Part 58

“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!”

XXI

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.”