the black splotches of forest began to run together in the bottoms of the cañons drenched in shadow, they began to move again with incredible stillness, drawing out of the wood toward the bare slopes of hill up the gully by which the deer had gone. Nothing moved behind them but the light wind in the leaves; be. fore them they had the steep tireless scarp of the hill. They would ride a little, and then Arnaldo would quest forward on his feet a little, exploring the way, incredibly tedious, but they had no serious impediment. Once Isidro’s horse struck a loose stone that went rolling and rattling to the bottom of the hill with a small avalanche of coarse gravel and set their hearts pounding with apprehension, but no alarm followed it. They came at last to open country about moonset, found it firm under foot and admitting of some speed. They began to go down presently, and by dawn had come to clumps of thin pines and dwarfish oaks. They rode and saw deer bedded unstartled in the fern, and all the ease of wild life, warrant that no men had lately passed that way. A million wild pigeons began to stir and voice the blush light of dawn; their calls and the incessant rustle of their wings rolled together like soft thunder among the trees. The two men pushed their jaded horses, breakfasting, without lighting, on jerke of wild venison which they had from Peter Lebecque, reached the foot of the grade, struck the level of a valley, crossed it three hours after sunrise, and in the hot palpitant forenoon began to wind and turn in the intricate shallow cañons of low hills. They had come upon no camps nor fresh trail of Indians, saw no signal fires nor any sign of pursuit; not so much as a crow flapped or a jay squawked suspiciously away from the trail.

“The rogues are behind us,” said Arnaldo, “we have thrown them off our trail; nevertheless, we must get on to Monterey. We shall have a word for the Commandante. ”

“What word?” said Escobar, thinking of his own affair.

“There were no women among them. Some of them had guns; they have been trading with the Russians. It will take more than holy water to keep these bears away from the calf-pens of the Padres,” Arnaldo chuckled.

“Do you think they are for San Antonio ?”

“That or Soledad; they might reach either easily from where they are now camped. They may have accomplices among the mission neophytes. The word that has gone about that the Padres are to be sent out of the country has bred maggots in their heads.”

“And what,” said Isidro, “if that word were true ? ”

“Eh,” said the tracker, “ they are swine; they will return to root in the earth where they were bred.”

“They have been made Christians, and the Padres have taught them to save their souls from Hell,” said the young gentleman, who still had thoughts of becoming a padre himself.

Arnaldo showed a dry and twinkling mirth.

“Manuel,” he said, “was a Christian. I remember an Easter when he served the mass. That washe you saw last night, with the rattle of ram’s horn and a bear’s teeth grinning on his shoulders.”

They were both beginning to weary of the ride. The horses drooped and looked hungrily at the grass by the water courses. The air in the close little cañons was still and hot.

“Dios! but I could sleep,” cried Escobar, yawning.

“Sleep, then,” said the tracker; “here is feed for the horses.”

They unsaddled, set the horses to the stake rope, crept themselves under the low screen of a live oak that dropped its branches to the ground. The hills were sunk in a midday drowse. That was a time when, except for some such seldom mischance as had fallen to them the night before, a man might lie down and sleep under any tree in Alta California, and take no account of risk or time. As the mood of the land never swayed much between the extremes of heat and cold, fury and calm, it bred even in its savage races an equable and tractile mind. If the Franciscans found great scope for material advantage they found little for martyrdom. It is a tradition that bullocks’ blood went to the cementing of adobe foundations, but little was shed of another sort.

Isidro and the tracker had expected no harm the night before but an annoying detention and interruption to the former’s affairs; therefore they slept heavily, that danger over, and woke past noon to find Mascado sitting over them, very still, with Escobar’s pistols laid across his knees.

(To be continued.)