To the north! That north which Felipe thought he had thoroughly searched. He sighed at the word. The Senor could, if he liked, see the house in which Alessandro had lived. There it was, on the south side of the valley, just in the edge of the foothills; some Americans lived in it now. Such a good ranch Alessandro had; the best wheat in the valley. The American had paid Alessandro something for it,—they did not know how much; but Alessandro was very lucky to get anything. If only they had listened to him. He was always telling them this would come. Now it was too late for most of them to get anything for their farms. One man had taken the whole of the village lands, and he had bought Ysidro's house because it was the best; and so they would not get anything. They were utterly disheartened, broken-spirited. In his sympathy for them, Felipe almost forgot his own distresses. 'Where are you going?' he asked of several. 'Who knows, Senor?' was their reply. 'Where can we go? There is no place.' When, in reply to his questions in regard to Alessandro's wife, Felipe heard her spoken of as 'Majella,' his perplexity deepened. Finally he asked if no one had ever heard the name Ramona. 'Never.' What could it mean? Could it be possible that this was another Alessandro than the one of whom he was in search? Felipe bethought himself of a possible marriage-record. Did they know where Alessandro had married this wife of his, of whom every word they spoke seemed both like and unlike Ramona? Yes. It was in San Diego they had been married, by Father Gaspara. Hoping against hope, the baffled Felipe rode on to San Diego; and here, as ill-luck would have it, he found, not Father Gaspara, who would at his first word have understood all, but a young Irish priest, who had only just come to be Father Gaspara's assistant. Father Gaspara was away in the mountains, at Santa Ysabel. But the young assistant would do equally well, to examine the records. He was courteous and kind; brought out the tattered old book, and, looking over his shoulder, his breath coming fast with excitement and fear, there Felipe read, in Father Gaspara's hasty and blotted characters, the fatal entry of the names, 'Alessandro Assis and Majella Fa—' Heart-sick, Felipe went away. Most certainly Ramona would never have been married under any but her own name. Who, then, was this woman whom Alessandro Assis had married in less than ten days from the night on which Ramona had left her home? Some Indian woman for whom he felt compassion, or to whom he was bound by previous ties? And where, in what lonely, forever hidden spot, was the grave of Ramona? Now at last Felipe felt sure that she was dead. It was useless searching farther. Yet, after he reached home, his restless conjectures took one more turn, and he sat down and wrote a letter to every priest between San Diego and Monterey, asking if there were on his books a record of the marriage of one Alessandro Assis and Ramona Ortegna. It was not impossible that there might be, after all, another Alessandro Assis, The old Fathers, in baptizing their tens of thousands of Indian converts, were sore put to it to make out names enough. There might have been another Assis besides old Pablo, and of Alessandros there were dozens everywhere. This last faint hope also failed. No record anywhere of an Alessandro Assis, except in Father Gaspara's book. As Felipe was riding out of San Pasquale, he had seen an Indian man and woman walking by the side of mules heavily laden. Two little children, two young or too feeble to walk, were so packed in among the bundles that their faces were the only part of them in sight. The woman was crying bitterly. 'More of these exiles. God help the poor creatures!' thought Felipe; and he pulled out his purse, and gave the woman a piece of gold. She looked up in as great astonishment as if the money had fallen from the skies. 'Thanks! Thanks, Senor!' she exclaimed; and the man coming up to Felipe said also, 'God reward you, Senor! That is more money than I had in the world! Does the Senor know of any place where I could get work?' Felipe longed to say, 'Yes, come to my estate; there you shall have work!' In the olden time he would have done it without a second thought, for both the man and the woman had good faces,—were young and strong. But the pay-roll of the Moreno estate was even now too long for its dwindled fortunes. 'No, my man, I am sorry to say I do not,' he answered. 'I live a long way from here. Where were you thinking of going?' 'Somewhere in San Jacinto,' said the man. 'They say the Americans have not come in there much yet. I have a brother living there. Thanks, Senor; may the saints reward you!' 'San Jacinto!' After Felipe returned home, the name haunted his thoughts. The grand mountain-top bearing that name he had known well in many a distant horizon. 'Juan Can,' he said one day, 'are there many Indians in San Jacinto?' 'The mountain?' said Juan Can. 'Ay, I suppose, the mountain,' said Felipe. 'What else is there?' 'The valley, too,' replied Juan. 'The San Jacinto Valley is a fine, broad valley, though the river is not much to be counted on. It is mostly dry sand a good part of the year. But there is good grazing. There is one village of Indians I know in the valley; some of the San Luis Rey Indians came from there; and up on the mountain is a big village; the wildest Indians in all the country live there. Oh, they are fierce, Senor!' The next morning Felipe set out for San Jacinto. Why had no one mentioned, why had he not himself known, of these villages? Perhaps there were yet others he had not heard of. Hope sprang in Felipe's impressionable nature as easily as it died. An hour, a moment, might see him both lifted up and cast down. When he rode into the sleepy little village street of San Bernardino, and saw, in the near horizon, against the southern sky, a superb mountain-peak, changing in the sunset lights from turquoise to ruby, and from ruby to turquoise again, he said to himself, 'She is there! I have found her!' The sight of the mountain affected him, as it had always affected Aunt Ri, with an indefinable, solemn sense of something revealed, yet hidden. 'San Jacinto?' he said to a bystander, pointing to it with his whip. 'Yes, Senor,' replied the man. As he spoke, a pair of black horses came whirling round the corner, and he sprang to one side, narrowly escaping being knocked down. 'That Tennessee fellow'll run over somebody yet, with those black devils of his, if he don't look out,' he muttered, as he recovered his balance. Felipe glanced at the horses, then driving his spurs deep into his horse's sides, galloped after them. 'Baba! by God!' he cried aloud in his excitement and forgetful of everything, he urged his horse faster, shouting as he rode, 'Stop that man! Stop that man with the black horses!' Jos, hearing his name called on all sides, reined in Benito and Baba as soon as he could, and looked around in bewilderment to see what had happened. Before he had time to ask any questions, Felipe had overtaken him, and riding straight to Baba's head, had flung himself from his own horse and taken Baba by the rein, crying, 'Baba! Baba!' Baba knew his voice, and began to whinny and plunge. Felipe was nearly unmanned. For the second, he forgot everything. A crowd was gathering around them. It had never been quite clear to the San Bernardino mind that Jos's title to Benito and Baba would bear looking into; and it was no surprise, therefore, to some of the on-lookers, to hear Felipe cry in a loud voice, looking suspiciously at Jos, 'How did you get him?' Jos was a wag, and Jos was never hurried. The man did not live, nor could the occasion arrive, which would quicken his constitutional drawl. Before even beginning his answer he crossed one leg over the other and took a long, observant look at Felipe; then in a
