Yes, Alessandro saw. He had been seeing this precise thing for months. Many times, in his dreams and in his waking thoughts, he had lived over scenes similar to this. An almost preternatural calm and wisdom seemed to be given him now.
“Yes, I see, Senor,” he said. “I am not surprised. I knew it would come; but I hoped it would not be till after harvest. I will not give you any trouble, Senor, because I cannot. If I could, I would. But I have heard all about the new law which gives all the Indians' lands to the Americans. We cannot help ourselves. But it is very hard, Senor.” He paused.
The man, confused and embarrassed, astonished beyond expression at being met in this way by an Indian, did not find words come ready to his tongue. “Of course, I know it does seem a little rough on fellows like you, that are industrious, and have done some work on the land. But you see the land's in the market; I've paid my money for it.”
“The Senor is going to build a house?” asked Alessandro.
“Yes,” the man answered. “I've got my family in San Diego, and I want to get them settled as soon as I can. My wife won't feel comfortable till she's in her own house. We're from the States, and she's been used to having everything comfortable.”
“I have a wife and child, Senor,” said Alessandro, still in the same calm, deliberate tone; “and we have a very good house of two rooms. It would save the Senor's building, if he would buy mine.”
“How far is it?” said the man. “I can't tell exactly where the boundaries of my land are, for the stakes we set have been pulled up.”
“Yes, Senor, I pulled them up and burned them. They were on my land,” replied Alessandro. “My house is farther west than your stakes; and I have large wheat-fields there, too,—many acres, Senor, all planted.”
Here was a chance, indeed. The man's eyes gleamed. He would do the handsome thing. He would give this fellow something for his house and wheat-crops. First he would see the house, however; and it was for that purpose he had walked back with Alessandro, When he saw the neat whitewashed adobe, with its broad veranda, the sheds and corrals all in good order, he instantly resolved to get possession of them by fair means or foul.
“There will be three hundred dollars' worth of wheat in July, Senor, you can see for yourself; and a house so good as that, you cannot build for less than one hundred dollars. What will you give me for them?”
“I suppose I can have them without paying you for them, if I choose,” said the man, insolently.
“No, Senor,” replied Alessandro.
“What's to hinder, then, I'd like to know!” in a brutal sneer. “You haven't got any rights here, whatever, according to law.”
“I shall hinder, Senor,” replied Alessandro. “I shall burn down the sheds and corrals, tear down the house; and before a blade of the wheat is reaped, I will burn that.” Still in the same calm tone.
“What'll you take?” said the man, sullenly.
“Two hundred dollars,” replied Alessandro.
“Well, leave your plough and wagon, and I'll give it to you,” said the man; “and a big fool I am, too. Well laughed at, I'll be, do you know it, for buying out an Indian!”
“The wagon, Senor, cost me one hundred and thirty dollars in San Diego. You cannot buy one so good for less. I will not sell it. I need it to take away my things in. The plough you may have. That is worth twenty.”
“I'll do it,” said the man; and pulling out a heavy buckskin pouch, he counted out into Alessandro's hand two hundred dollars in gold.
“Is that all right?” he said, as he put down the last piece.
“That is the sum I said, Senor,” replied Alessandro. “Tomorrow, at noon, you can come into the house.”
“Where will you go?” asked the man, again slightly touched by Alessandro's manner. “Why don't you stay round here? I expect you could get work enough; there are a lot of farmers coming in here; they'll want hands.”
A fierce torrent of words sprang to Alessandro's lips, but he choked them back. “I do not know where I shall go, but I will not stay here,” he said; and that ended the interview.
“I don't know as I blame him a mite for feeling that way,” thought the man from the States, as he walked slowly back to his pile of lumber. “I expect I should feel just so myself.”
Almost before Alessandro had finished this tale, he began to move about the room, taking down, folding up, opening and shutting lids; his restlessness was terrible to see. “By sunrise, I would like to be off,” he said. “It is like death, to be in the house which is no longer ours.” Ramona had spoken no words since her first cry on hearing that terrible laugh. She was like one stricken dumb. The shock was greater to her than to Alessandro. He had lived with it ever present in his thoughts for a year. She had always hoped. But far more dreadful than the loss of her home, was the anguish of seeing, hearing, the changed face, changed voice, of Alessandro. Almost this swallowed up the other. She obeyed him mechanically, working faster and faster as he grew more and more feverish in his haste. Before sundown the little house was dismantled; everything, except the bed and the stove, packed in the big wagon.
“Now, we must cook food for the journey,” said Alessandro.
“Where are we going?” said the weeping Ramona.
“Where?” ejaculated Alessandro, so scornfully that it sounded like impatience with Ramona, and made her tears flow afresh. “Where? I know not, Majella! Into the mountains, where the white men come not! At sunrise we will start.”
Ramona wished to say good-by to their friends. There were women in the village that she tenderly loved. But Alessandro was unwilling. “There will be weeping and crying, Majella; I pray you do not speak to one. Why should we have more tears? Let us disappear. I will say all to Ysidro. He will tell them.”
This was a sore grief to Ramona. In her heart she rebelled against it, as she had never yet rebelled against an act of Alessandro's; but she could not distress him. Was not his burden heavy enough now?
Without a word of farewell to any one, they set off in the gray dawn, before a creature was stirring in the village,—the wagon piled high; Ramona, her baby in her arms, in front; Alessandro walking. The load was heavy. Benito and Baba walked slowly. Capitan, unhappy, looking first at Ramona's face, then at Alessandro's, walked dispiritedly by their side. He knew all was wrong.
As Alessandro turned the horses into a faintly marked road leading in a northeasterly direction, Ramona said with a sob, “Where does this road lead, Alessandro?”
“To San Jacinto,” he said. “San Jacinto Mountain. Do not look back, Majella! Do not look back!” he cried, as he saw Ramona, with streaming eyes, gazing back towards San Pasquale. “Do not look back! It is gone! Pray to the saints now, Majella! Pray! Pray!”
THE Senora Moreno was dying. It had been a sad two years in the Moreno house. After the first excitement following Ramona's departure had died away, things had settled down in a surface similitude of their old routine. But nothing was really the same. No one was so happy as before. Juan Canito was heart-broken. There had been set over him the very Mexican whose coming to the place he had dreaded. The sheep had not done well; there had been a drought; many had died of hunger,—a thing for which the new Mexican overseer was not to blame, though it pleased Juan to hold him so, and to say from morning till night that if his leg had not been broken, or if the lad Alessandro had been there, the wool-crop would have been as big as ever. Not one of the servants liked this Mexican; he had a sorry time of it, poor fellow; each man and woman on the place had or fancied some reason for being set against him; some from sympathy with Juan Can, some from idleness and general impatience; Margarita, most of all, because he was not Alessandro. Margarita, between remorse about her young mistress and pique and disappointment about Alessandro, had become a very unhappy girl; and her mother, instead of comforting or soothing her, added to her misery by continually bemoaning Ramona's fate. The void that Ramona had left in the whole household seemed an irreparable one; nothing came to fill it; there was no forgetting; every day her name was mentioned by some one; mentioned with bated breath, fearful conjecture, compassion, and regret. Where had she vanished? Had she indeed gone to the convent, as she said, or had she fled with Alessandro?
Margarita would have given her right hand to know. Only Juan Can felt sure. Very well Juan Can knew that nobody but Alessandro had the wit and the power over Baba to lure him out of that corral, “and never a rail out of its place.” And the saddle, too! Ay, the smart lad! He had done the best he could for the Senorita; but, Holy Virgin! what had got into the Senorita to run off like that, with an Indian,—even Alessandro! The fiends had bewitched her. Tirelessly Juan Can questioned every traveller, every wandering herder he saw. No one knew anything of Alessandro, beyond the fact that all the Temecula Indians had been driven out of their village, and that there was now not an Indian in the valley. There was a rumor that Alessandro and his father had both died; but no one knew anything certainly. The Temecula Indians had disappeared, that was all there was of it,—disappeared, like any wild creatures, foxes or coyotes, hunted down, driven out; the valley was rid of them. But the Senorita! She was not with these fugitives. That could not be! Heaven forbid!
“If I'd my legs, I'd go and see for myself.” said Juan Can. “It would be some comfort to know even the worst. Perdition take the Senora, who drove her to it! Ay, drove her to it! That's what I say, Luigo.” In some of his most venturesome wrathy moments he would say: “There's none of you know the truth about the Senorita but me! It's a hard hand the Senora's reared her with, from the first. She's a wonderful woman, our Senora! She gets power over one.”
But the Senora's power was shaken now. More changed than all else in the changed Moreno household, was the relation between the Senora Moreno and her son Felipe. On the morning after Ramona's disappearance, words had been spoken by each which neither would ever forget. In fact, the Senora believed that it was of them she was dying, and perhaps that was not far from the truth; the reason that forces could no longer rally in her to repel disease, lying no doubt largely in the fact that to live seemed no longer to her desirable.
Felipe had found the note Ramona had laid on his bed. Before it was yet dawn he had waked, and tossing uneasily under the light covering had heard the rustle of the paper, and knowing instinctively that it was from Ramona, had risen instantly to make sure of it. Before his mother opened her window, he had read it. He felt like one bereft of his senses as he read. Gone! Gone with Alessandro! Stolen away like a thief in the night, his dear, sweet little sister! Ah, what a cruel shame! Scales seemed to drop from Felipe's eyes as he lay motionless, thinking of it. A shame! a cruel shame! And he and his mother were the ones who had brought it on Ramona's head, and on the house of Moreno. Felipe felt as if he had been under a spell all along, not to have realized this. “That's what I told my mother!” he groaned,—“that it drove her to running away! Oh, my sweet Ramona! what will become of her? I will go after them, and bring them back;” and Felipe rose, and hastily dressing himself, ran down the veranda steps, to gain a little more time to think. He returned shortly, to meet his mother standing in the doorway, with pale, affrighted face.
“Felipe!” she cried, “Ramona is not here.”
“I know it,” he replied in an angry tone. “That is what I told you we should do,—drive her to running away with Alessandro!”
“With Alessandro!” interrupted the Senora.
“Yes,” continued Felipe,—“with Alessandro, the Indian! Perhaps you think it is less disgrace to the names of Ortegna and Moreno to have her run away with him, than to be married to him here under our roof! I do not! Curse the day, I say, when I ever lent myself to breaking the girl's heart! I am going after them, to fetch them back!”
If the skies had opened and rained fire, the Senora had hardly less quailed and wondered than she did at these words; but even for fire from the skies she would not surrender till she must.
“How know you that it is with Alessandro?” she said.
“Because she has written it here!” cried Felipe, defiantly holding up his little note. “She left this, her good-by to me. Bless her! She writes like a saint, to thank me for all my goodness to her,—I, who drove her to steal out of my house like a thief!”
The phrase, “my house,” smote the Senora's ear like a note from some other sphere, which indeed it was,—from the new world into which Felipe had been in an hour born. Her cheeks flushed, and she opened her lips to reply; but before she had uttered a word, Luigo came running round the corner, Juan Can hobbling after him at a miraculous pace on his crutches. “Senor Felipe! Senor Felipe! Oh, Senora!” they cried. “Thieves have been here in the night! Baba is gone,—Baba, and the Senorita's saddle.”
A malicious smile broke over the Senora's countenance, and turning to Felipe, she said in a tone—what a tone it was! Felipe felt as if he must put his hands to his ears to shut it out; Felipe would never forget,—“As you were saying, like a thief in the night!”
With a swifter and more energetic movement than any had ever before seen Senor Felipe make, he stepped forward, saying in an undertone to his mother, “For God's sake, mother, not a word before the men!—What is that you say, Luigo? Baba gone? We must see to our corral. I will come down, after breakfast, and look at it;” and turning his back on them, he drew his mother by a firm grasp, she could not resist, into the house.
She gazed at him in sheer, dumb wonder.
“Ay, mother,” he said, “you may well look thus in wonder; I have been no man, to let my foster-sister, I care not what blood were in her veins, be driven to this pass! I will set out this day, and bring her back.”
“The day you do that, then, I lie in this house dead!” retorted the Senora, at white heat. “You may rear as many Indian families as you please under the Moreno roof, I will at least have my grave!” In spite of her anger, grief convulsed her; and in another second she had burst into tears, and sunk helpless and trembling into a chair. No counterfeiting now. No pretences. The Senora Moreno's heart broke within her, when those words passed her lips to her adored Felipe. At the sight, Felipe flung himself on his knees before her; he kissed the aged hands as they lay trembling in her lap. “Mother mia,” he cried, “you will break my heart if you speak like that! Oh, why, why do you command me to do what a man may not? I would die for you, my mother; but how can I see my sister a homeless wanderer in the wilderness?”
“I suppose the man Alessandro has something he calls a home,” said the Senora, regaining herself a little. “Had they no plans? Spoke she not in her letter of what they would do?”
“Only that they would go to Father Salvierderra first,” he replied.
“Ah!” The Senora reflected. At first startled, her second thought was that this would be the best possible thing which could happen. “Father Salvierderra will counsel them what to do,” she said. “He could no doubt establish them in Santa Barbara in some way. My son, when you reflect, you will see the impossibility of bringing them here. Help them in any way you like, but do not bring them here.” She paused. “Not until I am dead, Felipe! It will not be long.”
Felipe bowed his head in his mother's lap. She laid her hands on his hair, and stroked it with passionate tenderness. “My Felipe!” she said. “It was a cruel fate to rob me of you at the last!”
“Mother! mother!” he cried in anguish. “I am yours,—wholly, devotedly yours! Why do you torture me thus?”
“I will not torture you more,” she said wearily, in a feeble tone. “I ask only one thing of you; let me never hear again the name of that wretched girl, who has brought all this woe on our house; let her name never be spoken on this place by man, woman, or child. Like a thief in the night! Ay, a horse-thief!”
Felipe sprang to his feet.
“Mother.” he said, “Baba was Ramona's own; I myself gave him to her as soon as he was born!”
The Senora made no reply. She had fainted. Calling the maids, in terror and sorrow Felipe bore her to her bed, and she did not leave it for many days. She seemed hovering between life and death. Felipe watched over her as a lover might; her great mournful eyes followed his every motion. She spoke little, partly because of physical weakness, partly from despair. The Senora had got her death-blow. She would die hard. It would take long. Yet she was dying, and she knew it.
Felipe did not know it. When he saw her going about again, with a step only a little slower than before, and with a countenance not so much changed as he had feared, he thought she would be well again, after a time. And now he would go in search of Ramona. How he hoped he should find them in Santa Barbara! He must leave them there, or wherever he should find them; never again would he for a moment contemplate the possibility of bringing them home with him. But he would see them; help them, if need be. Ramona should not feel herself an outcast, so long as he lived.
When he said, agitatedly, to his mother, one night, “You are so strong now, mother, I think I will take a journey; I will not be away long,—not over a week,” she understood, and with a deep sigh replied: “I am not strong; but I am as strong as I shall ever be. If the journey must be taken, it is as well done now.”
How was the Senora changed!
“It must be, mother,” said Felipe, “or I would not leave you. I will set off before sunrise, so I will say farewell tonight.”
But in the morning, at his first step, his mother's window opened, and there she stood, wan, speechless, looking at him. “You must go, my son?” she asked at last.
“I must, mother!” and Felipe threw his arms around her, and kissed her again and again. “Dearest mother! Do smile! Can you not?”
“No, my son, I cannot. Farewell. The saints keep you. Farewell.” And she turned, that she might not see him go.
Felipe rode away with a sad heart, but his purpose did not falter. Following straight down the river road to the sea, he then kept up along the coast, asking here and there, cautiously, if persons answering to the description of Alessandro and Ramona had been seen. No one had seen any such persons.
When, on the night of the second day, he rode up to the Santa Barbara Mission, the first figure he saw was the venerable Father Salvierderra sitting in the corridor. As Felipe approached, the old man's face beamed with pleasure, and he came forward totteringly, leaning on a staff in each hand. “Welcome, my son!” he said. “Are all well? You find me very feeble just now; my legs are failing me sorely this autumn.”
Dismay seized on Felipe at the Father's first words. He would not have spoken thus, had he seen Ramona. Barely replying to the greeting, Felipe exclaimed: “Father, I come seeking Ramona. Has she not been with you?”
Father Salvierderra's face was reply to the question. “Ramona!” he cried. “Seeking Ramona! What has befallen the blessed child?”
It was a bitter story for Felipe to tell; but he told it, sparing himself no shame. He would have suffered less in the telling, had he known how well Father Salvierderra understood his mother's character, and her almost unlimited power over all persons around her. Father Salvierderra was not shocked at the news of Ramona's attachment for Alessandro. He regretted it, but he did not think it shame, as the Senora had done. As Felipe talked with him, he perceived even more clearly how bitter and unjust his mother had been to Alessandro.
“He is a noble young man,” said Father Salvierderra. “His father was one of the most trusted of Father Peyri's assistants. You must find them, Felipe. I wonder much they did not come to me. Perhaps they may yet come. When you find them, bear them my blessing, and say that I wish they would come hither. I would like to give them my blessing before I die. Felipe, I shall never leave Santa Barbara again. My time draws near.”
Felipe was so full of impatience to continue his search, that he hardly listened to the Father's words. “I will not tarry,” he said. “I cannot rest till I find her. I will ride back as far as Ventura to-night.”
“You will send me word by a messenger, when you find them,” said the Father. “God grant no harm has befallen them. I will pray for them, Felipe;” and he tottered into the church.
Felipe's thoughts, as he retraced his road, were full of bewilderment and pain. He was wholly at loss to conjecture what course Alessandro and Ramona had taken, or what could have led them to abandon their intention of going to Father Salvierderra. Temecula seemed the only place, now, to look for them; and yet from Temecula Felipe had heard, only a few days before leaving home, that there was not an Indian left in the valley. But he could at least learn there where the Indians had gone. Poor as the clew seemed, it was all he had. Cruelly Felipe urged his horse on his return journey. He grudged an hour's rest to himself or to the beast; and before he reached the head of the Temecula canon the creature was near spent. At the steepest part he jumped off and walked, to save her strength. As he was toiling slowly up a narrow, rocky pass, he suddenly saw an Indian's head peering over the ledge. He made signs to him to come down. The Indian turned his head, and spoke to some one behind; one after another a score of figures rose. They made signs to Felipe to come up. “Poor things!” he thought; “they are afraid.” He shouted to them that his horse was too tired to climb that wall; but if they would come down, he would give them money, holding up a gold-piece. They consulted among themselves; presently they began slowly descending, still halting at intervals, and looking suspiciously at him. He held up the gold again, and beckoned. As soon as they could see his face distinctly, they broke into a run. That was no enemy's face.
Only one of the number could speak Spanish. On hearing this man's reply to Felipe's first question, a woman, who had listened sharply and caught the word Alessandro, came forward, and spoke rapidly in the Indian tongue.
“This woman has seen Alessandro,” said the man.
“Where?” said Felipe, breathlessly.
“In Temecula, two weeks ago,” he said.
“Ask her if he had any one with him,” said Felipe.
“No,” said the woman. “He was alone.”
A convulsion passed over Felipe's face. “Alone!” What did this mean! He reflected. The woman watched him. “Is she sure he was alone; there was no one with him?”
“Yes.”
“Was he riding a big black horse?”
“No, a white horse,” answered the woman, promptly. “A small white horse.”
It was Carmena, every nerve of her loyal nature on the alert to baffle this pursuer of Alessandro and Ramona. Again Felipe reflected. “Ask her if she saw him for any length of time; how long she saw him.”
“All night,” he answered. “He spent the night where she did.”
Felipe despaired. “Does she know where he is now?” he asked.
“He was going to San Luis Obispo, to go in a ship to Monterey.”
“What to do?”
“She does not know.”
“Did he say when he would come back?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Never! He said he would never set foot in Temecula again.”
“Does she know him well?”
“As well as her own brother.”
What more could Felipe ask? With a groan, wrung from the very depths of his heart, he tossed the man a gold-piece; another to the woman. “I am sorry,” he said. “Alessandro was my friend. I wanted to see him;” and he rode away, Carmena's eyes following him with a covert gleam of triumph.
When these last words of his were interpreted to her, she started, made as if she would run after him, but checked herself. “No,” she thought. “It may be a lie. He may be an enemy, for all that. I will not tell. Alessandro wished not to be found. I will not tell.”
And thus vanished the last chance of succor for Ramona; vanished in a moment; blown like a thistledown on a chance breath,—the breath of a loyal, loving friend, speaking a lie to save her.
Distraught with grief, Felipe returned home. Ramona had been very ill when she left home. Had she died, and been buried by the lonely, sorrowing Alessandro? And was that the reason Alessandro was going away to the North, never to return? Fool that he was, to have shrunk from speaking Ramona's name to the Indians! He would return, and ask again. As soon as he had seen his mother, he would set off again, and never cease searching till he had found either Ramona or her grave. But when Felipe entered his mother's presence, his first look in her face told him that he would not leave her side again until he had laid her at rest in the tomb.
“Thank God! you have come, Felipe,” she said in a feeble voice. “I had begun to fear you would not come in time to say farewell to me. I am going to leave you, my son;” and the tears rolled down her cheeks.
Though she no longer wished to live, neither did she wish to die,—this poor, proud, passionate, defeated, bereft Senora. All the consolations of her religion seemed to fail her. She had prayed incessantly, but got no peace. She fixed her imploring eyes on the Virgin's face and on the saints; but all seemed to her to wear a forbidding look. “If Father Salvierderra would only come!” she groaned. “He could give me peace. If only I can live till he comes again!”
When Felipe told her of the old man's feeble state, and that he would never again make the journey, she turned her face to the wall and wept. Not only for her own soul's help did she wish to see him: she wished to put into his hands the Ortegna jewels. What would become of them? To whom should she transfer the charge? Was there a secular priest within reach that she could trust? When her sister had said, in her instructions, “the Church,” she meant, as the Senora Moreno well knew, the Franciscans. The Senora dared not consult Felipe; yet she must. Day by day these fretting anxieties and perplexities wasted her strength, and her fever grew higher and higher. She asked no questions as to the result of Felipe's journey, and he dared not mention Ramona's name. At last he could bear it no longer, and one day said, “Mother, I found no trace of Ramona. I have not the least idea where she is. The Father had not seen her or heard of her. I fear she is dead.”
“Better so,” was the Senora's sole reply; and she fell again into still deeper, more perplexed thought about the hidden treasure. Each day she resolved, “To-morrow I will tell Felipe;” and when to-morrow came, she put it off again. Finally she decided not to do it till she found herself dying. Father Salvierderra might yet come once more, and then all would be well. With trembling hands she wrote him a letter, imploring him to be brought to her, and sent it by messenger, who was empowered to hire a litter and four men to bring the Father gently and carefully all the way. But when the messenger reached Santa Barbara, Father Salvierderra was too feeble to be moved; too feeble even to write. He could write only by amanuensis, and wrote, therefore, guardedly, sending her his blessing, and saying that he hoped her foster-child might yet be restored to the keeping of her friends. The Father had been in sore straits of mind, as month after month had passed without tidings of his “blessed child.”
Soon after this came the news that the Father was dead. This dealt the Senora a terrible blow. She never left her bed after it. And so the year had worn on; and Felipe, mourning over his sinking and failing mother, and haunted by terrible fears about the lost Ramona, had been tortured indeed.
But the end drew near, now. The Senora was plainly dying. The Ventura doctor had left off coming, saying that he could do no more; nothing remained but to give her what ease was possible; in a day or two more all would be over. Felipe hardly left her bedside. Rarely was mother so loved and nursed by son. No daughter could have shown more tenderness and devotion. In the close relation and affection of these last days, the sense of alienation and antagonism faded from both their hearts.
“My adorable Felipe!” she would murmur. “What a son hast thou been!” And, “My beloved mother! How shall I give you up?” Felipe would reply, bowing his head on her hands,—so wasted now, so white, so weak; those hands which had been cruel and strong little more than one short year ago. Ah, no one could refuse to forgive the Senora now! The gentle Ramona, had she seen her, had wept tears of pity. Her eyes wore at times a look almost of terror. It was the secret. How should she speak it? What would Felipe say? At last the moment came. She had been with difficulty roused from a long fainting; one more such would be the last, she knew,—knew even better than those around her. As she regained consciousness, she gasped, “Felipe! Alone!”
He understood, and waved the rest away.
“Alone!” she said again, turning her eyes to the door.
“Leave the room,” said Felipe; “all—wait outside;” and he closed the door on them. Even then the Senora hesitated. Almost was she ready to go out of life leaving the hidden treasure to its chance of discovery, rather than with her own lips reveal to Felipe what she saw now, saw with the terrible, relentless clear-sightedness of death, would make him, even after she was in her grave, reproach her in his thoughts.
But she dared not withhold it. It must be said. Pointing to the statue of Saint Catharine, whose face seemed, she thought, to frown unforgiving upon her, she said, “Felipe—behind that statue—look!”
Felipe thought her delirious, and said tenderly, “Nothing is there, dearest mother. Be calm. I am here.”
New terror seized the dying woman. Was she to be forced to carry the secret to the grave? to be denied this late avowal? “No! no! Felipe—there is a door there—secret door. Look! Open! I must tell you!”
Hastily Felipe moved the statue. There was indeed the door, as she had said.
“Do not tell me now, mother dear. Wait till you are stronger,” he said. As he spoke, he turned, and saw, with alarm, his mother sitting upright in the bed, her right arm outstretched, her hand pointing to the door, her eyes in a glassy stare, her face convulsed. Before a cry could pass his lips, she had fallen back. The Senora Moreno was dead.
At Felipe's cry, the women waiting in the hall hurried in, wailing aloud as their first glance showed them all was over. In the confusion, Felipe, with a pale, set face, pushed the statue back into its place. Even then a premonition of horror swept over him. What was he, the son, to find behind that secret door, at sight of which his mother had died with that look of anguished terror in her eyes? All through the sad duties of the next four days Felipe was conscious of the undercurrent of this premonition. The funeral ceremonies were impressive. The little chapel could not hold the quarter part of those who came, from far and near. Everybody wished to do honor to the Senora Moreno. A priest from Ventura and one from San Luis Obispo were there. When all was done, they bore the Senora to the little graveyard on the hillside, and laid her by the side of her husband and her children; silent and still at last, the restless, passionate, proud, sad heart! When, the night after the funeral, the servants saw Senor Felipe going into his mother's room, they shuddered, and whispered, “Oh, he must not! He will break his heart, Senor Felipe! How he loved her!”
Old Marda ventured to follow him, and at the threshold said: “Dear Senor Felipe, do not! It is not good to go there! Come away!”
But he put her gently by, saying, “I would rather be here, good Marda;” and went in and locked the door.
It was past midnight when he came out. His face was stern. He had buried his mother again. Well might the Senora have dreaded to tell to Felipe the tale of the Ortegna treasure. Until he reached the bottom of the jewel-box, and found the Senora Ortegna's letter to his mother, he was in entire bewilderment at all he saw. After he had read this letter, he sat motionless for a long time, his head buried in his hands. His soul was wrung.
“And she thought that shame, and not this!” he said bitterly.
But one thing remained for Felipe now, If Ramona lived, he would find her, and restore to her this her rightful property. If she were dead, it must go to the Santa Barbara College.
“Surely my mother must have intended to give it to the Church,” he said. “But why keep it all this time? It is this that has killed her. Oh, shame! oh, disgrace!” From the grave in which Felipe had buried his mother now, was no resurrection.
Replacing everything as before in the safe hiding-place, he sat down and wrote a letter to the Superior of the Santa Barbara College, telling him of the existence of these valuables, which in certain contingencies would belong to the College. Early in the morning he gave this letter to Juan Canito, saying: “I am going away, Juan, on a journey. If anything happens to me, and I do not return, send this letter by trusty messenger to Santa Barbara.”
“Will you be long away, Senor Felipe?” asked the old man, piteously.
“I cannot tell, Juan,” replied Felipe. “It may be only a short time; it may be long. I leave everything in your care. You will do all according to your best judgment, I know. I will say to all that I have left you in charge.”
“Thanks, Senor Felipe! Thanks!” exclaimed Juan, happier than he had been for two years. “Indeed, you may trust me! From the time you were a boy till now, I have had no thought except for your house.”
Even in heaven the Senora Moreno had felt woe as if in hell, had she known the thoughts with which her Felipe galloped this morning out of the gateway through which, only the day before, he had walked weeping behind her body borne to burial.
“And she thought this no shame to the house of Moreno!” he said. “My God!”
DURING the first day of Ramona's and Alessandro's sad journey they scarcely spoke. Alessandro walked at the horses' heads, his face sunk on his breast, his eyes fixed on the ground. Ramona watched him in anxious fear. Even the baby's voice and cooing laugh won from him no response. After they were camped for the night, she said, “Dear Alessandro, will you not tell me where we are going?”
In spite of her gentleness, there was a shade of wounded feeling in her tone. Alessandro flung himself on his knees before her, and cried: “My Majella! my Majella! it seems to me I am going mad! I cannot tell what to do. I do not know what I think; all my thoughts seem whirling round as leaves do in brooks in the time of the spring rains. Do you think I can be going mad? It was enough to make me!”
Ramona, her own heart wrung with fear, soothed him as best she could. “Dear Alessandro,” she said, “let us go to Los Angeles, and not live with the Indians any more. You could get work there. You could play at dances sometimes; there must be plenty of work. I could get more sewing to do, too. It would be better, I think.”
He looked horror-stricken at the thought. “Go live among the white people!” he cried. “What does Majella think would become of one Indian, or two, alone among whites? If they will come to our villages and drive us out a hundred at a time, what would they do to one man alone? Oh, Majella is foolish!”
“But there are many of your people at work for whites at San Bernardino and other places,” she persisted. “Why could not we do as they do?”
“Yes,” he said bitterly, “at work for whites; so they are, Majella has not seen. No man will pay an Indian but half wages; even long ago, when the Fathers were not all gone, and tried to help the Indians, my father has told me that it was the way only to pay an Indian one-half that a white man or a Mexican had. It was the Mexicans, too, did that, Majella. And now they pay the Indians in money sometimes, half wages; sometimes in bad flour, or things he does not want; sometimes in whiskey; and if he will not take it, and asks for his money, they laugh, and tell him to go, then. One man in San Bernardino last year, when an Indian would not take a bottle of sour wine for pay for a day's work, shot him in the cheek with his pistol, and told him to mind how he was insolent any more! Oh, Majella, do not ask me to go work in the towns! I should kill some man, Majella, if I saw things like that.”
Ramona shuddered, and was silent. Alessandro continued: “If Majella would not be afraid, I know a place, high up on the mountain, where no white man has ever been, or ever will be. I found it when I was following a bear. The beast led me up. It was his home; and I said then, it was a fit hiding-place for a man. There is water, and a little green valley. We could live there; but it would be no more than to live,, it is very small, the valley. Majella would be afraid?”
“Yes, Alessandro, I would be afraid, all alone on a high mountain. Oh, do not let us go there! Try something else first, Alessandro. Is there no other Indian village you know?”
“There is Saboba,” he said, “at foot of the San Jacinto Mountain; I had thought of that. Some of my people went there from Temecula; but it is a poor little village, Majella. Majella would not like to live in it. Neither do I believe it will long be any safer than San Pasquale. There was a kind, good old man who owned all that valley,—Senor Ravallo; he found the village of Saboba there when he came to the country. It is one of the very oldest of all; he was good to all Indians, and he said they should never be disturbed, never. He is dead; but his three sons have the estate yet, and I think they would keep their father's promise to the Indians. But you see, to-morrow, Majella, they may die, or go back to Mexico, as Senor Valdez did, and then the Americans will get it, as they did Temecula. And there are already white men living in the valley. We will go that way, Majella. Majella shall see. If she says stay, we will stay.”
It was in the early afternoon that they entered the broad valley of San Jacinto. They entered it from the west. As they came in, though the sky over their heads was overcast and gray, the eastern and northeastern part of the valley was flooded with a strange light, at once ruddy and golden. It was a glorious sight. The jagged top and spurs of San Jacinto Mountain shone like the turrets and posterns of a citadel built of rubies. The glow seemed preternatural.
“Behold San Jacinto!” cried Alessandro.
Ramona exclaimed in delight. “It is an omen!” she said. “We are going into the sunlight, out of the shadow;” and she glanced back at the west, which was of a slaty blackness.
“I like it not!” said Alessandro. “The shadow follows too fast!”
Indeed it did. Even as he spoke, a fierce wind blew from the north, and tearing off fleeces from the black cloud, sent them in scurrying masses across the sky. In a moment more, snow-flakes began to fall.
“Holy Virgin!” cried Alessandro. Too well he knew what it meant. He urged the horses, running fast beside them. It was of no use. Too much even for Baba and Benito to make any haste, with the heavily loaded wagon.
“There is an old sheep-corral and a hut not over a mile farther, if we could but reach it!” groaned Alessandro. “Majella, you and the child will freeze.”
“She is warm on my breast,” said Ramona; “but, Alessandro, what ice in this wind! It is like a knife at my back!”
Alessandro uttered another ejaculation of dismay. The snow was fast thickening; already the track was covered. The wind lessened.
“Thank God, that wind no longer cuts as it did,” said Ramona, her teeth chattering, clasping the baby closer and closer.
“I would rather it blew than not,” said Alessandro; “it will carry the snow before it. A little more of this, and we cannot see, any more than in the night.”
Still thicker and faster fell the snow; the air was dense; it was, as Alessandro had said, worse than the darkness of night,—this strange opaque whiteness, thick, choking, freezing one's breath. Presently the rough jolting of the wagon showed that they were off the road. The horses stopped; refused to go on.
“We are lost, if we stay here!” cried Alessandro. “Come, my Benito, come!” and he took him by the head, and pulled him by main force back into the road, and led him along. It was terrible. Ramona's heart sank within her. She felt her arms growing numb; how much longer could she hold the baby safe? She called to Alessandro. He did not hear her; the wind had risen again; the snow was being blown in masses; it was like making headway among whirling snow-drifts.
“We will die,” thought Ramona. “Perhaps it is as well!” And that was the last she knew, till she heard a shouting, and found herself being shaken and beaten, and heard a strange voice saying, “Sorry ter handle yer so rough, ma'am, but we've got ter git yer out ter the fire!”
“Fire!” Were there such things as fire and warmth? Mechanically she put the baby into the unknown arms that were reaching up to her, and tried to rise from her seat; but she could not move.
“Set still! set still!” said the strange voice. “I'll jest carry the baby ter my wife, an' come back fur you. I allowed yer couldn't git up on yer feet;” and the tall form disappeared. The baby, thus vigorously disturbed from her warm sleep, began to cry.
“Thank God!” said Alessandro, at the plunging horses' heads. “The child is alive! Majella!” he called.
“Yes, Alessandro,” she answered faintly, the gusts sweeping her voice like a distant echo past him.
It was a marvellous rescue. They had been nearer the old sheep-corral than Alessandro had thought; but except that other storm-beaten travellers had reached it before them, Alessandro had never found it. Just as he felt his strength failing him, and had thought to himself, in almost the same despairing words as Ramona, “This will end all our troubles,” he saw a faint light to the left. Instantly he had turned the horses' heads towards it. The ground was rough and broken, and more than once he had been in danger of overturning the wagon; but he had pressed on, shouting at intervals for help. At last his call was answered, and another light appeared; this time a swinging one, coming slowly towards him,—a lantern, in the hand of a man, whose first words, “Wall, stranger, I allow yer inter trouble,” were as intelligible to Alessandro as if they had been spoken in the purest San Luiseno dialect.
Not so, to the stranger, Alessandro's grateful reply in Spanish.
“Another o' these no-'count Mexicans, by thunder!” thought Jeff Hyer to himself. “Blamed ef I'd lived in a country all my life, ef I wouldn't know better'n to git caught out in such weather's this!” And as he put the crying babe into his wife's arms, he said half impatiently, “Ef I'd knowed 't wuz Mexicans, Ri, I wouldn't ev' gone out ter 'um. They're more ter hum 'n I am, 'n these yer tropicks.”
“Naow, Jeff, yer know yer wouldn't let ennythin' in shape ev a human creetur go perishin' past aour fire sech weather's this,” replied the woman, as she took the baby, which recognized the motherly hand at its first touch, and ceased crying.
“Why, yer pooty, blue-eyed little thing!” she exclaimed, as she looked into the baby's face. “I declar, Jos, think o' sech a mite's this bein' aout'n this weather. I'll jest warm up some milk for it this minnit.”
“Better see't th' mother fust, Ri,” said Jeff, leading, half carrying, Ramona into the hut. “She's nigh abaout froze stiff!”
But the sight of her baby safe and smiling was a better restorative for Ramona than anything else, and in a few moments she had fully recovered. It was in a strange group she found herself. On a mattress, in the corner of the hut, lay a young man apparently about twenty-five, whose bright eyes and flushed cheeks told but too plainly the story of his disease. The woman, tall, ungainly, her face gaunt, her hands hardened and wrinkled, gown ragged, shoes ragged, her dry and broken light hair wound in a careless, straggling knot in her neck, wisps of it flying over her forehead, was certainly not a prepossessing figure. Yet spite of her careless, unkempt condition, there was a certain gentle dignity in her bearing, and a kindliness in her glance, which won trust and warmed hearts at once. Her pale blue eyes were still keen-sighted; and as she fixed them on Ramona, she thought to herself, “This ain't no common Mexican, no how.” “Be ye movers?” she said.
Ramona stared. In the little English she knew, that word was not included. “Ah, Senora,” she said regretfully, “I cannot talk in the English speech; only in Spanish.”
“Spanish, eh? Yer mean Mexican? Jos, hyar, he kin talk thet. He can't talk much, though; 'tain't good fur him; his lungs is out er kilter. Thet's what we're bringin' him hyar fur,—fur warm climate! 'pears like it, don't it?” and she chuckled grimly, but with a side glance of ineffable tenderness at the sick man. “Ask her who they be, Jos,” she added.
Jos lifted himself on his elbow, and fixing his shining eyes on Ramona, said in Spanish, “My mother asks if you are travellers?”
“Yes,” said Ramona. “We have come all the way from San Diego. We are Indians.”
“Injuns!” ejaculated Jos's mother. “Lord save us, Jos! Hev we reelly took in Injuns? What on airth—Well, well, she's fond uv her baby's enny white woman! I kin see thet; an', Injun or no Injun, they've got to stay naow. Yer couldn't turn a dog out 'n sech weather's this. I bet thet baby's father wuz white, then. Look at them blue eyes.”
Ramona listened and looked intently, but could understand nothing. Almost she doubted if the woman were really speaking English. She had never before heard so many English sentences without being able to understand one word. The Tennessee drawl so altered even the commonest words, that she did not recognize them. Turning to Jos, she said gently, “I know very little English. I am so sorry I cannot understand. Will it tire you to interpret to me what your mother said?”
Jos was as full of humor as his mother. “She wants me to tell her what you wuz sayin',” he said, “I allow, I'll only tell her the part on't she'll like best.—My mother says you can stay here with us till the storm is over,” he said to Ramona.
Swifter than lightning, Ramona had seized the woman's hand and carried it to her heart, with an expressive gesture of gratitude and emotion. “Thanks! thanks! Senora!” she cried.
“What is it she calls me, Jos?” asked his mother.
“Senora,” he replied. “It only means the same as lady.”
“Shaw, Jos! You tell her I ain't any lady. Tell her everybody round where we live calls me 'Aunt Ri,' or 'Mis Hyer;' she kin call me whichever she's a mind to. She's reel sweet-spoken.”
With some difficulty Jos explained his mother's disclaimer of the title of Senora, and the choice of names she offered to Ramona.
Ramona, with smiles which won both mother and son, repeated after him both names, getting neither exactly right at first trial, and finally said, “I like 'Aunt Ri' best; she is so kind, like aunt, to every one.”
“Naow, ain't thet queer, Jos,” said Aunt Ri, “aout here 'n thes wilderness to ketch sumbody sayin' thet,—jest what they all say ter hum? I donno's I'm enny kinder'n ennybody else. I don't want ter see ennybody put upon, nor noways sufferin', ef so be's I kin help; but thet ain't ennythin' stronary, ez I know. I donno how ennybody could feel enny different.”
“There's lots doos, mammy,” replied Jos, affectionately. “Yer'd find out fast enuf, ef yer went raound more. There's mighty few's good's you air ter everybody.”
Ramona was crouching in the corner by the fire, her baby held close to her breast. The place which at first had seemed a haven of warmth, she now saw was indeed but a poor shelter against the fearful storm which raged outside. It was only a hut of rough boards, carelessly knocked together for a shepherd's temporary home. It had been long unused, and many of the boards were loose and broken. Through these crevices, at every blast of the wind, the fine snow swirled. On the hearth were burning a few sticks of wood, dead cottonwood branches, which Jef Hyer had hastily collected before the storm reached its height. A few more sticks lay by the hearth. Aunt Ri glanced at them anxiously. A poor provision for a night in the snow. “Be ye warm, Jos?” she asked.
“Not very, mammy,” he said; “but I ain't cold, nuther; an' thet's somethin'.”
It was the way in the Hyer family to make the best of things; they had always possessed this virtue to such an extent, that they suffered from it as from a vice. There was hardly to be found in all Southern Tennessee a more contented, shiftless, ill-bestead family than theirs. But there was no grumbling. Whatever went wrong, whatever was lacking, it was “jest like aour luck,” they said, and did nothing, or next to nothing, about it. Good-natured, affectionate, humorous people; after all, they got more comfort out of life than many a family whose surface conditions were incomparably better than theirs. When Jos, their oldest child and only son, broke down, had hemorrhage after hemorrhage, and the doctor said the only thing that could save him was to go across the plains in a wagon to California, they said, “What good luck 'Lizy was married last year! Now there ain't nuthin' ter hinder sellin' the farm 'n goin' right off.” And they sold their little place for half it was worth, traded cattle for a pair of horses and a covered wagon, and set off, half beggared, with their sick boy on a bed in the bottom of the wagon, as cheery as if they were rich people on a pleasure-trip. A pair of steers “to spell” the horses, and a cow to give milk for Jos, they drove before them; and so they had come by slow stages, sometimes camping for a week at a time, all the way from Tennessee to the San Jacinto Valley. They were rewarded. Jos was getting well. Another six months, they thought, would see him cured; and it would have gone hard with any one who had tried to persuade either Jefferson or Maria Hyer that they were not as lucky a couple as could be found. Had they not saved Joshua, their son?
Nicknames among this class of poor whites in the South seem singularly like those in vogue in New England. From totally opposite motives, the lazy, easy-going Tennesseean and the hurry-driven Vermonter cut down all their family names to the shortest. To speak three syllables where one will answer, seems to the Vermonter a waste of time; to the Tennesseean, quite too much trouble. Mrs. Hyer could hardly recollect ever having heard her name, “Maria,” in full; as a child, and until she was married, she was simply “Ri;” and as soon as she had a house of her own, to become a centre of hospitality and help, she was adopted by common consent of the neighborhood, in a sort of titular and universal aunt-hood, which really was a much greater tribute and honor than she dreamed. Not a man, woman, or child, within her reach, that did not call her or know of her as “Aunt Ri.”
“I donno whether I'd best make enny more fire naow or not,” she said reflectively; “ef this storm's goin' to last till mornin', we'll come short o' wood, thet's clear.” As she spoke, the door of the hut burst open, and her husband staggered in, followed by Alessandro, both covered with snow, their arms full of wood. Alessandro, luckily, knew of a little clump of young cottonwood-trees in a ravine, only a few rods from the house; and the first thing he had thought of, after tethering the horses in shelter between the hut and the wagons, was to get wood. Jeff, seeing him take a hatchet from the wagon, had understood, got his own, and followed; and now there lay on the ground enough to keep them warm for hours. As soon as Alessandro had thrown down his load, he darted to Ramona, and kneeling down, looked anxiously into the baby's face, then into hers; then he said devoutly, “The saints be praised, my Majella! It is a miracle!”
Jos listened in dismay to this ejaculation. “Ef they ain't Catholics!” he thought. “What kind o' Injuns be they I wonder. I won't tell mammy they're Catholics; she'd feel wuss'n ever. I don't care what they be. Thet gal's got the sweetest eyes'n her head ever I saw sence I wuz born.”
By help of Jos's interpreting, the two families soon became well acquainted with each other's condition and plans; and a feeling of friendliness, surprising under the circumstances, grew up between them.
“Jeff,” said Aunt Ri,—“Jeff, they can't understand a word we say, so't's no harm done, I s'pose, to speak afore 'em, though't don't seem hardly fair to take advantage o' their not knowin' any language but their own; but I jest tell you thet I've got a lesson'n the subjeck uv Injuns. I've always hed a reel mean feelin' about 'em; I didn't want ter come nigh 'em, nor ter hev 'em come nigh me. This woman, here, she's ez sweet a creetur's ever I see; 'n' ez bound up 'n thet baby's yer could ask enny woman to be; 'n' 's fur thet man, can't yer see, Jeff, he jest worships the ground she walks on? Thet's a fact, Jeff. I donno's ever I see a white man think so much uv a woman; come, naow, Jeff, d' yer think yer ever did yerself?”
Aunt Ri was excited. The experience was, to her, almost incredible. Her ideas of Indians had been drawn from newspapers, and from a book or two of narratives of massacres, and from an occasional sight of vagabond bands or families they had encountered in their journey across the plains. Here she found herself sitting side by side in friendly intercourse with an Indian man and Indian woman, whose appearance and behavior were attractive; towards whom she felt herself singularly drawn.
“I'm free to confess, Jos,” she said, “I wouldn't ha' bleeved it. I hain't seen nobody, black, white, or gray, sence we left hum, I've took to like these yere folks. An' they're real dark; 's dark's any nigger in Tennessee; 'n' he's pewer Injun; her father wuz white, she sez, but she don't call herself nothin' but an Injun, the same's he is. D' yer notice the way she looks at him, Jos? Don't she jest set a store by thet feller? 'N' I don't blame her.”
Indeed, Jos had noticed. No man was likely to see Ramona with Alessandro without perceiving the rare quality of her devotion to him. And now there was added to this devotion an element of indefinable anxiety which made its vigilance unceasing. Ramona feared for Alessandro's reason. She had hardly put it into words to herself, but the terrible fear dwelt with her. She felt that another blow would be more than he could bear.
The storm lasted only a few hours. When it cleared, the valley was a solid expanse of white, and the stars shone out as if in an Arctic sky.
“It will be all gone by noon to-morrow,” said Alessandro to Jos, who was dreading the next day.
“Not really!” he said.
“You will see,” said Alessandro. “I have often known it thus. It is like death while it lasts; but it is never long.”
The Hyers were on their way to some hot springs on the north side of the valley. Here they proposed to camp for three months, to try the waters for Jos. They had a tent, and all that was necessary for living in their primitive fashion. Aunt Ri was looking forward to the rest with great anticipation; she was heartily tired of being on the move. Her husband's anticipations were of a more stirring nature. He had heard that there was good hunting on San Jacinto Mountain. When he found that Alessandro knew the region thoroughly, and had been thinking of settling there, he was rejoiced, and proposed to him to become his companion and guide in hunting expeditions. Ramona grasped eagerly at the suggestion; companionship, she was sure, would do Alessandro good,—companionship, the outdoor life, and the excitement of hunting, of which he was fond. This hot-spring canon was only a short distance from the Saboba village, of which they had spoken as a possible home; which she had from the first desired to try. She no longer had repugnance to the thought of an Indian village; she already felt a sense of kinship and shelter with any Indian people. She had become, as Carmena had said, “one of them.”
A few days saw the two families settled,—the Hyers in their tent and wagon, at the hot springs, and Alessandro and Ramona, with the baby, in a little adobe house in the Saboba village. The house belonged to an old Indian woman who, her husband having died, had gone to live with a daughter, and was very glad to get a few dollars by renting her own house. It was a wretched place; one small room, walled with poorly made adobe bricks, thatched with tule, no floor, and only one window. When Alessandro heard Ramona say cheerily, “Oh, this will do very well, when it is repaired a little,” his face was convulsed, and he turned away; but he said nothing. It was the only house to be had in the village, and there were few better. Two months later, no one would have known it. Alessandro had had good luck in hunting. Two fine deerskins covered the earth floor; a third was spread over the bedstead; and the horns, hung on the walls, served for hooks to hang clothes upon. The scarlet calico canopy was again set up over the bed, and the woven cradle, on its red manzanita frame, stood near. A small window in the door, and one more cut in the walls, let in light and air. On a shelf near one of these windows stood the little Madonna, again wreathed with vines as in San Pasquale.
When Aunt Ri first saw the room, after it was thus arranged, she put both arms akimbo, and stood in the doorway, her mouth wide open, her eyes full of wonder. Finally her wonder framed itself in an ejaculation: “Wall, I allow yer air fixed up!”
Aunt Ri, at her best estate, had never possessed a room which had the expression of this poor little mud hut of Ramona's. She could not understand it. The more she studied the place, the less she understood it. On returning to the tent, she said to Jos: “It beats all ever I see, the way thet Injun woman's got fixed up out er nothin'. It ain't no more'n a hovel, a mud hovel, Jos, not much bigger'n this yer tent, fur all three on 'em, an' the bed an' the stove an' everythin'; an' I vow, Jos, she's fixed it so't looks jest like a parlor! It beats me, it does. I'd jest like you to see it.”
And when Jos saw it, and Jeff, they were as full of wonder as Aunt Ri had been. Dimly they recognized the existence of a principle here which had never entered into their life. They did not know it by name, and it could not have been either taught, transferred, or explained to the good-hearted wife and mother who had been so many years the affectionate disorderly genius of their home. But they felt its charm; and when, one day, after the return of Alessandro and Jeff from a particularly successful hunt, the two families had sat down together to a supper of Ramona's cooking,—stewed venison and artichokes, and frijoles with chili,—their wonder was still greater.
“Ask her if this is Injun style of cooking, Jos,” said Aunt Ri. “I never thought nothin' o' beans; but these air good, 'n' no mistake!”
Ramona laughed. “No; it is Mexican,” she said. “I learned to cook from an old Mexican woman.”
“Wall, I'd like the receipt on't; but I allow I shouldn't never git the time to fuss with it,” said Aunt Ri; “but I may's well git the rule, naow I'm here.”
Alessandro began to lose some of his gloom. He had earned money. He had been lifted out of himself by kindly companionship; he saw Ramona cheerful, the little one sunny; the sense of home, the strongest passion Alessandro possessed, next to his love for Ramona, began again to awake in him. He began to talk about building a house. He had found things in the village better than he feared. It was but a poverty-stricken little handful, to be sure; still, they were unmolested; the valley was large; their stock ran free; the few white settlers, one at the upper end and two or three on the south side, had manifested no disposition to crowd the Indians; the Ravallo brothers were living on the estate still, and there was protection in that, Alessandro thought. And Majella was content. Majella had found friends. Something, not quite hope, but akin to it, began to stir in Alessandro's heart. He would build a house; Majella should no longer live in this mud hut. But to his surprise, when he spoke of it, Ramona said no; they had all they needed, now. Was not Alessandro comfortable? She was. It would be wise to wait longer before building.
Ramona knew many things that Alessandro did not. While he had been away on his hunts, she had had speech with many a one he never saw. She had gone to the store and post-office several times, to exchange baskets or lace for flour, and she had heard talk there which disquieted her. She did not believe that Saboba was safe. One day she had heard a man say, “If there is a drought we shall have the devil to pay with our stock before winter is over.” “Yes,” said another; “and look at those damned Indians over there in Saboba, with water running all the time in their village! It's a shame they should have that spring!”
Not for worlds would Ramona have told this to Alessandro. She kept it locked in her own breast, but it rankled there like a ceaseless warning and prophecy. When she reached home that day she went down to the spring in the centre of the village, and stood a long time looking at the bubbling water. It was indeed a priceless treasure; a long irrigating ditch led from it down into the bottom, where lay the cultivated fields,—many acres in wheat, barley, and vegetables. Alessandro himself had fields there from which they would harvest all they needed for the horses and their cow all winter, in case pasturage failed. If the whites took away this water, Saboba would be ruined. However, as the spring began in the very heart of the village, they could not take it without destroying the village. “And the Ravallos would surely never let that be done,” thought Ramona. “While they live, it will not happen.”
It was a sad day for Ramona and Alessandro when the kindly Hyers pulled up their tent-stakes and left the valley. Their intended three months had stretched into six, they had so enjoyed the climate, and the waters had seemed to do such good to Jos. But, “We ain't rich folks, yer know, not by a long ways, we ain't,” said Aunt Ri; “an' we've got pretty nigh down to where Jeff an' me's got to begin airnin' suthin'. Ef we kin git settled 'n some o' these towns where there's carpenterin' to be done. Jeff, he's a master hand to thet kind o' work, though yer mightn't think it; 'n I kin airn right smart at weavin'; jest give me a good carpet-loom, 'n I won't be beholden to nobody for vittles. I jest du love weavin'. I donno how I've contented myself this hull year, or nigh about a year, without a loom. Jeff, he sez to me once, sez he, 'Ri, do yer think yer'd be contented in heaven without yer loom?' an' I was free to say I didn't know's I should.”
“Is it hard?” cried Ramona. “Could I learn to do it?” It was wonderful what progress in understanding and speaking English Ramona had made in these six months. She now understood nearly all that was said directly to her, though she could not follow general and confused conversation.
“Wall, 'tis, an' 'tain't,” said Aunt Ri. “I don't s'pose I'm much of a jedge; fur I can't remember when I fust learned it. I know I set in the loom to weave when my feet couldn't reach the floor; an' I don't remember nothin' about fust learnin' to spool 'n' warp. I've tried to teach lots of folks; an' sum learns quick, an' some don't never learn; it's jest 's 't strikes 'em. I should think, naow, thet you wuz one o' the kind could turn yer hands to anythin'. When we get settled in San Bernardino, if yer'll come down thar, I'll teach yer all I know, 'n' be glad ter. I donno's 't 's goin' to be much uv a place for carpet-weavin' though, anywheres raound 'n this yer country; not but what thar's plenty o' rags, but folks seems to be wearin' 'em; pooty gen'ral wear, I sh'd say. I've seen more cloes on folks' backs hyar, thet wan't no more'n fit for carpet-rags, than any place ever I struck. They're drefful sheftless lot, these yere Mexicans; 'n' the Injuns is wuss. Naow when I say Injuns, I don't never mean yeow, yer know thet. Yer ain't ever seemed to me one mite like an Injun.”