Isidro

SEPTEMBER, 1904

BY MARY AUSTIN

I

IN WHICH ISIDRO SEEKS HIS FORTUNE

IT was the year of our Lord 18—, and the spring coming on lustily, when the younger son of Antonio Escobar rode out to seek his fortune, singing lightly to the jingle of his bit and bridle rein, as if it were no great matter for a man with good Castilian blood in him, and his youth at high tide, to become a priest; rode merrily, in fact, as if he already saw the end of all that coil of mischief and murder and love, as if he saw Padre Saavedra appeased, Mascado dead, and himself happy in his own chimney corner, no priest, but the head of a great house. In truth, Isidro saw none of these things, but it was a day to make a man sing whatever he saw.

Spring exhaled from the hills, and the valleys were wells of intoxicating balm. Radiant corollas lapped the trail and closed smoothly over where the horse trod. A great body of warm air moved fluently about him, nestling to the cheek as he rode. The sun glinted warmly on the lucent green of the wild oats, on the burnt gold of the poppies, on the thick silver-broidered rim of his sombrero, the silver fringe of his cloak, the silver mountings of his pistols, on the silver and jewels of bridle and spurs. In fact, there was more silver a-glitter in his dress and harness than he carried in his purse, for he rode only to Monterey, and who on that road would ask toll of an Escobar?

Baggage he had next to none; a change of linen and such small matters; what should a priest do with fine raiment ? What, indeed; but an Escobar it seemed might have much. His ruffles were all of very fine needlework, his smallclothes of Genoese velvet, his jacket ropy with precious embroidery, none so fresh as it had been; the black silk kerchief knotted under his sombrero was of the finest, his saddle, of Mexican leather work, cunningly carved. And this fine sprig of an ancient house was to be a priest.

It was a matter practically determined upon before he was born, and, being so settled, Isidro was complaisant. The case was this: Mercedes Venegas, a tender slip of a girl, as wan and lovely as the rim of a new moon, being motherless and left to herself too much, had vowed herself to Holy Church and the Sisterhood of the Sacred Heart. But before she had come through her novitiate the eyes of Antonio Ossais Escobar, roving eyes and keen for a maid, had spied her out, and the matter falling in with some worldly plans of her father, she had been drawn back from being the bride of the Church to be bride to the hot-hearted Escobar. Not without a price, though. Don Antonio had been obliged to surrender a good lump of her dowry to Holy Church, with the further promise, not certified to, but spiritually binding, to give back of her issue as much as in herself he had taken away.

So the promise ran, but being long gone by, and himself come to a new country, it is doubtful if the elder Escobar would have remembered it if St. Francis, to whom he vowed, had not mercifully sent him the gout as a hint on that score. The subject had come up off and on for a dozen years as the malady ran high or low, and found Isidro in no wise unkindly disposed toward it. He liked a red lip, and had an eye for the turn of an ankle; even so he liked the wind in the sage and bloom of the almond; they stirred no deeper ardor than might be satisfied with mere looking. He liked a horse, he liked a cup of wine, and had an ear for a tune. Well-a-day! A priest might look at God’s world as well as another, might drink wine for his stomach’s sake, and ride of necessity. As for music, it pleased him well, so it were fairly executed, whether it were a rondeau or a hymn.

And, on the other side, there was his father fond of a merry tune, liking wine very well, a horse better, women more than all three, and so beridden by gout that he could have small enjoyment of any. All said, there were worse things than being a priest. So Isidro Escobar, being turned twenty, rode out to Monterey, singing as he rode a very proper song for a young man, all of love and high emprise, except that he forgot most of the words, and went on making merry noises in his throat in sheer delight of the trail and the day.

As for Don Antonio, he thought his son very well suited to be a priest, and was vexed with him accordingly. It was a thing that could never have been said of him in his younger days. Other times, when his gout, which he misread for his conscience, troubled him, he felt it a satisfaction to make peace so handsomely with Holy Church. If it had been Pascual now!

Pascual, who had ridden as far as the home inclosure with his brother, and, notwithstanding Isidro’s weaknesses, was very fond of him, was at that moment riding back, looking complacently at the tangle of vine and fig tree where the ranch garden sloped down to the trail, and thinking Isidro rather a fool to give it all up so easily, and none so fit as himself to be lord of this good demesne.

As for Isidro, he rode forward, looking not once at the home where he had grown up, nor to the hills that he had known, nor up the slope to the tall white cross raised in memory of Mercedes Venegas Escobar whose body lay in Zacatecas, and whose soul was no doubt in Paradise; nor thought if he should ever look on these again, nor when, nor how. He was not of the nature that looks back. He looked rather at the wild oats, how they were tasseling; at the blue of the lupines in the swale; at the broods of the burrowing owl blinking a-row in their burrows, and caught up handfuls of over-sweet white forget-me-nots, stooping lightly from the saddle. He answered the pipe of the lark, and the nesting call of the quail, gave good-morrow to the badger who showed him his teeth for courtesy, and to the lean coyote who paid him no heed whatever; and when he came by the wash where old Miguel set his traps, turned out of the trail to see if they had caught anything. He found a fox in one, which he set free, very pitiful of its dangling useless member as it made off limpingly, and finding the others empty, snapped them one by one, laughing softly to himself.

“Priest’s work,” he said.

That was Isidro all over. Miguel was accustomed to say that the younger Escobar had more thought for dumb beasts than for his own kind, though the lad protested he would have helped Miguel out of a trap as readily as a coyote. To which the old man would say that that also was Isidro. You could never make him angry however you might try. He was quite as much amused over his inaptness at young men’s accomplishments as you were, and he could not be dared to try more than pleased him, but had always an answer for you. There could be no doubt, said the men at his father’s hacienda, that Isidro was cut out for a priest.

“Ah, no doubt,” said the women, with an accent that made the men understand that they had somehow the worst of it.

For all this they were sorry to see him go; Margarita, who had nursed him, wept copiously in the kitchen; the old Don fretted in the patio, and to hide his fretting swore heartily at Isidro’s dog chained in the kennel, and not to be stopped of his grieving, as were the rest of them, by thinking what a fine thing it would be to have a priest in the family.

And all this time Isidro rode singing into the noon of spring, and the high day of adventure. He crossed the bad land, lifting his horse cautiously from the pitfalls of badger and squirrel holes, scaring the blue heron from his watch, and when he had struck firmly into the foothill trail laid his rein on the horse’s neck and fell into a muse concerning the thing he would be. He had sung of love, riding out from Las Plumas in the blaze of morning, but when he came by the place called The Dove in the evening glow, he sang of the Virgin Mary. That, too, was Isidro. His sympathies slipped off the coil of things he had known, and shaped themselves to what would be. He had the fine resonance of an old violin that gives back the perfect tone; you could not strike a discord out of him unawares. That was what made you love him when you had sat an hour in his company, until you had seen him so sitting with your dearest foe, and then you had moments of exasperation with him. You found him always in possession of your point of view; he understood at once what you were driving at. It was only after reflection that you perceived that he was not driven. One felt convinced he would make an excellent confessor. For all his quietness he had his way with women, more even than Pascual, who swaggered prodigiously, and was known to take his affairs to heart. Under this complaisance of mood there was a hint of something not quite grasped, something foreign to an Escobar, like the brown lights in his hair, and the touch of Saxon ruddiness that he had from some far-off strain of his mother’s.

He had a square chin, a little cleft, a level eye, and a quick collected demeanor like a wild thing. His lower lip, all of his mouth not hidden by a mustache, had a trick as if it had been caught smiling unawares. He was courteous, never more so than when least your friend, but seldom anything else. This was that Isidro who rode out from Las Plumas to be a priest, and let his cigarette die out between his fingers while he sang a hymn to the Mother of God.

He rode all that day in the Escobar demesne, having a late start, and slept the first night with the vaqueros branding calves in the meadow of Los Robles. The next day at noon he passed out of the Escobar grant. The trail he took kept still to the east slope of the coast range, and ran northward through the spurs of the Sierritas, by dip and angle working up toward the summit whence he would cross into the Salinas. To the left he had always the leopard-colored hills, and eastward the vast dim hollow of the valley spreading softly into the spring haze. As he traveled, the shy wild herds cleared out of the wild oats before him. Jack rabbits ran by droves like small deer in the chaparral. Isidro sang less and smoked more, and fell gradually into the carriage and motion of one who travels far of a set purpose. The light, palpitating from the hollow sky, beat down his eyelids. His thoughts drew inward with his gaze; he swayed lightly to the jogging of his horse. He met Indians — women and children and goods — roving with the spring, for no reason but that their blood prompted them, and gave them the compliments of the road.

He woke once out of a noontide drowse of travel at what promised a touch of adventure. In the glade of a shallow cañon between the oaks he came upon a red deer of those parts, a buck well antlered and letting blood freely from a wound in the throat, that bore a man to the earth and trampled him. The man — a mothernaked Indian —had the buck by the horns so that they might do him no hurt, but at every move he felt the cutting hooves. The buck put his forehead against the man’s chest and pressed hard, lifting and dragging him with no sound but the sobbing of hot breath and drip of his wound. The man looked in the brute’s eyes and had a look back again, each thinking of death not his own. Two ravens sat hard by on an oak, expectant but indifferent which might be quarry. Doubtless the struggle must have gone to the man, for he of the two had lost least blood. The Indian’s knife lay on the grass within an arm’s length,but he dared not loose his hold to reach it. Isidro picked up the blade and found the buck’s heart with it. Next moment the Indian rose up breathing short, and drenched with the warm flood.

“Body of Christ! friend,” said Isidro, “the next deer you kill, make sure of it before you come up with him.”

Red as he was, and covered with bruises, the Indian, who, now that he was up, showed comely in a dark, low-browed sort, and looked to have some foreign blood in him, began to disembowel his kill and make it ready for packing.

“I owe you thanks, señor,” he said in good enough Spanish, but with no thankfulness of manner. When he had slung as much as he could carry upon his shoulders, he made up the trail, and Isidro, who felt himself entitled to some entertainment, drew rein beside him.

“Where to, friend?” he said cheerily, since two on the same road go better than one.

“I follow the trail, señor,” said the man, and so surlily that Isidro concluded there was nothing to be looked for from that quarter.

“Priest’s work again,” he said, “to do a good deed and get scant thanks for it. Truly I begin well,” and he rode laughing up the trail.

Toward evening he crossed a mesa, open and falling abruptly to the valley, of a mile’s breadth or more, very fragrant with sage and gilias opening in the waning light. The sound of bells came faintly up to him with the blether of shee from the mesa’s edge that marked the progress of a flock. Against the slanting light he made out the forms of shepherds running, it seemed, and in some commotion. They came together, and one ran and the other drew up with him, halting and parting as in flight and pursuit. And across the clear space of evening something reached him like an exhalation, a presage, a sense of evil where no evil should be. He would have turned out of the trail, being used to trust his instinct, but he could not convince himself that this matter was for his minding. How should an Escobar concern himself with two sheep-herders chasing coyotes.

Presently, looking back from a rise of land, he saw the flock spread out across the mesa, and one shepherd moving his accustomed round.

“Now on my life,” said Isidro, “I would have sworn there were two,” and again some instinct pricked him vaguely.

II

NOE AND REINA MARIA

The sheep which Isidro had seen feeding at evening belonged to Mariana, the Portuguese. His house stood in a little open plain having a pool in the midst, treeless, and very lonely, called The Reed; his sheep fed thence into the free lands as far as might be. The Portuguese was old, he was rich, he was unspeakably dirty, and a man of no blood. The Escobars, who knew him slightly, used him considerately, because manners were becoming to an Escobar, not because the old miser was in any wise worth considering. Mariana was not known to have any one belonging to him; his house was low and mean, thatched with tules, having a floor of stamped earth; his dress and manners what might have been expected. Those who wished to say nothing evil of him could find nothing better to say than that he was diligent; those who would speak of him only with contempt found nothing worse. He was reputed to have at his bed’s head a great box full of gold and silver pieces, — and yet he worked! It was predicted of him that because of his riches he would have a foul ending, and as yet he had not. There you have the time and the people. Mariana was openly a hoarder of gold, and was not robbed; he was diligent without need, and therefore scorned.

His sheep were in three brands, and Mariana kept the tale of them. He had with him, keeping the home flock, one Juan Ruiz, a mongrel as to breed, who spoke Spanish, Portuguese, and French indifferently well, and believed himself a very fine fellow. Mariana used toward him an absence of surliness that amounted to kindliness, therefore it was reported that Ruiz had some claim upon him. The herder in his cups had been known to hint broadly that there was more likeness than liking between them. Whatever the case, Ruiz bore him a deep-seated grudge. Mariana, as I have said, was old, and growing older, and boozy with drink was not a proper spectacle to be the proprietor of fleeces and gold; and Ruiz, who was a pretty fellow in his own fashion, and loved frippery inordinately, was poor. What more would you have? If ever there was a man fitted to make ducks and drakes of a fortune it was Ruiz, but in this case the fortune lay in a strong box at the head of his master’s bed.

On the day that Isidro Escobar came riding across the mesa where Ruiz fed the flock, Mariana, who trusted no one very much, came down to see how they fared, and to bring supplies to his shepherd. Among other things he brought wine; I have said there was the appearance of kindliness on Mariana’s side. It was the wine of San Gabriel, heady and cordial to the blood. They pieced out the noon siesta with a bottle, and grew merry. Ruiz clapped Mariana on the shoulder and called him kin; the Portuguese admitted that he had known Ruiz’s mother. They sang together, they laughed, finally they wept. That was when they were beginning the second bottle. When they had no more than half done, Ruiz remembered his grievance and brooded over it darkly, and in the third bottle he killed Mariana, not all at once as you might say the word, but provoked him, broiled with him, pricked him blunderingly with his knife. Mariana, who was leery with drink half his days, and had no hint of the other’s grievance, on which point Ruiz himself was by now not quite clear, was in no case to deal with the affair. At last, sobered a little by blood-letting, he became afraid and ran. This with beasts of the Ruiz order was the worst thing to do. Pursuit whetted him. So they ran and wrestled futilely and struck blindly, for the drink worked in them yet, but Ruiz’s knife, because he was heaviest and longest of arm, bit oftenest and to the bone. It was the dust of their running that Isidro saw across the evening glow. Between drink and bleeding they fell headlong into the scrub, panting like spent beasts. But Mariana, having bled most, was most sobered, and began to crawl away, and Ruiz, when he had come to himself a little, began to work after him on his wet trail with the knife between his teeth, leering through a mist of rage and drink. If he had no grievance before that was enough.

“Ha, you will leave me, hell litter?” he said, and so, voiding curses, he reeled and came up to him, plunging his knife in Mariana’s back. The Portuguese fell forward with a wet cough, and the poppies, drowned in blood, shrank all away from him.

Ruiz, for his part, went back to find the dregs of the bottle. He was very merry with himself about Mariana lying out in the sage like a stuck pig. “Ah, ah! but it served him right, setting up for a rich man, who had neither manners nor wit, nor looks, — no, certainly, not looks.” Then he observed his own wounds, and grew frightened to see them bleed; grew very pitiful of himself, washing and binding them, blubbered over them, thinking new grievances of Mariana, who would so misuse him. So he wept, sitting on a hummock waist deep in bloom, until the day drew into dusk, and the dogs and the flock clamored for their evening care.

“ Eh ? — Oh, — go to Mariana out there,” he said; “he is master,” and laughed, thinking it a very fine jest, and afterwards wept again, and so fell into a mindless sleep.

It was in the hope and promise of dawn when he awoke. The sky paled slowly; here and there peaks swam into rosy glow above the cool dark. He felt the stiffness of his wounds, and groaned,remembering — what ? — That Mariana lay out there in the scrub. It was a deep sleep he kept out there between the poppies and the sage; he looked not to have stirred all night. It was a joke between them that Mariana would play out to the end. Ruiz went about the morning meal fumblingly. The sky filled and filled; pale slits of light between the rifts began to streak the floor of the plain. By the spring a mourning dove began to call. The dogs shrunk uneasily; they looked at the figure of Mariana, and now it seemed to stir, and now did not. Noé put his nose to the air and moaned with a hushed noise in his throat. Ruiz wished to make haste, but seemed intolerably slow. He strayed out toward the still body as the day warmed him and cleared the mists of drink. “Get up, Mariana,” he began to say, but fell off into whispering; a patch of sun lit the blackened poppies, and his ear caught the burr-r-r of flies.

Without doubt the habit of a man’s work stands him in good stead; whatever had come to Mariana there was still the flock. They were scattering northward, and Noé and Reina Maria had, it appeared, little mind for their work, but they heard the shepherd’s voice and answered it. To bring the sheep together in good form took them a flock’s length farther from Mariana. It is probable Juan Ruiz had not thought till then what he should do, but now this was the thing,— to get away; to get shut of the sight and nearness of the dead.

He began to push the sheep into the hills, crossed the trail, and struck up over a sharp ridge. His progress grew into hurry, his hurry to a fever of flight. He pressed the sheep unmercifully; bells jangled up the steeps and down into hollows by paths that only sheep could have taken, by places where were no paths, and at last he wearied them beyond going. He was by this time beside himself. They came to an open hill-slope above a stream, thick and slippery with new grass. The shepherd instinct told him the sheep must rest and feed, but his mind gave him no rest. He killed a lamb and fed the dogs, and since he had eaten nothing that day, ate also, and made out to spend the night. He was beyond the country of the burrowing owls; there was no sound other than the eager cropping of the sheep. There came a wind walking across the grasses that made the shadows stir, and in every patch of shadow were dead men trembling to arise, struggling and twisting so they might come at him. So it seemed to Ruiz. He got his back to a rock and shuddered into sleep. He woke after an hour or two and began to think. He was neither clear nor quick in his mind, but by and by he thrashed the matter out somewhat in this fashion.

It was not likely Mariana would be missed, or,if missed,found again; by now the coyotes should be at him. And if found, what then ? There was no witness. The dogs ? Ah yes. They had carried themselves strangely toward him that day. All through his sleep he had heard Noé keening the dead master with a mournful howl. The faith a shepherd grows to have in the understanding of his dogs passes belief. It is equal to his assurance of their ability to make themselves understood. Ruiz was afraid of Noé and Reina Maria. The sheep also had Mariana’s mark; but if he got shut of all these, what was there to accuse him ? Above all, his desire moved him to get away and away, and to mix with his own kind. There was a very dull sort of cunning in this that did not at first profit him. He had to battle with the shepherd habit to stay by the flock. Unconsciously he had worked all day against it, but the fear of dead men walking in the dark also held him still. With all this he gave no thought to the great box of reals lying unguarded in the hut of Mariana. About the hour the night breeze fell off before dawn he left the flock on the hill, and began to strike along the ridge by ways he knew, to come into Monterey from the north, which he hoped to do in four days. He left the dead and the witnesses, and carried his guilt openly in his face.

What happened to Noé and Reina Maria with the flock is a matter of record. Mascado, the Indian renegade, for purposes of his own tracked them from the day they struck the rancheria of Peter Lebecque, backward to where he found the body of Mariana, big and overblown by flies. There was nothing to tell from it except that it had been a man. The flock, it seemed, must have stayed upon the hill that day, or near it, forging forward a little by the trail Ruiz had taken. The dogs ate of the lamb that he had killed, and kept the flock close. They went on a little from there doubtfully, but presently, it seemed, they made certain, by what gift God knows, that the shepherd would not return. They headed the flock toward the place of The Reed, where they had been bred. It is not known if they had any food after the first day; they had not been taught killing. The second night brought them — for they made pace slowly — to a very close-grown and woody stretch of country all a-tumble of great boulders among the trees. They found themselves brought up against a crisis. Through the middle of this copse ran a stream full and roaring from the rains. What urgency they used, Reina Maria who was old in the wisdom of herding, and Noé who was young, could not be guessed. Sufficient that they got the flock so near the crossing that some two or three were drowned. But they could do no more; they went, perforce, upstream. Here is a matter for wonder, and made talk in sheep camps wherever the dogs of Del Mar —for they were of that breed — were known. The Reed lay nearest as the crow flies going dowmstream; the only hope of crossing lay upstream where there might be shallows, and that way they took. Here it seems was a disagreement. They were hungry, no doubt, overwrought, and one of them loved himself more than the flock. It was a question of saving the sheep who did very well, or saving their own skins. Noé would and Reina Maria would not. So they fought, faint and a-hungered, one for himself and the other for the flock, and the silly sheep strayed bleating through the scrub. The battle went to Reina Maria; it was Noé, when succor found them, that showed most wounds. So they worked the flock up the waterside, which here ran parallel to a foot trail,toward the traveled roads. They had been four days from Mariana, two of them without food, and had come twenty miles.

In the meantime Isidro Escobar had hardly come more. From the oak shelter where he had slept the second night of his journey he had set out leisurely to Los Alamos, which he made by noon. That was the day Ruiz was hurrying his flock across country by steeper ways than the accustomed trail. Between the Escobars and the family at Los Alamos there was amnesty and observance. It lay out of the trail somewhat, but not too far for the courtesy of an Escobar. By all the laws of hospitality Isidro should have stayed a month, but contented himself with three days, pleading his appointment with Padre Saavedra, and the urgence of his new calling, which now began to sit becomingly upon him.

He was, therefore, pushing merrily along the trail that rounded a barren hill running like a cape into a lake of woods that gave off a continuous murmuring. He was riding fast, not certain where he should rest, or if, in fact, he would have any shelter but his cloak, and gave no attention to the way. Toward mid-afternoon he heard afar the slow, incessant jangle of bells that bespoke a moving flock. It promised him other things, —a meal and company, at least. The wood was scattered more, and marked by an absence of underbrush. Between the boles of oak were grassy plats, in one of which he looked to find the sheep camp. By the rising of the ground whereon the wood stood, and the dipping of the trail, he could not see very far into it, but the sound lay still ahead of him; so, with no other warning, when the ridge of westward hills began to make a twilight gloom in the gully, he came suddenly upon the flock, Noé, and Reina Maria.

III

THE HUT OF THE GRAPEVINE

Isidro was an owner of sheep, one bred to an open life, and no fool. He made sure on the instant that there was no shepherd about. Wanting other witness, the behavior of the dogs would have told him that. To make doubly sure he raised a shout that rang and rang among the tree boles and the rocks and brought no answer.

He looked the flock over and found them sleek; the brand he thought he had seen, but could not be sure. Then he came to the dogs; here was evidence. They looked gaunt and wolfish-eyed; they had wounds, — Noé was caked with blood about the throat. Isidro thought they bore the marks of wolf’s teeth or coyote’s. They fawned upon him with short, gulping barks and throaty whines, glad and wishful at once in an intolerable speechlessness. Properly they should have stood off from him and left parleying to the shepherd. The absence of such reserve was the best evidence that they understood the fact, if not the reason, of their desertion. Something of what they had suffered they told Isidro in their dumb way, which was a very good way since it touched him. His first move, done quickly to take advantage of the waning day, was to cast a wide circle about the flock, to pick up the trail of the vanished shepherd. He found the way the sheep had come with Noé and Reina Maria, but found nothing more. At the first motion of riding away Noé had set up a thin howl, but Reina Maria had the faith of her sex. She waited the event.

“So,” said Isidro, “it seems there is no company where I looked to find it, and no fire, though a fire would be a comfort, and no food but great need of feeding.” It was quite dusk in the wood, where the earth was all a litter of rotten leaves. The ripples of the stream, which at this point ran shallowly in a rocky bed, began to climb above the hushed noises of the day; the air had a feel of dampness. Isidro made his horse comfortable by the stream border, where there was a cropping of fresh grass, and lit a fire of twigs. He thought of supper and then of the dogs, for they looked to have suffered much. He killed a lamb for them bunglingly, as not being used to such work, spattering his ruffles with blood, and was pleased to see them feed. They were in a fair way to get a taste for new mutton.

“My faith!” said he, watching their ravening, “is it so long as that?”

Isidro set to work to piece out the circumstance. Whatever had befallen the shepherd it could not be Indians, since these would hardly have spared the flock; nor wild beasts, though the wounds of Noé hinted at that. It was not possible that a beast which could carry off a man would let the dogs go free. Besides, the sheep were too sleek, too little uneasy; they had had no fright, as would have shown in the case of an attack by wolves or bears. The only thing that was clear was the devotion of Noé and Reina Maria.

“Good dogs,” said Isidro, and praised them to their fill, though in an unfamiliar speech.

The bells of the sheep made a friendly tinkle; the flock drowsed; the dogs dressed their wounds by the fire. Isidro heaped him a bed of dried fern and slept deep.

He awoke in the morning twilight; all the wood was astir with wild pigeons,— soft, slaty blue like the sky. The flock was out and feeding up the stream; Noé and Reina Maria stood for orders. Here was a bother. There was no mistaking the attitude of the dogs,—they had shifted their responsibility.

Caramba! Was an Escobar to turn herder, and go straggling into the Presidio of Monterey with a flock not his own at his heels ? It was a pity, of course, but clearly not a case for his intervention. So Isidro; not so Noé and Reina Maria. When the man put his horse to the ford they brought up the flock that, also reassured by the man’s presence, began to get over in a silly fashion. Directly they had a hint of a new desertion. It went hard with the dogs at first in the shock to a free given faith. They were checked, bewildered. Noé yelped dismally, and then frankly deserted the flock for the man. But Reina Maria ran to and fro between him and her charge, back and forth with tongue wagging out and red, wearied eyes, harrying the flock and fawning on the man, not daunted, but persisting until she had won his understanding and rested the case upon the facts. She was fit to burst with running and eagerness. A hundred rods or so of this, and Isidro wheeled back in a kind of comical dismay.

“Your way, my lady!” he cried. “Jesus! but I will make poor work of being a priest if I refuse such begging. Thou art a faithful beast.”

“A priest is a shepherd in some sort,” he said later, moving with the flock slowly in the morning freshness, “but I doubt the herder has the easier time of it.” The difficulties of the work came home to him presently. Thus far he had followed the trail, which grew steep and stony in a great tangle of brush. The light lay level with the hills and too warm. The sheep scattered in the brush, and the dogs were plainly fagged.

To keep the trail grew nearly impossible; besides, it seemed little likely to afford pasture.

“My friends,” said Isidro, “it is clear we shall get nowhere at this rate, and seeing I am new to the business and likely to make a mess of it, do you be so kind as to lead the way.”

No doubt communication between man and beast is helped by speech, but it is not indispensable. Noé and Reina Maria knew only Portuguese and a little French, Isidro only Castilian, but somehow there passed from each to each some assurance, sense of understanding. Gradually the dogs assumed the responsibility of the flocks, growing assured as they felt themselves free and Isidro following. They passed out of the thickets, turned north along an open ridge, and by noon made a little grassy swale, through which the rill of a spring ran unseen, though you heard it talking in the grass. Beyond that was rolling country, nearly treeless, lush with wild oats, bordered with poppies, holding little lakes of white forget-me-nots in coves of the hills.

The grass grew up tall, and muffled the bells of the sheep. Then began trees again, — buckeyes bursting into bloom, wateroaks strung with long, pendulous vines misty with bloom. Deer stood up in the open places ; a band of antelope flashed by them, three coyotes behind them in full chase; they came upon two tawny cats at their mating in the clear warm space before a rocky wall. They saw no man, neither shepherd nor Indian, nor any trace of one. Those were the days when men shifted for themselves without finiken. So long as the flock lasted and he had the means of a fire — it was still the time of flint and tinder — they would not lack food, and for shelter Isidro had his cloak. But by the time the light had got a yellow tinge from shining slantwise on the poppy fires, they came upon a better shift. Under an oak, mocking the jays with as shrill a voice, sat a slim, dark lad, pillowed on a great sheaf of plucked bloom.

For excuse of his being, a small flock, lacking a brand, fed thereabout, minded by a mongrel cur that looked more for killing than herding, but, nevertheless, came and went obediently at the lad’s word. So much Isidro perceived at the first onset; for the rest, since he had come upon him suddenly, Isidro found himself enough to do to turn aside his own sheep so that the two bands might not mix,— a matter in which the lad spent no pains. He stood up, though, and seeing him not likely to begin, Isidro fetched a very courteous bow.

“Señor,” he said, “will you do me the favor to tell me whose sheep I have, and whither they would go?”

“That,” said the lad, “you should know better than I. Keep back your sheep, sir; if they mix the parting out will be no sport.”

“Your pardon, señor, so I should judge, but I am newly come into the business, and the dogs do not understand Castilian.”

The herd boy spoke some words of diverse tongues, mongrel speech of the mixed peoples that come together in a new land, and lighted upon those that the dogs understood, for they went at their work with quickened apprehension. The lad got his own band behind him, and started them moving.

“As for the flock, señor,” he said, “whose should they be if not yours, unless you have stolen them ?”

“ My faith, you have a tongue! ” cried Isidro; “but as for stealing, it appears that they have stolen me, since they have taken me out of my way so that I know not how I shall come at it, nor what to do with them.”

“ You speak riddles, señor.”

“Then I will speak more to the point; ” whereupon he told him straightly how he came upon the flock and what followed.

“The brand is Mariana’s,” said the boy, “and the dogs I think I have seen. Noé ? ” he questioned, and the dogfawned upon him. “They are Mariana’s sheep, and the dogs belonged to Juan Ruiz. They passed a fortnight since. Strange work.”

“I know none stranger,” said Isidro with much gravity; “and since you know their owner, who is no doubt much distressed on their account, will you do me the favor to restore them ? I will give you two reals for your trouble, and the Portuguese will scarcely do less.”

The boy knit his brows with quick darting scorn. “The señor does not understand these things. Juan Ruiz has doubtless come to some hurt. Suppose the Portuguese comes upon me unawares with his dogs and his sheep. Will he believe me if I say I had them from a fine gentleman in the woods?”

“As well your story as mine,” said Isidro, beginning to be vastly amused. He rolled a cigarette and leaned against his horse, waiting. The boy frowned, and thought. When he spoke again it was with a curious apathy, as if he had somehow come free of the whole affair.

“If the señor will but come with me,” he said.

“As well with you as anywhere,” cried Isidro with the greatest cheerfulness. Seeing the boy moving before him with the flock Isidro took thought of him. He was slightly built for his age, which looked to be fifteen, and was clothed for the most part in very good woven stuff, cut after no fashion but convenience, wore moccasins, and about his calves strips of buckskin wrapped many times Indian fashion. He had black hair cropped at the shoulders, and falling so as to leave visible only a thin disk of face, dark and ruddy-colored. He stood straightly, and had the fine, level looking eyes of an Indian, though no Indian as was plain to see. About his brows he wore a rag of red silk, in which were tucked vine leaves for coolness; under this penthouse his eyes were alert and unfrightened as a bird’s.

They went sidelong on a ridge, avoiding a deep cañon, and came clear of trees. Presently they reached the head of a long, winding shallow that should have held a stream, but flowed only a river of grass and bloom. Down this the sheep poured steadily as if it had been a lane, and Isidro found space for conversation.

“Your sheep?” said he.

“Peter Lebecque’s.”

“And who may Peter Lebecque be? I have not heard of him, and I thought to know these hills.”

“And who may you be that should know such humble folk?” quoth the shepherd lad.

“My faith,” thought Isidro,“but this is a sharp one!” Nevertheless, he took off his hat with a very low sweep, being now beside his companion. “Isidro Rodrigo Escobar, your servant, señor.”

The boy eyed him a moment through narrowing lids, and then, as if appeased, replied in kind: —

“Peter Lebecque is a trapper; he lives by the Grapevine where the water of that creek comes out of the Gap.”

“And where may that be?”

“It is near by, señor.”

“And you, what are you called ?”

“ El Zarzo.” ²

“ El Zarzo ? Nothing else ?”

“Nothing else, señor.”

“But that is no name for a Christian. Had you never another?”

“El Zarzo I am called, señor, or Zarzito.”

“Well, well, a good name enough; one might guess how you came by it.”

The way began to narrow and wind down; presently they heard the barking of dogs. The gully widened abruptly to a little meadow fronting a cañon wall, looking from above to have a close green thicket in its midst. Isidro, when they had come down to the level, perceived it to be a group of tree trunks overgrown by wild vines that had come up by the help of the trees and afterward strangled them. The twisted stems rose up like pillars, and overhead ran stringers of vine thatched with leaves. Alcoves and galleries of shade lay between the tree boles under thick rainproof roofs. The outer walls were cunningly pieced out by willow withes, to which the vines had taken kindly; a rod away it looked to be all nature. It was as safe and dark as a lair; the floor of stamped earth had a musty dampness; it smelt like a fox’s earth. Bearskins drying in the sun stank very vilely, and dogs lolled hunting fleas on the floor.

Peter Lebecque, who was shaping a trap, stood up as they came, but found no words; all manner of threats, questionings, resentments, played across his eyes. El Zarzo slid away from Isidro and stood in low-toned foreign talk a long time with the trapper, with many a quick flung look and dropped inflection. They need not, however, have concerned themselves so much; an Escobar had the manners not to hear what was not intended for his ears. Isidro stood by his horse and smoked cigarettes until the sun was quite down.

By that the old rascal, for so he looked, came forward to take his horse. “Will you eat, señor ? ” he said.

“With the best will in the world,” said Isidro.

The old trapper took a pot of very savory stew from the fire, added bread and wine and a dish of beans. They three sat upon stools about a table contrived of hewn slabs, and dipped in the dish, every man with his own knife and his fingers. The day went out in a flare of crimson clouds trumpeted by a sea wind; there was promise of rain.

It appeared that Peter Lebecque knew something of fine manners, though Isidro confessed to himself that he could not get to like the look of him. There was a great deal of polite indirection before they came to the pith of their business.

The sheep, it was agreed, were Mariana’s; further agreed that Isidro and the lad should deliver them to-morrow to the shepherds of Mariana, who might be met with about the place called Pasteria. This you can imagine was no comfortable news for Isidro, since it took him still further out of his course, but, in fact, there was no help for it.

“It, would go hard,” said the trapper, “if the flock were found with us. An Escobar is above suspicion, but we, señor, are poor folk.” He leered wickedly with beady eyes. Isidro had washed his hands before meat, and the old villain had noted blood upon his wrists.

“As you will,” said Isidro, wishing to be rid of the matter, “and then you will tell me how I shall come bv the trail to the Presidio of Monterey again.”

“Ah, Monterey; it is a very fine town, I have heard.”

“I have never been there.”

“Nor I, but I have heard, a gay town, and many gay ladies, eh señor ? ”

“Oh, as to that I cannot say; I go to Padre Saavedra at Carmelo.” Isidro let a prodigious yawn; he was tired of the day’s work, and tired of the company. When he had got to bed at last on a heap of skins he had his saddle for pillow, and his pistols ready to hand. “I am not a priest yet,” he said, “and the old fellow looks to be the devil or of his brood.”

By this the rain had begun, and drummed softly on the thatch of vines. The old man and the lad had their heads together, talking in a foreign tongue, droning and incessant as the drip of the rain; the sound of it ran on into the night, and mixed strangely with Isidro’s dreams.

IV

THE FATHER PRESIDENT

In a cove of quietness back from the bay, between the mountains and the Point of Pines, stands Carmel, otherwise the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, second of the strongholds of Holy Church established by that great saint and greater man, Fray Junip’ero Serra, for the salvation of souls and the increasing glory of God. Where the river winds through the mission purlieus shallowly to the sea, rise the towers and chimes of San Carlos, overlooking the alcoves of the Mission and the wattled huts of the neophytes. It looks beyond to the strips of tillage, the winking weirs that head up the river for the irrigating ditches, to the sloping fields of the Mission, browsed over by cleanlimbed cattle. Over this clearing and over some miles of oak forest and birchfringed waters, over rolling pine lands and blossomy meadows, the Padres of San Carlos had right of usufruct and disposition, over field and flock and folk, rights temporal and spiritual under the hand of the Father President of Missions.

It was at the time Isidro Escobar set out to be a priest for his own good and the better ease of his father’s conscience a very goodly demesne, a flowery land full of golden-throated larks lilting in the barley, of doves moaning in the blossoming pears, of jays shouting in the sombre oaks. The cattle lowed from the hills, the Indian women crooned at their weaving in the sun.

Upon a day when Peter Lebecque sat knitting his fierce brows in his hut over an Escobar who, with blood upon his wrists, drove Mariana’s shepherdless sheep to no purpose, it happened that Padre Vicente Saavedra, Father President of Missions of Alta California, Brother of St. Francis, together with Fray Demetrio Fages, his almoner and secretary, set out to walk from San Carlos to the Presidio on business of the Commandante’s. Of this business and whom it might concern he knew nothing, but surmised much. At sundown on the previous day an orderly rode out to San Carlos desiring the Father President’s presence with all possible convenience; nothing more from that source, but from Demetrio Fages, a comfortable gossip, he had gathered that a ship of a build such as seldom put into that port had anchored off Monterey. Padre Saavedra had spent much of the time thereafter walking up and down in the corridor.

These were tight times for the Father President. He knew from his college of San Fernando that this new strumpet Republic contrived evil against the Brothers of St. Francis; nothing less than the removal of the mission demesne from under the cure of his order. He knew also that the brotherhood was primed against that attempt, and his faith was great, but of late his mind misgave him. Communication with his college was slow. Whispers reached him from the outside, rumors, veiled intimations.

From Soledad, from Santa Inez, from La Purisima, there were reports of restlessness and lack of reverence among the neophytes. The fact was, the reverend Father President hardly glimpsed the breadth of the disaster. Liberty was awake and crying in the land. The secularization of the Missions was an accomplished fact while the Padre still hoped to avert it.

Father Saavedra was less shrewd than saintly. In the management of the Missions difficulties arose; if there was a way out he took it; if not, it was indubitably so ordered of God, hence bearable. He looked for the ultimate triumph of St. Francis, but what he could contrive by way of betterment he did. His night’s muse had been rather of his own affairs than this business of the Commandante’s, which he supposed might be pertinent to the matter.

Notwithstanding his afternoon of years and the heaviness of his concerns, the Padre walked springily toward the Presidio of Monterey. A wet fog that hung in shreds and patches about the pines had left the fields dewy and glorious. Blossoms lapped the trail, birds sang in the woods, Padre Vicente was in tune. He must needs talk, and since this was clearly no time to let vapors, he talked with Fages upon another matter which lay close to his heart, and concerned the good of the order. Said he: —

“You should know something of the family of Escobar, brother, a very ancient house and a noble one, well set up by marriages on either side. Don Antonio, who has the estates of Las Plumas and La Liebre, you have met. Know, then, that his younger son, called Isidro, is dedicated, vowed, given over to Mother Church and our Holy Order of St. Francis. Him I look to have with me in three days at the farthest. To that end I have had the room made ready next to mine at Carmelo.”

This was straight news. If the secretary’s eyes had not been cast down as their custom was he would have seen the little flicker of pride with which it was delivered; but then the dropped lids hid also a little prick of alert dismayedness behind them. The good Padre was big with his plan, which was now ripe for delivery. He went on: —

“You will know, of course, that this scion of a goodly house cannot be made a priest here in California, as one might say the word, that he must needs go to our college of San Fernando, perhaps also to Rome, but in good time, brother, in good time.

“You have heard me speak, Fray Dcmetrio, of the danger that threatens our great foundation, the work of our brother in Christ and St. Francis, Padre Junip’ero Serra, whom God assoil, and how that by prayer and the works of the Superior of our order and the intervention of Holy Church it may yet be turned aside.” This was as far as the Father President would admit the imminence of that dissolution of the Missions which was so soon to be accomplished, lest by admitting he should make it sure. Anything more implied a doubt of the sovereign powers of St. Francis; St. Francis, it appeared, had other affairs.

“Yet,” said Padre Vicente, “in times like these even the least of God’s servants, of whom we are, may do somewhat. The coming of this young man into our order at this time should mean much for the Missions, much, Demetrio, and was no doubt so ordered aforetime, as you shall hear.” Upon this the good Padre out with the story of Mercedes Venegas and the elder Escobar, and a very pretty story he made of it down to the ruin of Don Antonio’s fortune and the grant to him of the twin estates of Las Plumas and La Liebre. Yet there remained in Mexico members of both mother’s and father’s houses, men of affairs and good fortune, well friended of the state, who might serve St. Francis a turn.

“So,” concluded the Padre, “we have here in this young man, whom I have seen and found well inclined toward the work, that which may win for us many worldly means, by which it is ordained God’s work should proceed.” Thus the Father President unbosomed himself of his conceit, which was, plainly put, to keep Isidro by him until the spirit and power of the Missions had got into his blood, and then send him to Mexico to be made a priest, and use his family for priestly ends. An excellent plan enough, but too late in fruition. Perhaps Fages knew this; the man was no fool, though reputed slow; no less a saint than many of his stripe, and greedy of advancement. Perhaps Father Vicente made the mistake of taking his subordinate’s limitations for granted. Fray Demetrio was a man of no blood and little schooling, but if he had gone far for a man of his parts he might go farther. Father Vicente was all for Holy Church and St. Francis; Fages was all for Fages. Holy Church was a good thing for you if you could make it so; one might climb by the skirts of St. Francis to some very desirable seat. So when the Father President unburdened himself on the hill trail between Carmelo and the Presidio of Monterey he gave that worthy food for thought. He had hardly done with it by the time they had come to the top of the hill that looks on the town. Out beyond, caught, as it were, in the bight of the moon-shaped bay, the stranger ship dipped to her white reflection on the tide.

“How make you her country ?” asked the Padre.

“Venetian by the flag,” said Fray Demetrio.

“Venetian. Ah, ah!” The Father President felt a loosening about his heart. What menace to St. Francis could come from that quarter ? An hour later he was with the Commandante at the Presidio.

The Commandante of Monterey was a personable man, keen, well set up, not young, iron gray as to hair, as to temper cold steel that remembered the pit where it was forged. A just man, very jealous of military power. The Father President and the Commandante were, as respected their several jurisdictions, upon the edge of distrust; for the rest, they were very good friends. The Commandante’s rooms overlooked the blue floor of the bay and the Venetian ship which lay in the anchorage. The vessel had seen stiff weather and the mercy of God. Off Cape San Lucas, beating before a southerly wind, it became certain the rotten mainsail would never hold; the sound of splitting canvas was like the crack of doom to the crew, who took themselves at once to religion. They found an advocate with God in the person of the Virgin, and by her intervention, being strengthened miraculously, the sail held, and had been vowed to her at the first port of entry. The sailors even now gathered on the beach to walk barefoot, each holding a corner of the canvas to bring it to the church of San Carlos at Monterey. They raised a hymn as they walked, the burden of which came up through the Commandante’s window, and served for all introduction to the conversation.

“There came in that vessel,the King’s Delight,” said the Commandante, “one Valentin Delgardo, with letters from the capital upon a matter which concerns the civil authorities, which concerns you, Padre, a little, me most of all.” Here was a good beginning, but the Padre waited to hear more. It grew upon him as he waited that Jesus Castro must be older than he thought, not so much by years as by grief. When the Commandante was ready for going on it was curtly enough.

“You knew my wife?” The Padre bowed. “She was a Ramirez. This Delgardo comes with word of a considerable estate which has fallen to her or her heirs; failing the direct line it reverts to the Church, — to the Hospital of the Clean Conception at Mexico, to be exact.” This was large news, but could hardly be expected to interest a brother of St. Francis; the Padre judged there was more. Presently it came.

“You wonder what further there could be in the matter, since you, Padre, in common with the rest of the world, believe me childless; so, for a long time, I supposed myself, but the truth is Ysabel had a child.” Something of what this cost Castro the Padre guessed, but the Coramandante’s temper brooked no pity.

“It is true,” he went on, beginning to walk up and down the room, “there was a daughter, and no one knows what has become of her. . . . Ysabel was at Santa Barbara; I was putting down the revolt in the south. It was the year of the pestilence. On my return I found my wife dead, and the woman Elisa, her nurse, gone back to her people. Of the child I could hear no word. As you have perhaps heard — as you know” — The pride of a Castro could go no farther.

“As I know, my son,” assented Saavedra fatherly. Report had it that the Señora Castro had died of hate for the proudest man in New Spain, whose hair was white with grief of her before his time.

“Well,” said the Commandante, “it was not for a year that I heard anything of that matter. Padre Bonaventura, who confessed her when she died, was transferred from Santa Barbara, but when he learned of my return he made occasion to see me and told me this much. Ysabel was not yet recovered from her confinement when she was taken with the fever, and though the Padre came as quickly as he might in that fearful time, she was soon spent. What she confessed to him was that she had had a child and put it away from her, — I cannot believe her mind right at that time, — but repented. She wished me to have it, for it was mine of a surety. ‘Tell him to take the child,’ she said, and with that she died.” Damp like death stood on the Commandante’s brows. Father Saavedra kept his fine hands twisted in a knot, and his eyes on the King’s Delight. Men will not look on one another’s mortal agony.

Said the Padre at last, “And you found no trace ? ”

“None. The woman Elisa might have told somewhat, but she had disappeared. Afterward I came upon sure proof that she had died of the fever.”

“ And now ? ”

“ Now I wish to know more. Elisa was a Christian, and very intelligent. If the child died she would hardly have had it buried without a priest; if it lived she would have had it baptized. Some of your Padres may know; I am told they keep strict register. Or, at least, whoever had her in charge would have confessed, perhaps.”

“The seal of the confessional,” began the Father President —

“The seal of the confessional, Padre,” interrupted the other, “has been used before now to restore that which was lost, and to bring riches into the maw of the Church.” He shrugged off the implied rebuke of the Padre’s uplifted hand and hurried on: “I have heard lately that your college of San Fernando has fallen somewhat into decay. The child is the heiress of the Ramirez; bring me news of her, and I promise you St. Francis shall not suffer for it.” It was a relief to Castro to speak peremptorily of what he would do if the child were found; it seemed almost like getting something done; but to do the Padre justice, at this point he had hardly a thought of the bribe to St. Francis, though that came afterward as befitted a Superior of the Order. Just now he was touched as a man by the other man’s consuming grief.

“By what marks would you know her when found ? ”

“ None, none! ” cried Castro. “ I know nothing except the time of her birth. She would be turned sixteen by now. You see I did not know — I was not sure — my wife had not said— I had been four months from home, and it is probable Ysabel was brought untimely to bed. She had not been well in Santa Barbara. Then when I heard that my wife was dead I wished not to live myself; I asked to be kept in active service. But in the end I went back to Santa Barbara, and there I learned about the child.”

Slowly the two men beat over the stubble of the Commandante’s old grief, but found small comfort in it. The woman Elisa had not been one of the mission neophytes, and in that busy time she had died without priestly ministrations. There had been another woman with her keeping the Señora Castro’s house. It seemed she might be able to tell something if she could be found. It appeared to the Padre that she must be living, for if she had died in any of the Missions she would have confessed, and word of it come to the Commandante. There were not then so many dwellers in Alta California that the name of Jesus Castro could come up in any such connection and the Padres not know who it should be. The Father President promised to charge his mind with it as he went on his yearly round of Missions, which would begin now in a week or two at most.

It was a matter which could be turned to account in many ways. To serve Castro in this affair would be to turn his influence on the side of the Missions in the crisis which approached, and the reward might be considerable. Besides, there was the heiress herself, who, if found, might be, as a child of the Missions, brought to serve their end. These were the thoughts of the functionary, the head of an order; there was another which was pure priesthood. Father Vicente was jealous for souls, and Castro an indifferent communicant. If now he could be helped in this matter his thoughts might be turned properly toward God and the Church, his mother, who served him. This was sweet thought, and the Padre fed upon it walking back to Monterey. But what he thought he did not tell to Fages, much to that worthy’s discomfiture. The good Brother had an itch for news.

V

YSABEL

This is a true account of Ysabel Castro, and how a child of hers came to be lost. The rest of the argument has to do with finding her. Most of it was known to her husband: as much as was known to all the world was known to Vicente Saavedra; the rest you shall hear and judge.

If Ysabel Castro had been a beautiful woman, fit to set a man beside himself, Ysabel Ramirez had been a more beautiful girl. There are still extant in San Blas among the gallants there some songs which were made of her worshipfully. They knew how to appraise a woman, those sprigs of New Spain,— her hands, her ankles, her eyebrows, the black shroud of her hair. That she had few suitors for her hand among many lovers was not so much because the Señor Ramirez was villainously poor as that he was villainously proud.

Suitors or no suitors, Ysabel had given her heart to another Ramirez, a cousin in some sort, who had the family beauty, the family pride, and, it may be added, the family poverty. There is no doubt he loved Ysabel; perhaps the young people might have come together and been happy in the face of all these, — such things have happened in New Spain, — but before this could be accomplished Jesus Castro had seen her. Castro was already a made man, and his youth dry in him when the beauty of Ysabel Ramirez shook the crypts of his soul. One is obliged to admit, had there been no impediment, it would have been a suitable marriage. The name of Castro was as good as Ramirez, the fortunes better.

The pride of young men is not the pride of middle age. Ramon Ramirez was too proud to have his cousin if she did not love him; Castro was too proud, loving her, not to have her on any terms. In the end he possessed her, at what cost to himself you shall hear. Always one must admit a certain amount of misunderstanding to mitigate the pitiableness of human affairs.

When Castro began to make favors of small loans to the elder Ramirez it was merely to ease the need he had of serving Ysabel. When Ramirez began to accept favors he had no hint of Castro’s suit. If he had known how much the weight of debt pressed upon the elder man, Castro might not have used such urgency. That Ysabel did not love him he knew, but had no hint of the affair with the cousin; there had been no formal betrothal, and, besides, the body and soul of him cried out for her. The desire of mastery mastered him; Ysabel he would have if he died for it. But Ysabel died.

She had one stormy hour with her father, a stolen one with her lover, and afterward submitted to what was, for her, the will of God. They were all for pride, those dons of New Spain, for name and honor and bravery; but, in fact, they were a simple folk.

Jesus Castro was at that time Commandante at San Blas, and Ramon Ramirez one of his lieutenants. At the marriage of his superior Ramon held a stirrup for the bride at the church door. Castro saw his hand tremble when her foot was on it, and got an inkling; looked at his wife’s face, and had a revelation. There went to that wedding a broken heart, a slighted troth, a cold exchange of coin, for all of which Castro paid.

Ysabel saw to that. She went to his hearth in scorn, to his bed with cold shudderings of distaste. He had his will of her as far as the outward form, never so far as the borderland of soul and understanding. His pretty plan for marrying a wife and winning her afterward went all awry. It was not that he was too proud to woo, but he lacked knowing how. She met his courtesies with contempt, and his passion with bitter gibes. In all this was no outward quarrel. Her very obedience was a mock. Ramon she had never seen, never tried to see since her marriage. It was not doubt of his wife’s honor that led him to exchange his post to Santa Barbara, where all was strange, but the hope that in sheer loneliness she might turn to her husband. The worst of his unhappiness was that with all her hating he could not unlove her.

At Santa Barbara Ysabel loathed him more, and clung closer to the woman Elisa, who had nursed her.

In truth, I think the poor lady not all to blame in this. With all his will to do her good, her husband’s bitter passion would not let him spare her. Besides, her condition — she was by now enceinte — no doubt worked a disorder in her mind. Of this, as you have learned, Castro had no hint.

“It would please him too much,” said Ysabel to her woman.

Indian revolts in the south kept her husband away from home much of that year, and furthered her plan of concealment. When the Doña Ysabel was near her time, there broke out at the Mission a great pestilence of fever that carried off the natives by scores, and kept every man’s mind upon his own affairs.

Those were simple times when nature had a large measure of trust, and women served one another at need. Doña Ysabel had in her hour, which came untimely, the woman Elisa and one other. About sundawn, when they showed her the child, she saw that she had stamped it with her hate, — the very front and feature of the Castros. She turned upon her side and hid her face. “Take it away,” she said to the women, “take it away.”

It seemed a weakling, not likely to find breath for going on, and the women had hurried it to the priest for baptism. Father Bonaventura had too much to do at that time for record keeping; he christened the child, between two deaths, Jacintha Concepcion, and knew no more about it.

Ysabel never saw her child but once afterward. The women put it to her breast, but there was no milk; the rage of grief had dried that fountain. It seemed she might have been tenderly moved toward it, for she looked at it long, and took a medal from her neck to hang about the child’s, but at once she rose up in her bed, bright and hot and shaken terribly, crying upon the women to take it away. She seemed not to have any thought but “Take it away! take it away!” and — “never let him know, Elisa, never let him know,” meaning her husband, “ah God, never let him know!” So she would fall asleep moaning, and waking fall to crying again very pitifully. It seemed as if the child were a great shame to her which she would hide, as, indeed, such a birth might be to a woman who was a maid at heart. But the women understood that she was in a fever, and were very tender of her.

On the ninth day the woman Elisa saw that she opened new eyes upon her, strange, but sane. “Go for the Padre,” she said to the other serving woman; “it is the shadow of death.” The shadow was very near.

“I have been a sinful woman,” Ysabel said to the priest between two breaths. “Tell my husband to take the child” — With that she fell a-shuddering so that the Padre made haste to lay the host between her lips. So she died, but when Padre Bonaventura had time to inquire into the matter the woman and the child had disappeared. Doña Ysabel should have shown her repentance to her servant rather than the priest. The woman loved her, and was as reticent as death.

Neither the Padre nor Castro could make anything of it. That they had died of the fever seemed likeliest. Castro fed upon the hint of forgiveness in that last word, “Tell my husband to take the child”— Ah, Christ, what would he not give! but to the world he was still a childless man.

As much of this as he knew Padre Saavedra brooded over after his meeting with the Commandante. He glimpsed a little what had been in Ysabel’s mind when she had denied her child — the good father had confessed women as well as men — and a little of the notion of the woman Elisa, but he believed the daughter of Castro still alive, since God, who ordered all things, would hardly let it rise up to trouble his mind if there were nothing to come of it. The woman Elisa was a Christian, therefore if living to be reached through Holy Church. Father Saavedra had it in mind to go through the Missions as with a sieve till she was found, or some trace of her. Castro believed her dead of the plague, but the child was not with her; then she had left it in charge of some other who might still be reached. But the best reason for believing was the urgent need of St. Francis to support his failing cause; the fortune of Ramirez might very well be the ram caught in the thicket for sacrifice. You will easily perceive by this the bent of the Father President’s mind.

At the Presidio the Padre had asked Castro for proofs, marks of identification by which the child should be known when found; the Commandante, you remember, had said there were none. There was the medal, — Castro had seen it on his wife’s bosom, — but they knew nothing of that; and there were marks: the beauty of the Ramirez stamped by the Commandante, — two perfect parted bows of lips, two great eyes under a fine curved line of brows meeting over the high straight nose, a temper quick and restrained, a tongue tipped with the aloe of bitterness that curdled Doña Ysabel’s heart, great power of hating, greater for loving. By these marks you should know the child of Ysabel and Jesus Castro when she was found. No doubt the good Padre was right. The surface of waters is troubled above bodies about to rise; something was to come up out of the depths to concern the Commandante and the Father President. Revolving the affair Father Vicente paced back to Carmelo neither so cheery nor so communicable as he had been in the morning.

Meantime Castro who knew more of these things than the Padre, but not so much as you have heard, set straightly about the business of doing something. He sought out Don Valentin, and put it before him somewhat in this fashion. There was an heir, a daughter who would be about sixteen, but she was unfortunately out of touch, mislaid, in fact lost. He let Delgardo think what he would of causes, gave him only facts, place, time, the name of the nurse. It occurred to him now as he talked that he had not paid sufficient attention to the other woman; he had been all for Elisa. It grew upon him that here was a clue that might be followed to advantage. All this was interesting, though it was hardly clear what it purported to Delgardo, but there was more to follow.

This Delgardo was as courtly and serviceable a young man as ever came out of Mexico; a nimble wit and likely to have himself most in hand when there was most need. All the young caballeros about the Presidio were vastly taken with him. He brought them a new style of waistcoat and a new game at cards. The rope of silver around his peaked sombrero was fastened with a great turquoise. The leathers of his spurs had jewels in them. Besides he could talk, as the fashion then set, of liberty and the Republic, — had all its newest phases very pat.

It seemed from his account that there had been a half brother of the elder Ramirez who had gone far in the favor of fortune, but not far enough in the favor of ladies to secure him a lawful heir. Dying, his estates fell to the heirs of Ysabel, if any such were found. Delgardo freely admitted that he had accepted that quest from the administrator because it brought him to the new land where he had heard estates were to be come by. He had taken ship at San Blas on this same King’s Delight that dwindled to a speck against the west. He had no other employment but the business of the heir.

Castro considered that he had here a tool to his hand. Delgardo could see for himself — Castro put it to him, walking up and down in the low room opening toward the sea — that he was the man for this affair. Once supplied with money, letters, all the details that were known to the father, this young blade with the quick wit should do wonders. To tell the truth, Castro had made a perfunctory search. The rage of Ysabel even in her grave had been a thing not lightly to be braved. From the first he had been sure it would baffle him.

Padre Bonaventura was no longer at Santa Barbara, but at San Gabriel. He should be able to set forth the facts freshly. The census of the inhabitants was so strictly kept by the Missions that a careful search must reveal something, and the girl once found,— ah, well, — who so worthy of the doe as he who sped the arrow; to whom should the dove belong if not to him who set the snare? In short, Castro let him know in very courtly and roundabout fashion, and not all at one sitting or in one day, that if he would but find the daughter of Ysabel Ramirez he might have whatever he asked, even to the hand of the heiress. Delgardo felicitated himself things were coming his way, but he would have a surer bond. This polite indirection had a little fallen into disuse in the days of the Republic. He would do his utmost he said, and marry her — “if so be she was marriageable!” The eyes of the Commandante narrowed to two slits spitting fire. Marriageable! to a Delgardo, the daughter of a Ramirez! Don Valentin kept a level eye; he had seen great men rage before now; nevertheless, he had good manners in the main.

“The Señor Commandante forgets — the señorita may be married by now.” This was a check, and Castro let his rage die out while he considered it. Ah, ah, no matter; only find her, the reward would not be wanting. So, finally, a bargain was struck, but at this first interview they had hardly made a beginning. There was very little business in those days in Alta California which could not better be finished to-morrow than to-day.

Delgardo had gone off to his quarters in the town. Lights twinkled in the houses and went out. Somewhere out of sight a woman sang to a fretful child, the sentries called across the dark. Over in Carmel Padre Vicente knelt by the bones of Serra; in devotion his soul took flight. Demetrio Fages, near him, moved sidewise on his knees to rest them from the tiles; he prayed with his lips, his hands, and the surface of his mind. The depths of him were busy with other things.

By and by the moon swam into the clear void; it looked in on the serene face of the Father President, sleeping with his hands clasped on a crucifix lest death surprise him; on Delgardo, gaming with the young bloods of Monterey; on Escobar, sleeping in his silver-fringed mantle, and on El Zarzo watching him in the wakeful pauses with black, deep-lighted eyes. But in the house of the Commandante lay shadow of darkness; where no moon could pierce a man rolled face downward on his bed, who moaned and bit his hands, and cried only “Ysabel! Ysabel! Ysabel!”

(To be continued.)