Isidro

XI

THE QUEST OF JUAN RUIZ

IN the orchard closes of San Carlos Isidro had been smitten with a sense of the sufficiency of the Mission Fathers as men. Now he was to have a revelation of the men as priests. The Brothers of St. Francis, who admitted no material hindrance, who dug, hewed, and planted, unbound all considerations of want and toil, were themselves in bondage. Men who made themselves masters of a raw land and unkempt thousands of its people were overmastered by their own vows. If they loosed others, themselves they could not loose.

Vicente Saavedra was a man of parts, great in dignities, honored in place, but before all a priest in orders and a servant of God. His great work as Father President of Missions was not set before his greater service in the cure of souls. Within his province he could plot to use the Escobar connection to the advantage of the Missions, and be commended for the contrivance by the measure of its success; but he could not, to further that design, abrogate his position as spiritual father to a filthy shepherd with a stain of murder on his soul. Except by the greatness of his determination, in the present trouble he was no greater than the meanest of his priests. He had the whole tale of suspicion from the shepherd Ramon, the whole business of Noé and Reina Maria from Escobar, and the confession of Juan Ruiz to make all straight. As for the robbery, he took no account of it, not being able to lay it to either party. What he knew to be truth was that Mariana, not Ruiz, lay out in the unblessed grave on the Mesa Buena Vista, and Ruiz, not Isidro, was the murderer, but knew it by such means as made his surety impotent. Not for any of the considerations entering here might the seal of the confessional be broken. What he must do was to find Ruiz, and by the sword of the Spirit bring him to open confession; and now that prompting of the Spirit that had secured from the penitent the right to seek him out in the interest of one unjustly accused in his stead, assumed in the Padre’s devout mind the proportions of Divine Intervention. Saavedra might not declare Isidro’s innocence, but Juan Ruiz was pledged to it could he be found. Forthwith the good father set about it. He visited Isidro in the calabozo at Monterey and comforted him. “God,” he said, “permits his people to be vexed for no light purpose. Do you, therefore, my son, set yourself to discover the meaning of God behind this visitation of humiliation, and so nourish yourself in the wisdom of the Spirit. Meanwhile, I go to bring that which will serve you this turn.” So having made the best disposition that he might of present affairs, Saavedra set off with an Indian tracker, and very light of baggage, upon the trail of Juan Ruiz.

It was, after all, though tedious, an affair of no great magnitude to follow and find the vanished shepherd of Mariana. There were not at that time above two thousand souls in Alta California not of the native races, — gentes de razon they were called, and of these was Juan Ruiz. His mother was a Mexican; his father might have been Mariana as well as any other. He was well known to hunters and trappers and the riffraff of population that floats into new lands; within a fortnight he had been heard of at Santa Cruz hearing mass at the Church of the Holy Cross.

This business of the mass had stripped him of all his poor earnings, and left him bare to the purpose that lay all this while at the back of his mind like a stone in a pool, —not revealed because of the troubling of the waters. Rid of the witnesses and the fear of dead men walking on his trail, the thoughts of Ruiz began to turn toward the strong box at the head of Mariana’s bed in the hut at the place called The Reed. It was not for that he had killed Mariana, but the Portuguese being dead, and Ruiz impoverished for the good of his soul, it was fitting that Mariana should pay. By now the sweat of fear began to leave him, and Ruiz recovered the low cunning which was the habit of his mind. So, on the day that Isidro and El Zarzo rode into Santa Cruz, Ruiz went out, telling no man, with no baggage but his shepherd’s staff and a parcel of bread and meat, bound for the place of The Reed.

He went south all day by piney wood and open slope, meeting no one, walked on into the night as long as the moon lasted, and slept under an oak. He supped next night at an Indian rancheria, where they shared with him what fare they had, and asked no questions. The third day brought him early to the place of The Reed, having made good time; for ever as he trudged there grew in him the lust of gold, — the touch and sight of it, the clink of bright pieces falling together. He ate very little, feeding on the pleasures he would buy with Mariana’s coin, the bustle and change, fine clothes, the lusting, the feasting, the drink — Ah, well, not so much of that, perhaps; the Padre had forbidden it; but there must be money enough in that strong box to buy indulgence for such small transgressions without curtailing them. Oh, the golden coins, the golden days! Then from glowing hot he grew cold to think of his treasure — his! It had come to that with him now, — lying there in the tenantless hut for any wandering thief to take. Who knew if Mariana had made fast the door, seeing, when he went out of it last, he had no notion of being so long away ? Suppose Nicolas and Ramon had been there before him, scurvy rogues both. So he hurried his going, ready to do killing again for the sake of the slain man’s treasure, until he came to the place of The Reed, where he was brought up again by the fear of Mariana.

The hut looked low and menacing in the evening light, shut and barred, weathered and soiled and mean. The pool, reflecting all the light waning from the concave heaven, glimmered palely at him like an eye. He heard the reeds whispering above it all night long. Ruiz had not dared to come into the hut in the dark, but lay out near it, watching, watching, lest any come out of it to surprise him where he lay in long pauses of strained wakefulness and snatches of haunted sleep. But when earth and sky had cleared to a cool gray, and rabbits began to stir in the long grass, he was up and had broken the lock with a stone. He found the box at the bed’s head, as he had known it, but bound with iron, studded with nails, double-locked, a weary piece of work. He tried the lock with his stone, tried the wood with his knife, fumbling and hurried; bethought himself at last to stumble about the dark and filthy corners of the room for a mattock. The clank and thud of it upon the chest rolled out and scared the rabbits from the pool; it jarred Ruiz to a fury of haste and fear. So between pounding and running to the door to see if any one spied upon him, he wrestled with the chest in the darkling hut until the gold poured out of the riven wood, and he knew himself shepherd no longer, but his own man, and rich. He was quieter after that, looked about him, found a bag for his coin, found food, and remembering that Mariana would have wine — he felt the want of it by now — looked for it until he found it in a kind of crypt under the bed, and carried away as much as he could handle. Then, being laden and wearied, he turned south slowly to fetch up with the place where he had left Mariana. Father Saavedra, you will remember, had bidden him bury the man, and, in fact, Ruiz would hardly have any peace until he had seen the sod upon him.

On this business, chiefly because of great fatigue, he was three days more, meeting no one but Indians, and reached the Mesa Buena Vista shortly after Mascado had visited it. Here he fell into a new terror, greater than all, for he found the fresh dug grave sunken to the shape under it. Here was discovery hot upon his track; Mariana’s death known, himself, no doubt, guessed as the murderer. Sick, shaken, he went back to where he had covered his gold, for he would not come into the presence of Mariana with it, and drew together his wit which had gone all abroad with fancying himself cunning and rich and altogether a fine fellow. But because his wit was slow, he went on a day and a half in his old course before he was able to shape a new one. First, his plan had been to work dowm to Santa Barbara to take ship there and away; to live well, and to take pains never to confess to the theft of the money until after he had spent it. Now he thought best that he should turn north, skirt the vast, dim valley of the San Joaquin, cross the river, and so make the Russian colony out of the bounds of Alta California. So he planned, and, returning by the end of the Mesa Buena Vista, was in time to see Nicolas and Ramon, with Noé and Reina Maria, digging up what remained of Mariana. By this time he was clean daft with terror, and lay out in the scrub for a day, drinking Mariana’s wine. He took to the trail again while the drink was still in him, and so had a fall in a stony place, wrenching his foot. Then he began to want food, being afraid now even of Indians. In a day or so the need sobered him even of the drunkenness of fear; the habit of his shepherd life began to assert itself. He began to study the land, to lay the shortest course, to find roots and fruits, contriving that he should fall in with the bands of renegade Indians who, under Urbano, laired like beasts in the Tulares. But Urbano at that time had other affairs in hand. Ruiz kept to the border of the hill country; eastward lay the lineless valley, full of a brooding mist, formless and blue; dark and low on the horizon lay the Tulares, and the river in the midst of them maundering down to the bay.

Meantime, Father Saavedra, with Saco the tracker questing like a hound, followed the shepherd’s trail. Learning at what time he had left Santa Cruz, and guessing his errand in part, they had turned directly toward the Mesa Buena Vista, since it seemed likely Ruiz had not heard that any one had been before him with the burial. They pushed the way very shrewdly, and before long had trace of him. Among the Indians whom Ruiz met was a woman to whom he had given a gold piece, thinking himself a man of means and able to requite favors handsomely. The woman made a hole in the coin and strung it about her neck, having, in fact, no other use for it. This Saco spied, questioned, and reported. So the robbery was accounted for, and Father Saavedra went with his head sunken on his breast for the space of several hours. He could not escape the conclusion that Ruiz must have gone fresh from the confessional and the sacrament to this new transgression. Approaching Buena Vista, Saco found the place where Ruiz had hidden his treasure while he went to look his last on Mariana, and found the newer trail going from it; later they found an empty bottle where he had cast it from him, and a coin in the grass where the shepherd had dropped it in his drunken walk. Finally, they struck into his very path and the print of his limping foot.

Riding out from the Mission the Father President had sat his horse cheerfully, resting the issue of the affair, as his habit was, on God. He had in him that spirit of delighted service which informed the labors of Junip ero Serra, craving whatever circumstance of labor or sorrow that brought him into touch with the Divine Will. Come what might of this business of Juan Ruiz, Padre Vicente had no doubts; he was still able to interrogate every anguish, What lesson hast Thou? A little as a lover rides, into the garden of his mistress, expecting sight or reminder of her at every turn, so rode the Padre upon his errand to surprise the purposes of God. Thus at first, but the long journey wearied him. The evidence of the shepherd’s fresh crime, following closely on the sacrament, gave him heartsickness. The lust of man-hunting, which glowed in Saco as he pricked forward on the freshening trail, oppressed his soul. Lastly, he began to be troubled for the physical distress of the fugitive himself; the dragging foot, the rag of torn clothing by the brook where he had bound it up, the holes where he had dug feverishly for the roots of wild hyacinths, the wavering of the course which betokened unease of mind, gave the good father concern. In the beginning, he had ridden this quest for the sake of justice and Isidro; at the end, he pushed it hard for the sake of mercy and Juan Ruiz.

XII

THE PLACE OF WOLVES

Between the hills and the Tulares is a treeless space, rolling, shrubby, — herding-place of deer what time they run together. Transversely across it frothy winter floods gouge out furrows, sharp and deep near the cañon mouths, running out shallowly valleywards at the limit of waters. Here run turbid streams in wet weather, two or three months of the year; for the rest, they lie void, bone-dry waterscars, and wild beasts dig their lairs in the banks of them. Hereabouts is the Place of Wolves, El Poso de los Lobos. Here are stinking holes where the lean-flanked mothers with heavy dugs go in and out to the whimpering cubs; here are foxes’ covers and stale old lairs of the dogs of the wilderness, sunken caves, weathered niches all a-litter of old bones; earthy hollows where a hunted man might safely lie. It was a place known to trappers, guides, wanderers for any profit of the hills or for no profit at all, and to Juan Ruiz.

The reminder of the lair is strong in a stricken man, — to draw to cover, lie close, keep dark; to have the sense and nearness of the earth. Juan Ruiz, knowing the place of old, lame, a-hungered, feverish, hugging his gold, crooning over it to comfort himself for his pains, steered his course for the broken lairs of the Poso de los Lobos. In his mind he designed to shelter there and recover from the sickness of terror and fatigue, but the shuddering soul of him purposed more than that. Unawares, it drove him with the last instinct of the burrowing beast, the while he thought himself following a clever plan. A man who commits a crime without first taking his own measure is likely to find himself in such a case as this. He must be brute enough to have it lie wholly without his sensibilities, or his determination must be greater than all these; otherwise the thin wall of reason cracks. In the fifth night of his flight from Mesa Buena Vista Ruiz slept under a thicket of buckthorn on a forward sloping hill. The night was soft dark, warm and Sweet; no coyote howled nor bird awoke; the tormented soul departed into the borderland between death and sleep and found an interval of rest. About the mid-hour he started up, warned by the wolf sense of pursuit. It seemed such a sense watched in him while he slept. Often keeping the flock of Mariana he had roused at night before the unease of the dogs made him aware of danger; now he trusted that sense as he had been wont to do, and, in fact, the warning was true. Father Saavedra and Saco camped on his trail not a day behind him. Ruiz got up and shook off the stiffness of his limbs; huddling as the air began to chill toward morning, stooping as the weight of his treasure told on his shaken frame, dragging his swollen foot, he worked his way down the hill front. He followed a dry wash as long as it served him, then struck across a clear space of knee - high, shrubby herbs and grass. He had no light but star shine and the candle at the back of his brain, that burned brighter as his vital force waned in him. So he forged northward, and the day widened and shut him in like the hollow of a bell. Back on his trail followed Padre Vicente, pitiful and prayerful, and Saco, the hair of his neck pricking like a dog’s as the trail freshened.

By mid-morning Ruiz was out on the plain beyond the limit of small waters. Rain had fallen scantily on the eastern slopes that year, and few streams ran beyond the foothills. So, as the day advanced, he began to add to the fever of his flight the fever of thirst, the more severe because of his oblivion of delirium. It would come over him while he rested in the short shade of the scrub, and ease him of his pains and terrors until the brute warning of pursuit urged him forward. He made as straight a course as the land and his fuddled wit permitted for the Poso de los Lobos, to hide his gold and himself. Saco and Saavedra had sighted him, a moving speck in the haze, about the second hour of afternoon, and though they lost him again in the rolling land, expected confidently to come up with him before night. By this time Ruiz had forgotten about the priest and Mariana. He was hardly conscious of much beside the bag of gold which he huddled in his bosom; in his disorder he conceived that some one followed on his trail for the sake of it. Therefore, as he neared the Poso de los Lobos he began to go very cunningly, trod as much as possible upon the stones to leave no trail, and went back and forth upon his tracks. Stooping from the top of the bank, he fixed upon a bobcat’s lair, high up above the possible reach of waters. Leaning above it he kissed his treasure, half in tears to put it from him, half laughing with the pleasure of his cunning, made a long arm, and dropped it out of sight. Then, wallowing in the loose soil of the bank to leave no trace of hands or feet,he contrived to push down a quantity of gravel and loose stones until he had blotted out the mouth of the lair. That was the last flicker of the cunning mind. He had hidden Mariana’s money from those walking on his trail, and hidden it so securely that come another day he would not be able to find it himself.

There was a niche in the north bank of the wash that must have been left there first by the falling away of a great boulder the size of a wine cask; behind it the earth was a little damp from some blind water source that in a rainy country might have been a spring, and the coyotes had scented it in a dry season, pawing deeply into the bank. Now and then in hot weather they returned, drawn by the water smell to dig for it and cool their hairy flanks in the cool dampness. The opening had thus grown larger than any lair, and smelled of beasts. The displaced boulder lay not far from the mouth of it, and loose soil from above had piled about it, making a barrier that screened it from the unaccustomed eye. Here Juan Ruiz hid himself, clean gone out of his natural mind, lacking food and drink, but glad of the darkness and the cool damp of the clay, to which he bared his aching foot, and in his gladness of relief and the sense of the solid earth about him, babbled foolishly as a child. Here, when the sun was not quite down, Saco found him singing in a feeble, merry voice the old nursery rhyme which begins “

Saco, starting out from San Carlos knew nothing whatever of the Ruiz affair except that he was a man the Padre wished to find, and his trail was to be picked up somewhere about the Mesa Buena Vista. There, having found and followed it to this conclusion, although he was as pleased with his skill as a hound that has brought the fox to earth, his Indian breeding forbade him any expression of it. He squatted on his haunches by the lair, rolled a cigarette, and appeared to dismiss the whole matter from his mind. He looked now for Padre Saavedra to take up the turn, and the Padre had forgotten for the moment that he followed Ruiz for any other purpose than the man’s own relief. If he had remembered it at this juncture it must have been a sharp jog to his faith to find Ruiz brought to a pass so little likely to serve his purpose.

The Padres had always the means by them for bodily relief as well as for spiritual remedy. They were never lacking simples nor the materials for the sacrament, christening, marriage, and burial. Saavedra sent the Indian up the wash with the horses for water, and himself turned nurse. By the light of a brushwood fire and a few hours of the moon he bound up the shepherd’s foot and covered him from the night chill with his own blankets. As often as the Padre came near him to handle and relieve him, Ruiz remembered Mariana and the tortures of his soul; when they let him lie, his mind wandered off foolishly on the trail of the nursery song.

he sang as he lay stark on the earth, and then, as the Padre lifted him, “Ha, Hell litter, you will leave me, will you ? Take that! and that!” —and then failed for weakness, and feeling the comfort of the blankets began again presently piping and thin,—

“Rest, rest, my son,” said the Padre tenderly, and the raucous voice of the shepherd answered him with curses intolerably obscene. It fell off in obscure mutterings that clarified after an interval to the gentle air

So it went on mournful and sweet in the shadows until the clink of horses’ feet on the boulders, as Saco returned with the water, roused him to present memories. “Cursed be the wood of which it is made, thrice cursed the iron that binds it! Will it never come open ?” cried Ruiz, rising up in his place. “Faugh, what a filthy house for a rich man to live in! Ah, the pretty pieces, ah, so round, so bright! all mine, mine, MINE!” His voice rose to a scream, the Padre’s hand was on his breast pressing him back upon the blankets.

“Drink, my son,” said Saavedra, holding water to his lips.

“Ay, drink, Mariana,” said Ruiz. “Good wine, excellent wine, and a pretty price, eh? Another bottle; ” then as the water cooled him he was minded to sing again, —

“In nomine Patris, — per Christum Dominum,” breathed the Padre above him.

“ Beast — Devil’s spawn! ” gurgled Ruiz from the Padre’s bed.

So it wore on for the greater part of the night, but about the ebb of dark, when there was a smell of morning in the air, he woke out of his delirium tolerably sane. The presence of the Padre seemed not to surprise him; he was stricken with death, and knew it as the earth-born know, as the coyotes that dug this lair might have known before him.

He had come out of his stupor clear of the fear of men, knowing his end near; but the sight of Saavedra signing the cross above him put him in a greater terror of hell fire. He clutched a fold of the Padre’s gown and fell to whimpering, but was too far spent for tears. This was the Padre’s hour; tenderly and by all priestly contrivances, he lifted the poor soul through his agony, and for the ease of his conscience, to the point of open confession. The Padre wrote it out for him by the flare of the brushwood fire he had called Saco out of deep sleep to light, and held it carefully for the fidging hand to mark with a cross over the name he had written. Saavedra had signed it Juan Ruiz. The dying man gave back the quill, speaking more at ease, as the troubled will after open confession.

“ I’m not sure that it is right,” he said; “ Ruiz is not my name. It is the name of a man my mother married at the pueblo San José. I am not sure what my father’s name might have been; my mother was not married to him. She died years ago; she was Maria Lopez.”

“What,” cried the Padre, “was she, indeed, Maria Lopez, daughter of Manuel Lopez of San José ? And are you her son born out of wedlock ? May God be merciful to you a sinner! Your father was Mariana the Portuguese.”

That was a time when the consideration of the pangs of hell was potent to drive souls to salvation, and men were keen to pronounce judgment. What deeper pit was there than that reserved for the parricide ? The groan which was forced out of the Padre at the sudden revelation, his starting back, the horror of his countenance, smote upon the poor shaking soul like the judgment of God. With a great broken cry Ruiz threw himself upon the Padre’s breast, clawed him, clung to him, wrestled with him as a man might on the edge of the pit to win back out of it, with hoarse bestial breathings, a wide mouth of terror, and staring eyes. Saavedra, wrenched free, forced him back upon the bed, and trembling laid the blessed wafer between stretched lips from which the soul had departed.

They buried Juan Ruiz in the place where he lay, in a beast’s lair, after the Father President had blessed the ground. Saco rolled stones across the mouth of it and made a little cross of withes. All his life after Saavedra had moments of selfaccusing, in that he supposed he might, by the better control of his countenance in that crisis, have given the poor soul a larger assurance of the mercy of God.

They spent a day looking for the gold of Mariana, but got nothing for their pains; Juan Ruiz had not been very clear in his account of how he had hidden it. There, no doubt, it lies to this day, high up in the bank of the wash in the bobcat’s lair in the Poso de los Lobos.

Then, with the confession under his belt, the good Father President of Missions set back by the shortest route to the Presidio of Monterey. He had been gone just a week.

XIII

DELFINA

There was a woman in Monterey of a mischievous and biting humor, but not wanting in generous impulses, curious above all, a great lover of gossip and affairs. This Delfina had wit and traces of beauty, and, along with great formality of outward behavior, considerable reputation for impropriety. She had come into the country ten years since with the family of the, at that time, governor of Alta California, as a sort of companion or upper servant, on a footing of friendly intimacy, which she maintained, by report, with the governor at the expense of the governor’s lady. At any rate, she had found it convenient to break off that connection and establish herself in a little house just beyond the plaza in company with an elderly woman who was called by courtesy Tia Juana. The house had a high wall of adobe about it, and a heap of wild vines riding the rooftree and spreading down to the outer wall, affording, so she was accustomed to say, great sense of security to her solitary way of life.

It was not possible in so small a community as Monterey to quite overlook a lady of such conspicuous claims to consideration as Delfina, for that she possessed them there was no one heard to deny; and, indeed, she was not lacking friends willing to affirm that she was most infamously put upon, and possessed of as many virtues as accomplishments. She was the repository of all possible patterns and combinations for the drawnthread work which occupied the leisure of that time; she was a competent seamstress; invaluable at weddings, christenings, and bailes, in the way of decorations and confections, and an industrious and impartial purveyor of news. Among the most judicious and surely the most disinterested of her supporters was Fray Demetrio Fages, who visited her frequently in the interest of her Christian salvation, as he was heard to affirm; and was made the vehicle of liberal donations to the Church, which she was accustomed to bestow out of an ostensibly slender income. Since he was so often at her house it is to be supposed that he found no company there not to his liking, and no behavior not suited to so godly a churchman; but even upon this there were those disposed to wink the eye.

In one way, however, the friendliness of Fray Demetrio gave Delfina better countenance among the matrons of the town, as it gave greater weight to any news of hers which related to the affairs of the Missions, since none so likely to know the facts as the Father President’s secretary, and none more apt in the distribution than the secretary’s friend. If Delfina had been kindly received before, judge how it was in the month which brought Valentin Delgardo and the younger son of the Escobars to the Presidio of Monterey. Both these events in the bearing they had upon the Church gave a new fillip to the absorbing topic of the imminent secularization of the Missions, the probable distribution of the great wealth of herds and silver which they had, and the greater wealth with which report credited them, and the possible effect upon the settlements of removing from the authority of the Padres some thousands of Indians who required very little scratching to show the native savage under the mission gilding. Then there was the old story of Ysabel and Jesus Castro revived with new and fascinating particulars, for there were several people in Monterey who held a remembrance of the beautiful and unhappy woman. Along with this was the arrival of two pretty gentlemen of excellent manners and good blood, — one from the capital in search of a wife and a fortune, the other from Las Plumas, ready to renounce all these in favor of the priesthood. You will perceive that Delgardo had let some hints of his purpose be known, and, indeed, so obvious a conclusion as marrying the heiress when he had found her would have been tacked on to any account of his proceedings whether he had declared it or not. And to crown all this, when gossip was at its best, came the arrest of Isidro on a double charge of murder and robbery, and the departure of the Father President on some mysterious errand of justification or disproval.

Delfina, who had seen Don Valentin and entertained him in her house behind the wall, had the most to say of the first affair; but of Isidro, who had not cared, or had been too much under the supervision of the Father President, to make her acquaintance, — Delfina herself inclined to the latter opinion, — she knew only what Fages could tell her, and that, beyond a shrewd guess or two and some malice, was very little. Both her vanity and curiosity, therefore, were set upon the trail of the mystery behind the bare fact of the arrest. She began to cast about for some plausible ground for invention or explanation, and this led her in the course of a week to the servant of Escobar, who was still in Carmelo in the house of Marta. From Fages Delfina had learned, almost by accident, that the boy had not accompanied Isidro from Las Plumas, but had been picked up by the way. This seemed a very pregnant piece of news; to point to an accomplice or at least an accessory after the fact. Delfina set herself to fall in with the lad and have it out of him by cajolery or whatever means. It happened that her instincts led her soon into the proper juxtaposition for that very business.

Since Isidro’s arrest she had been in the habit of taking her evening walk in the neighborhood of the calabozo, as, indeed, how could any lady of sensibility help being drawn in that direction by the pitiful case of this handsome youth cast into prison on so heinous a charge, which must, no doubt, prove unfounded, or at least justifiable. And being so employed she observed on more than one occasion the lad, called the Briar, lurking about with a great air of disconsolateness, and the assumption of having no particular business. It was her instant conclusion that he walked there for the purpose of some secret communication with his master, and it wanted but the right moment of quiet and the absence of other observers; and Delfina concluded she might bring about a conjunction which would serve her ends.

In fact, the lad had no such purpose as the woman credited him with, having reached that point where he would have sold himself to the devil without parley to have quieted his hunger for a sight of Escobar, sound of him, print of his foot in the earth, or any indubitable sign of his living presence. And that he might have had if he had known enough to apply through Padre Salazar to the proper authorities. As the servant of Escobar he might have had free access to his person, but he was too little used to the ways of men to have known that, and, perhaps, too shy to have used it if he had known; so he hung frequently about the walls that inclosed Isidro, fevered with desire, but maintaining a tolerable appearance of having no interest there. This was that wild lad called the Briar who had come up to Monterey with Señor Escobar charged with a packet from Peter Lebecque, having instructions to deliver it and himself into the hands of the Father President. He had parted from the trapper with little compunction, for, though the old man stood in the place of a father to him, he showed little of fatherliness, accepted him as a member of his household, neither to be greatly considered nor denied. Since the death of the Indian woman Zarzito had called mother, the lad had known loneliness and the desire to mix with his own kind which stirs in the blood of the young, and had ridden this adventure with Escobar by instinct as a bird of passage attempts its initial flight. For the first time he had tasted companionship, faring forth in the royal spring, young blood timing to young blood, and the world all singing and awake. But the lad was most a creature of the wood. He had, one might say, the wit and the will to be tame, but kept the native caution of wild things. Therefore, had no other reason arisen, he would have gone slowly about the business of resigning himself to the disposal of the grave President of Missions. But another obstacle had arisen: love, forsooth. The love of young lads for older, — the love of the companionable for gay companions, love of the dawn sold for the soul of morning, — love, in short, —but of this you shall presently be better instructed. It was no great wonder that the hillgrown lad should love Escobar, so wise and merry and cool, and of such adorable and exasperating gentleness that it irked him to see thieves whipped and wild eagles get their food. It seemed to Zarzito that he could devise no better way of life than to serve Escobar, and follow him even into the cloister, of which you may be sure he had no very clear idea. But in the meantime the packet troubled him, for Lebecque’s instructions had been plain upon the point that it should be turned over to Saavedra, and his intimation that the Padre would thereupon put him in the way of good fortune. It appeared that El Zarzo desired no better fortune than following Escobar. But the real point of his difficulty was this, — he did not in the least know what the packet contained. The lad had not known much of priests or men, but he had learned rapidly, — from the Indian woman Marta, from walks and talks with Escobar, from mere seeing; he had sucked up information as the young sage of the mesa sucks up rain, filling out and erecting visibly. So he knew there was one fact hid from the Father President which, if it became known, would put an end to following his heart’s desire. The question was, did the packet give notice of it ?

On a day when Isidro had been about a week in prison, the day before the Father President returned from the quest of Juan Ruiz, El Zarzo sat a long time under an oak and considered the matter, turning the packet over and over. It was long and thin, wrapped in a black silk kerchief, wound about many times with thread, and sealed up with gum. It showed no sign nor superscription, — apparently nothing to connect it with Peter Lebecque’s lad or the servant of Escobar. Zarzito concluded that if it could be placed in the Father President’s hands without his agency he would be quit of his obligation at the least possible risk. Accordingly, in an unwatched moment he dropped it in the alms-box at the door of the church. It was part of his newly gained information that whatever went in at that opening found its way eventually to the priests.

It was close upon dark when El Zarzo came that evening with the light foot of his Indian training around the corner of the calabozo of Monterey. A bank of fog-built mountain hid the meeting of the sea and sky; a kind of whiteness, reflected from the near-by water and the level beaches, lightened the air. Across the plaza came the thrum of guitars, and the voice of singing mixed with children’s laughter, and the cheerful bark of dogs.

On the side of the prison away from the town was a window high up in the wall; between the bars fanned out the pale yellow ray of a candle. The wall was all of adobe, plastered smoothly up, and whitewashed. Below the window two or three cracks, which could be widened out with a toe or the fingers, afforded slight and crumbling holds. Within the wall all was still; no sound or motion from the prisoner or the guard. The candle rayed out steadily toward the sea that broke whisperingly along the beaches. El Zarzo’s heart beat loudly in his bosom, stirred by the nearness of the well beloved. He reached up the wall for a finger hold, put one toe in a crack and raised himself a foot or two nearer, clinging and climbing like a worm on an orchard wall. Delfina at that moment came mincingly around the corner on her errand of curiosity, and caught him there. The lady, who was as quick in execution as in design, made no outcry to have aroused the guard, but went and plucked him swiftly from behind, and dropped her arms about his as he came tumbling from the wall. The lad was but a slender armful for a person of her build, and though he writhed and wrung himself, he could neither get at her to do her hurt nor to set himself free.

“Be still,” said the lady, “I want but a word with you; ” but the lad struggled the more.

“Be still, you brat,” she said again; “do you want to bring the guard upon us?” But though El Zarzo had his own reasons for not wishing it, he did not or would not understand, and while she struggled and fretted with him Delfina made a discovery.

“What, what!” she cried, and her note was changed to one of amazement and smothered laughter; “so the rabbit has jumped out of the bag! — What, what, my lady,” she said again, continuing her investigations with ehucklings of mischievous delight; “and he a priest! And you his body servant! Fie, oh, fie! ” Her voice quavered with the burden of offensive mirth. “Be still,you little” — But the word will not bear repeating. El Zarzo grew sick to feel her hands fumbling about him, and limp and quiet more at the insult of her tones than at any word.

Behind them they heard the sudden stir of the guard.

“Come away,” cried the Briar, panting and shaking. Delfina wished nothing so much as to get to the bottom of this affair uninterrupted. Holding fast by the lad’s shoulder she ran her prisoner down the open road toward the bay, and out where their running left a wet trail on the sand. The tide was low and quiet.

Few lights showed on the seaward side of the town. Nothing moved in sight but the shape of a solitary horseman on the road above the beaches. It seemed a safe and silent hour for all confidences.

“Confess; you are a woman,” said Delfina.

“I am a maid,” said the other in a dry whisper.

“Oh, yes now, a maid,” said the older woman, mischief beginning to stir in her; “no doubt a maid, and he a priest.”

“I will hear nothing evil of him,” flashed the Briar.

“Why, to be sure,” bubbled Delfina; “and he, I dare say, will accredit you with all the virtues of Santa Cecilia. All priests are alike. I also could tell you ” — But it was plain the girl did not hear; she had begun to twist and wring her hands, with a kind of breathy moan, as one in great distress and unaccustomed to the use of tears.

“You will never betray me, señora,” she begged; “you will not ?”

“Why, as to that,” began Delfina, moved greatly by curiosity and a little by the girl’s evident distress, “ that remains to be determined. Let us hear your story.”

But the girl continued to wring her hands and cry brokenly without tears.

“ I will tell you,” she said, “yes, I wall tell you,” but made no beginning. The horseman on the upper road had passed on behind them; they did not see him wheel his horse and return upon the sand.

“Oh, I meant no harm, señora, and no harm must come to Señor Escobar because of me, — ah, yes, I will tell you,” began the girl again, moving her lips dryly. Delfina shook her to quiet her own impatience and the other’s quaking sobs. At once there came a hiss and hurtling through the air, a wind of whirling flight, a tang of tightening cord. The girl gave a gasp and staggered, began to cry out chokingly, threw up her hands, shook and struggled as with an invisible wrestler, and at the same time began to move with extraordinary rapid stumbling toward the horseman who had appeared opposite them on the sand. He drewr toward the girl as she drew to him and showed dimly a naked Indian through the dusk.

Delfina saw him approach the girl, lift her to the horse in front of him, and choke out her cries and the beating of her hands upon his breast. Delfina, too much astounded to cry out, was running heavily up the sand toward him, but only rapidly enough to see the Indian riding at a gallop toward the mainland, reeling in his riata, as he rode, about the body of the girl, who seemed still to twist and struggle in his grasp without outcry. A very little such pursuit warned the older woman of its futility; she stood at last staring and panting as she watched the man and his burden ride away into the soft dark.

XIV

LAS CHIMINEAS

Nights of early summer along the coast of Monterey are damp and heavy with sea-dew. It hangs on the blossom tops in the wild pastures, and drips down the fine brown needles of the pines. Swift passage among the close thickets of the hillslopes shakes out the moisture with a sound of rain. If the moon rides in the seaward sky it wall be dim and ghostly white with mist, or whoIly quenched in a floating bank of fog. A night rider through the wood wakes querulous jays in the oaks and deer from the deep fern. He must pass by sea marsh and spongy meadow to stony ridges, and thin, dark clumps of pine, and in an earlier time of scant and ill-kept trails must have had great faith in his horse and his luck. So rode Mascado on a line that led directly inland from the peninsula. He drove hard and wildly, careless of the trail he left; keen whips of the underbrush slapped against his bare legs as he rode. He was all bent on holding fast what he had got, and making the shortest going. As he rode he felt what the woman Delfina had felt, — the young budding breasts crushed against his bosom, and thrilled to the passion of the primal man, double joy of the huntsman and lover.

He rode east, leaving the Mission to the right, labored through a stretch of rolling dunes, lifted his horse carefully from the bog of back sea water, passed the wild pastures, and struck on to rising ground. At every shift of the rider the girl struggled shrewdly, but neither wept nor cried out. Once he spoke to his horse and she grew instantly quiet. He trembled through all his naked body at the sudden loosening of the tension of hers. Had she recognized his voice ? was this the quiescence of submission ? They rode; he felt her breast heave and fill under his hand; the weight of her body was sweet upon his arm. The sea wind blew about his face; wet, pungent - smelling leaves brushed against his horse’s sides. He had expected protest, had been led on and advised to this point by the effort of his spirit to match with hers. Now the cessation of struggle daunted him. His passion had reached that state where it was necessary for his ease to know how she stood toward it. Cautiously he loosened the blanket with which her head was covered and met the girl’s level, unfluttered gaze.

“I wish to sit up,” she said; there was hardly a shade of interest in her tone. Mechanically the man raised her until she rode more at ease. “ Unbind the rope, it cuts me,” she said again, with a terrible matter-of-factness that sent his passion receding from him like a wave from a rock. He fumbled at the rope a little, and got no thanks for it. The girl looked about her quietly by the dim watery moon. “Where do you go?” she said at last, but not at all as if she supposed she was going with him.

“Far enough from Monterey.”

“ But where ? ”

“Las Chimineas.”

“And what will you do there?”

“Keep you.” There was a sudden tightening of the arm about her slim young form; it met with no answering movement of repulsion or complaisance. Mascado saw he had still to deal with Peter Lebecque’s graceless boy. Many a time in the last year at the hut of the Grapevine he had tried to betray her into some consciousness of himself as a lover through her consciousness of herself as a maid, and had been beaten back by the incorrigible boyishness of her behavior. He had begun by allowing the child to brow-beat and revile him, and afterwards found himself in no case to deal with the woman, being swamped by the embarrassment of his own passion and Lebecque’s contemptuous perception of its futility. His desire throve best in absence, and suffered a check in the moment of personal contact. He had hours of doubting whether he should ever be able to take her, not being able to put her on the defensive, and he was savage enough to need a hint of fleeing to whet the courage of pursuit. Vaguely, though he had resented the hand of Escobar upon her, he expected that experience to have made a short cut to his desire, for he had believed the most concerning that relation; Lebecque had seen to that out of a rascally humor to pay the mestizo for his presumption, and, believing the girl gone quite out of the range of the half-breed’s life, had not spared innuendo. And Mascado without the old Frenchman’s hint would have come to the same conclusion, seeing that the girl passed everywhere as a lad and the servant of Escobar, slept at his door, and companioned his solitary hours. Probably no other conjunction would have braved Mascado for the capture and the sally at dusk, for he had a servile taint of his mission upbringing, and the girl’s spirit was imperious. But greatly as his passion had exalted her, the passion of Escobar, for so Mascado understood their relation, had brought her down. There was even an appeal to his savage sense in bearing off what had been the prize of another, and he suffered a check in her unconsciousness of the situation. She sat indifferently under the pressure of his arm, drew even breaths, and looked about her. Half in response to her unconscious carriage Mascado relaxed his hold.

“The corporal of the guard looks for you in yonder hills,” she said at last.

“He will look far and long without finding me,” said Mascado.

“ So you said once before, I remember,” remarked the girl.

Mascado had no answer to that.

“At Carmelo they showed me many things,” she went on; “among other things the whipping-post;” she laughed low and amusedly.

The mestizo felt his gorge rise. “And among other things,” he said, “you saw also the prison, you and your fine gentleman. He will see a rope, doubtless, before all is done, with his killing of silly shepherds and stealing of sheep.”

“That is a lie, Mascado,” said the girl simply,but she also shivered. “It is cold,” she said; “put the blanket about me.”

Mascado drew it clumsily across her shoulders. They were traveling slowly now, stooping under trees and picking the way on stony ground. Once they forded a stream where the water came gurgling to the horse’s thighs. The girl fidgeted and made fretful noises of fatigue. Presently Mascado felt her weight sag against his arm; by gentle constraint he forced her head back upon his shoulder and saw that she slept. Mother of Saints! here was a girl torn from one lover by another, who had come against her will from a delicate - mannered gentleman to be ravished by a renegade mestizo in the hills, and she slept, —by God and His Saints, she slept!

The moon had come free of the belt of fog that hangs about sea borders, and poured clear and light on the shut lids and drooping mouth. Mascado looked, and, though he had no words for these things and believed otherwise, suffered a remote perception of unassailable virginity. He passed on, wondering through the night. Two hours later the girl was roused by having a fold of the blanket drawn tightly across her mouth. Mascado bent over her and threatened with his eyes. He held the rein with the hand that constrained her, and with the other pressed the point of his knife against her breast. A little way ahead she saw a glow ruddier than the moon on the scrub. They had nearly stumbled on a camp in the dark. An Indian had risen up at the disturbance, and thrown fresh fuel on a dying fire, — stood listening and intent. The girl could see by the dress that he was of the Mission. She thought for a moment that it might be the corporal and his men, but as Mascado, guiding chiefly by the pressure of his knees, backed his horse away, she saw by the glow the face of the Father President, as he lay sleeping, turned toward Carmelo. Slowly, almost noiselessly, they backed away and around the camp; she could see the Indian still watching as long as the camp fire served for a light. The glimpse of Saavedra set her thoughts back toward Monterey and Isidro; she slept no more that night. At moon-set Mascado drew up under an oak, and lifted her from the horse under the canopy of thick dark.

“What is it?” she said; “it is not Las Chimineas ?”

“Here we rest,” said Mascado; “there is no further going in the dark.” Not the smallest star-beam showed through the close tent of the oak; the air under it was heavy and damp. Mascado heaped up leaves for her, and spread over them the folded pad of coarse woven stuff taken from his horse, all the saddle he used. She sat down, and he sat opposite her, holding the stake rope of his horse. So they sat for a space of two hours; the first gray dawning showed them watching each other with wide, regardful eyes.

Mascado took the trail again as soon as it was light enough to be moving, and by sunrise had come to the place of the Chimneys. Heading east among the highest peaks of the Monterey coast is a broad, shallow gorge, having in its middle a pleasant open glade, nearly treeless, walled in by a slaty formation weathering in huge upright pillars and nodules, standing singly, or in files; or higher up tumbled and falling athwart one another, affording tunnels and draughty caves of shade. Among the standing boulders trickle clear, warmish springs to water the cañon floor. Here, from time to time, had harbored more than one distressed clan, the smoke of whose hearth fires had blackened the bases of Las Chimineas. It was clear morning when Mascado rode into the cañon; wet shadows lay on the grass between bars of yellow light. The mid-meadow was succulently green and white with flower and leaf of yerba mansa. Its rosy pointed buds floated in the tops of the grass, dipped and bobbled with the motion of it in a rippling wind. Cool gray shadow spread among the caves, and small water chuckled on the stones. It was such a place and weather as might have served for a bridal morn. Mascado and the girl brought no bridal mood to it. Mascado was sure of nothing except that the girl seemed to have no hint of his purpose, which he should have to convey to her, and had no notion how he should begin. It seemed that he still held Peter Lebecque’s boy within the circle of his arm, riding as unconcernedly as she had ridden in a bygone spring, — before he had known her for a maid, — and presently she might insist upon climbing up on his shoulders, as she had once done, to look at a hawk’s nest in a blasted pine. And, in fact, the girl was farther from him in spirit than the child had been, panoplied by her love for Escobar, — though she did not call it by that name, — wrapt in it above the sense of all offense, so that if he had accomplished his intent upon her person in that exalted mood he could have left no stain upon her mind. He had expected protest and tears; rather counted on it to spur his lagging desire, always a little confounded by her cool assumption, now increased as she measured him by Escobar, whom she judged as far removed from him as the order of archangels or other blessed personages.

She had, in fact, very little thought to spare for Mascado at that moment, thinking that by now Father Saavedra would be moving toward Carmelo with the promised relief, and a few hours later, say by the time the shadow had gone up from the floor of Las Chimineas, he would be at Monterey. Comforted in that, though wearied of her bonds and hard riding, she was able to respond a little to the morning note of freshness and delight, and keep the ascendency over Mascado as she had done in the hut of the Grapevine, flooding him with lover’s delight at the nimbleness of her wit, with embarrassment at her jibes, and secret fuming that he made no better way with her.

“Your mother at Carmelo prays for your soul,” she said, as he went about to prepare a meal of food he had brought, “but I shall tell her to pray for your wits; you have burned all the cakes.”

And again, “Mend your fire,Mascado; it smokes like a lazy mahala’s.” But when he brought a fagot on his shoulders for its plenishing, “ Oh, spare your back, Mascado, you will need it when the corporal of the guard comes up with you.”

“ Where now, Mascado ? ” she said with the greatest cheerfulness when the meal was done, and she sat loosely bound against a broken tree.

“Here,” said Mascado; “it is safe enough. Did you think your fine gallant would be looking for you ? ”

“ Why should he ? ” said the girl coolly; “he has better things to do than looking for stray serving lads.”

“For a serving lad, yes,” said Mascado with a secret and insulting air. “But a wife ” —

“What talk is this ? ” said she,yawning in his face; “here are no wives,unless you have a fancy yourself for turning mahala, as seems likely.”

“But there will be one,” he said, ignoring the taunt with deep insinuation.

“Big talk,” she said; “but where there is no bride and no priest how will there be a wedding ? ”

“ I have never heard that there was any lack of weddings among my people before the priests came,” said Mascado, with something of a grin. “As for a bride”— He stopped full, and let his desire burn upon her from his eyes.

“Mascado, you are a fool, and Peter Lebecque will kill you,” said the girl.

“I am a free man. What will Peter Lebecque know of my doings ? ”

“All that I can tell him,” said she.

Mascado let his gaze wander pointedly along her bonds.

“And is it your purpose to keep me tied up forever and a day that you may cook and clean for me, like el cojo viejo in the Mission, scouring pots and tending a tame squirrel in a cage ? For look you, do you so much as slip the knots of my rope and turn your back, and you have seen the last of me. Do you remember the time I sent you and Peter Lebecque seeking and crying through half the day and night while I lay in a crypt of the vines almost under your noses ? Eh, you are a fool for your pains, Mascado.”

The girl had him there: she had the tricks of an Indian for making her way in the hills; but she was no Indian, who, once the subjection of her body was accomplished, would bring her mind into accord, sit by the fire, and follow at the back of him who had made himself her man and the father of her young. Mascado’s notions of the married state partook of the earth, but, such as he was, he wanted no prisoner, but a wife. There would be small satisfaction in keeping her bound, and no safety in letting her go free.

“Well,” said the girl, much as if she had disposed of the whole matter, “if we travel not, I sleep, though the bed is none of the softest.” Stolidly, to hide a certain shamefacedness, he brought her an armful of leaves and young boughs, which she took indifferently enough with her face turned away. Mascado staked his horse in the wet meadow, and set snares to catch quail and rabbits for their food. His mission training had lost him the familiar use of the bow, and he had no gun.

The girl spent most of the day upon her bed of leaves, her head hidden in her arms to hide the quivering of her face. She felt herself in desperate need of succor, but knew not from what quarter it could come. Supposing the Father President to have brought Isidro his freedom, would he be of a mind to follow his errant lad ? and who but the woman Delfina should tell him that El Zarzo had gone against his will ? and if Delfina told him that would she not tell all ? Ah, never all, never tell him all! Better Mascado should have his will of her at present, and trust to finding some better shift at the last. For she had no thought of marriage with Escobar, — was he not dedicated to God and His Church ? All that she asked for herself was to stand at his door and serve.

Then seeing no better issue of her affairs she would fall a-trembling with nameless dread, and feeling safe for that day, resolve to sleep, the better to wake and watch against the terrors of the night. She could trust to holding Mascado in check for a time, but there must come an hour of weakness, of fatigue, a moment of darkness and surprise, — she grew sick to think of it. And then across it all would come the dream of ineffable sweetness,— the joyous road to Monterey, the strolls on the beaches, the sea music and the sea air, Escobar walking with his hand upon her shoulder, the vesper hour when, kneeling on the bare tile flooring, she had leave and liking to watch Escobar through the changes of the hour’s devotion. Little looks, little ways, a trick of tossing back his hair, a gentle irony of laughter, the way his fine hand lay on the bridle rein — all these came back and pierced her with seductive pain. So the day wore on warm and still into the afternoon.

XV

THE RESCUE

Saavedra, working back toward Carmelo with the confession of Juan Ruiz in his wallet, had lost time on the last day’s travel by reason of over-full creeks and flooding fords from recent rains on the seaward slope of the hills, and camped for the night several hours out on the trail. Saco, who knew every foot of that region as a man knows his own dwelling, would have pushed on through the dark, but the Padre fancied the horses too much fagged, and managed to do with one more night away from his own bed.

He was up and stirring with the dove’s first call to dawn, and got in to the Mission for the eight o’clock breakfast with Padres Gomez and Salazar. The table was set in the corridor looking toward the bay, and white drift from the pear trees blew in on the morning air. Leisurely, as concerned their several jurisdictions, the Brothers of St. Francis gave him news of flock and folk, of a death in Monterey, and a christening set for Wednesday of that week, of a sail sighted off the Point of Pines, and much small talk of the garden and field.

“And yesterday,” concluded Padre Salazar, sipping his chocolate comfortably, “I found in the alms-box this packet, which, as it bore no name or superscription, I judged best left to your reverence’s disposal.”

Saavedra took the thin, oblong packet of black silk and turned it over absently. “Quite right, brother,” he said, “quite right. I cannot at this moment conjecture what it may contain, but I will make the earliest occasion to examine its contents, when I have this affair of Escobar off my mind. As for the calves, Brother Pablo, I always say you know more of that matter than myself, and I will be pleased if you will continue to follow your own excellent judgment. I will look at the garden, Ignacio, on my return from Monterey, where I must be almost immediately in the interest of this young man whose affairs I trust presently to put in better shape.”

It was a piece of the Father President’s humility that he never rode on any affair of the Mission when he could walk, and in that he patterned after the sainted Serra; but this morning toward the Presidio of Monterey he rode at a smart pace, with Fages cantering at his back, very keen to know, but not daring to ask, what the journey promised Escobar. It had occurred to him that the youth was too forward in the Father President’s favor for his — Fray Demetrio’s — good. He had experienced a pious glee in Isidro’s arrest, which it now appeared was ill timed. The Padre was too cheerful and too much in haste not to be the bearer of good news.

They rode at once to the alcalde, whom they found at breakfast, very well disposed toward the Father President now that he conceived himself to have the upper hand, and toward the family of Escobar, which he esteemed discreetly. He had had his fill of puffing and importance in the week past, and answered expansively to the tactful courtesy which Saavedra, in any affair not directly impugning his authority, knew well how to display, and between them they made a very pleasant occasion. The alcalde was charmed, overjoyed in fact, to learn that the young man, of whom, except in his capacity as magistrate, he had never a suspicion, should have come so handsomely off. But an affair of the state, you understand, my dear Padre, — it could not be dropped, dismissed as one might say the word. There were formalities — the circumstance had been noised abroad — it was due to himself as the civil authority,— a mere servant of the Republic, my dear Padre, — and to the young man, to give the fullest publicity to his justification. But under the circumstances he saw no reason why the youth — truly a most admirable young man — should not go at large. He would see to it, — if the Padre Presidente would excuse him until he put on his street-going clothes? Yes, and in the meantime try a glass of wine which had come around the Horn ?

The alcalde bustled himself into the house, the Padre sat in the gallery and sipped his wine, and having a quarter of an hour of undisposed leisure, took out Padre Ignacio’s packet from the bosom of his gown, and broke the confining threads. When the silk kerchief was unwrapped there fell out of it two folded papers, the merest glance at which gave the Padre as near to a shock as was possible to his well-ordered mind. They were the marriage certificate of Jesus and Ysabel Castro and the baptismal certificate of Jacintha Concepcion their child.

Saavedra stood up suddenly, betraying his years as he did in any sudden tide of excitement, and called to Fray Demetrio. The secretary came running and agog, hoping for news. “Do you,brother,”said Saavedra, “ do me the kindness to remain here and wait upon the alcalde — this packet — I have business with the Commandante. Neglect nothing which may be for the Señor Escobar’s relief, and bid him wait for me presently. I will be with Castro.” With that he gathered up the papers and the skirt of his cassock, and made hastily across the plaza, at that hour beginning to fill with children and dogs and a detachment of soldiery turned out to drill. The secretary managed the release of Isidro to the alcalde’s satisfaction and his own, each swelling with authority and disposed to yield to the other’s pretensions to save the more credit for his own; they were, in fact, a pair. Within another quarter of an hour Isidro had walked out into the morning, and shaken off both those worthies, who seemed disposed to bestow upon him their company. He walked seaward, and watched the fisher boats beat in across the bright, blue stillness of the bay. He wished that Saavedra might be speedily done with this business of the Commandante’s. The week of incarceration made the strange town and strange folk seem more strange. He was hankering for the company of his horse, which he had raised from a colt, and the lad Zarzito, whom he had known quite four days longer than any one in Monterey. He wondered that the boy had not visited him in prison; now that he thought of it, it might have been arranged ; but of course El Zarzo would have been too shy to have put himself forward,— shy and, no doubt, lonely in his turn. Isidro walked down to the sea border, and strolled in the wet track of the retreating tide, which was the place Delfina had elected for her morning walk.

There is no doubt Delfina had a nose for affairs; she had scented something going forward at the alcalde’s, and had come out with her shoe-laces untied, and a manta covering the inadequacies of her morning toilet, with all the mincing airs of a woman wishing to inaugurate an acquaintance with a young man to whom she has not been properly introduced. You can guess that Isidro, notwithstanding his vocation, made no great difficulty at this juncture.

“It is the Señor Escobar, is it not? Yes, — you must pardon my forwardness; it is impossible not to take an interest in one so estimably regarded and so grossly accused.” To the natural insinuation of manner Delfina added the play of her fine eyes.

“There is no pardon — rather cause for gratitude,” said Isidro, making her a bow and a compliment after the fashion of the time. “You add to my freedom the contemplation of beauty and the society of the graciously inclined.” He fell into a certain familiarity of exaggerated deference with remarkable ease for a man who was to become a priest.

“But, no doubt,” Delfina watched him sidewise through dropped lids, " there are others — one other — whom the Señor Escobar would have wished to see.”

“On my soul, señora, not one.”

“Oh, the men, the men!” fluttered Delfina; “oh, the faithless ones! and the poor girl in such straits, too!”

“If it pleases you to jest, señora” —

Delfina assumed a grave and monitory air. “It is no jest to her, I’ll warrant, señor. Indeed, I am not one to cry down my own sex; she was most faithful, Don Isidro, visited the prison every day in hopes to have sight of you, and went not away except by force, and most unwillingly, — that I can testify.”

“But she, señora, she” — cried Isidro;— “ what the devil does the woman mean!”

“Ah, if the señor wishes to preserve the incognito,” said Delfina, beginning to be mischievous and amused, — “ but with me, señor ? Well, then, the wild Briar that keeps its roses for secret plucking, the mestizo lad, — or is she Indian ?

— whom you brought out of the hills,— El Zarzo.”

“El Zarzo, — what of him?”

“She is gone, señor,” cried Delfina, with a sweeping air, — “seized, stolen, ravished, murdered and buried by now for all I know.”

“ But how ? When ? ” cried Isidro.

“Last night, by an Indian, I think; at least he had no clothing. We were walking here on the beach, but up at the prison I had just discovered — I wished to know — she was about to tell me, and we heard the guard coming.”

“But she, she !” cried Isidro.

Delfina looked at him in a momentary blankness. “Does the man mean to say that he does not know?” she said, and then dismissing it as wholly absurd, returned to her gurgle of secret amusedness.

“Oh, the men, the men!” she said. “We were walking here, Don Isidro, where we now stand, and it was just the edge of dark; suddenly there came a hissing through the air, — a riata, I think, — and I saw a rider draw up to her and she drew to him, but she went unwillingly enough, — and in a moment he had her in front of him and was away.”

“El Zarzo?”

“El Zarzo, so called.”

If Isidro appeared cool at that moment it was because he was too much confounded. Delfina was too circumstantial to be greatly doubted. She put him through all the steps of the evening’s performance; showed him the evidence of struggle, the galloping hoof prints that began where the shoe prints ended. The horse she judged to be a pinto pony, the man an Indian. Isidro quested forward on the trail, Delfina panted beside him.

“Arnaldo,” she said, “is the best tracker in Monterey.”

“Send him to me,” said Isidro curtly. He had all the woman could give and wished to be rid of her. Delfina took her dismissal cheerfully; she needed the rest of the morning to spread her news abroad. She had mixed herself with what might prove a most interesting scandal, and stumbled on a hint of a really untenable situation. “For suppose,” she said to herself, “the man really did not know!” and she dwelt upon that point until she was back in her house behind the wall.

Arnaldo the tracker, a short, keen man, came on his horse; in those days, in that land, a man saddled and bridled to go the length of his own dooryard. Isidro sent a boy to bring his own horse from the pastures of Carmelo. Arnaldo made a detour of half an hour to fetch necessaries for the day; together they worked on over the cold trail. There seemed a promise of mischief in the rider’s haste,— in the broken bushes, deep hoof scars, flakes of black loam cast up by running.

“It might be Mascado,” said the tracker; “he has been seen lately in this quarter. He has a pinto of about that stride, and he rides like the devil.”

“On the devil’s errand,” said Isidro; but the name, which he remembered only as the name of a renegade wanted at Carmelo, carried no information. He was in great confusion of mind which found no relief except in haste, though he could scarcely have told to what end he hurried the tracker on the open trail. He would say that the lad El Zarzo was in peril. But why ? Why ? A lad by his own account half Indian carried off by another. But if he believed his own judgment the lad was no Indian, and if he believed the woman Delfina, no lad. Well, then, if a maid, peril enough and reason enough. He began to recount occasions and circumstances,— the lad’s personal reticence, a certain avoidance of innuendo and embarrassing incident too constant, now that he recalled it, not to imply an intention; and, on the other side, a certain fearless matter - of - factness, an impertinence, as it were, directed to no person but to events, to destiny, endearing in a boy, but hardly to be looked for in a girl. But the lad was a good lad, — well a girl, then, if it must be, — so no doubt a good girl. Here Delfina’s amused insinuating gurgle recurred to him; it brought a hot flush and certain sickly prickings of shamefacedness.

“Sacred Name of a Name!” what was the woman doing now but spreading her news in Monterey, — excellent gossip about an Escobar who set out to be a priest. In his hurry he had neglected to stop her mouth, as he reflected he might have done with a compliment and silver.

Isidro was, first of all, a clean and honorable youth. If he regarded the priesthood as an opportunity rather than a renunciation, he was not single in his time, and though he purposed a discreet use of its prerogatives, he meant sincerely to keep within its restrictions. He had respect to its orders, and as a man and priest he wished to stand well with the Father President, and he had all the high and formal breeding which runs with pure Castilian blood; the finikin hospitality, and that exaggerated punctiliousness toward women which often consists with no very high estimate of the possibility of feminine virtue. If Delfina said truth, — and, though he rejected it, he found his mind working around toward conviction as fast as the tracker worked over the trail, —if it were true that the boy was no boy, then he had set a pretty snare for his reputation to fall into. Peace he might make with Saavedra through the confessional, but his father, the old Don, would be furious to have him so far forget the manners of an Escobar as to take a mistress, in the guise of a servant, under the Father President’s roof, and having so conducted his journey to Monterey as to have himself accused of murder and suspected of theft, had no sooner come free of that taint than he was off hot-foot after the girl and her Indian lover. That was the construction that would be put upon his behavior, and Isidro owned that he would probably have believed it in the case of any other. As for the girl, she was quite ruined in reputation, and any explanation of his would add a touch of ridicule to reproach. If these considerations had occurred to him earlier it is probable Isidro would have waited to take counsel with Saavedra before committing himself to the trail; but by the woman’s account there was the lad, whom he loved for his endearing boyishness and clean, companionable talk, ahead of him on that road at the expense of who knew what indignity; and though the fact of El Zarzo’s being a maid had not possessed his consciousness, it stirred in him an apprehension of unnamable disaster. As often as he thought of her it was of the nimble and teachable lad who had come through the wood with him in golden weather, or of the pleasant companion he had promised himself on a pilgrimage through Alta California, — but a maid — Oh, a pest on it! Escobar felt himself aggrieved that his servant had not stayed a boy.

The sun beat upon them, and the trail stretched out mile by mile. Arnaldo hung above it from his saddle, finding it too plain for dismounting. By noon they arrived where Mascado had stumbled on Saavedra’s camp, and Arnaldo chuckled to see how nearly the mestizo’s haste had been his undoing.

“If it were Mascado he would sooner see the devil than his reverence,” said the tracker.

After that it seemed the rider had taken a craftier way among the hills, concealing his trail more, and pursuit lagged through a hot, breathless afternoon. Later they came to where Mascado had kept the dark watch under the oak. Here Isidro looked for some signs of a struggle, not assured but relieved to find none. Here El Zarzo had sat, and here Mascado; here the horse cropped at the end of the rope. Isidro by this time fumed with impatience and saddle weariness. He rode after a week’s inaction and his breakfast had been prison fare.

“Caramba! but I could eat,” he said.

Arnaldo swung the food bag forward on the saddle.

“Eat,” he said; “the trail freshens,”

“And where,” cried Isidro, “do you think we shall come up with him ?”

“Dios sabe, but it leads toward Las Chimineas. That is the refuge of many a hunted one. We should be there in an hour,” said the tracker.

“We must find him before night.” Isidro bore forward in his saddle with eagerness; as if some impalpable thread of intelligence ran between him and the girl, his sense of urgency lengthened with the shadows. They had made good time, almost as good as Mascado, saving the dark hours. It appeared the mestizo had ridden without fear of pursuit, and ridden, moreover, in the night, while they had the day for following. It was four o’clock when Arnaldo pointed out from a knoll the tall, single stones of Las Chimineas.

“From here we go cautiously,” he said.

Meanwhile Saavedra had finished his talk with the Commandante. They had taken a long time to it, beating through all the possibilities that the appearance of the two certificates at this juncture implied. Finding no thoroughfare they came back to suck such comfort as they could from the mere fact of the papers spread out on the Commandante’s desk. Castro was trembling, expectant, and confused; the Padre hopeful and confounded. The question was, from what source had the packet come? By all accounts no strangers or suspicious persons had come or gone about the Mission or Monterey that week past. Then could it have been dropped by any one resident in the capital or at Carmelo ? At this suggestion, that one who had knowledge of Ysabel’s child might walk within daily sight of him, Castro shook as with an ague. Padre Vicente sighed; he thought to have known the hearts of his people. Padres Pablo and Ignacio had been warned if the matter came up in confession to use all permissible means to bring it to light. As yet from this source nothing had transpired. It had not been possible to keep the affair out of common talk, perhaps not advisable. It appeared the flood of gossip had floated this packet out of the backwater of an unconscienceable mind, — gossip, and not the searching sword of the Church. Therefore the good Padre sighed; therefore the Commandante fell sick. The word of each ran with power in their several provinces, but they could not compel a favorable issue of their own affairs. But why had the packet come to light and not the heiress ? why the evidence and not the claimant ? and why this concealment of the source ? who held the information that would connect the papers with Ysabel’s daughter? Ah, who, who? Was this flotsam all that was to come up out of the depth ? Was it fear that kept the informant in the background, or was it simply that the child was not? Here Saavedra came to the surface with a practical suggestion, — a paper pinned to the church door offering a reward for knowledge of Castro’s heir. The pride of the Castros demurred. Well, then, for information concerning the packet found in the alms-box on such a date ? This was better, and was so agreed. Then, for sheer unwillingness to leave the conference with so little accomplished, they fell to talking of other things. Of this affair of Escobar, which the Padre wished put in the best countenance; of the report, founded on nods and winks and suspicions, that Indians on the eastern border along the Sacramento and the Tulares, under Urbano, fomented disturbances. The Padres had never pushed their labors very far from the coast. Inland the unregenerate lived in native savagery, and gathering to themselves malcontents and deserters from among the neophytes, became a menace to the peaceful establishments of the Mission. From Solano and San José came news of cattle carried off, and mutterings, and restlessness.

Father Saavedra was as loath to report these matters as to believe them, but felt something due to the Commandante. Urbano was rumored to be massing his followers in the wooded regions to the east.

“Saw you any such intimations on your journey, Padre?” asked Castro.

“ None,” answered Saavedra. “ Now I think of it I saw not a dozen Indians this week past, nor came upon more than one camp which was not at least three days cold. It is surprising, I think, considering the report.”

“Not surprising, Padre, but ominous,” replied the Commandante, “considering what we know of their habits. At this season they should be spread abroad by clans and families. That you saw none is proof positive that they are gathering together in some other place and for some purpose.” “I trust not of mischief,”said saa-vedra.

“I hope not, but I do not trust where an Indian is concerned,” said the Commandante, smiling a little. “But the detachment which was sent out for your fellow Mascado should be in any hour; they were provisioned only for ten days, and they may be able to tell somewhat. In the meantime I advise, Padre, that you let none of the neophytes pass between the Missions on any errands whatever.” The Father President acquiesced. He was not the man for affrays; besides, had Urbano descended upon San Carlos, he would have met him in the fashion of the martyred Luis Jayme, saying, “Love God, my children,” and as likely have met the same end. By the time he had finished with the Commandante and come out into the plaza again Isidro had been gone an hour.

(To be continued.)