-all about and drove across the open
fields till he reached the road to Guadalajara, just below the Mission.

"Hurry!" cried Hilma.

The horses started forward under the touch of the whip. The ranch houses
of Quien Sabe came in sight.

"Do you want to stop at the house?" inquired Vacca over his shoulder.

"No, no; oh, go faster--make the horses run."

They dashed through the houses of the Home ranch.

"Oh, oh," cried Hilma suddenly, "look, look there. Look what they have
done."

Vacca pulled the horses up, for the road in front of Annixter's house
was blocked.

A vast, confused heap of household effects was there--chairs, sofas,
pictures, fixtures, lamps. Hilma's little home had been gutted;
everything had been taken from it and ruthlessly flung out upon the
road, everything that she and her husband had bought during that
wonderful week after their marriage. Here was the white enamelled "set"
of the bedroom furniture, the three chairs, wash-stand and bureau,--the
bureau drawers falling out, spilling their contents into the dust; there
were the white wool rugs of the sitting-room, the flower stand, with its
pots all broken, its flowers wilting; the cracked goldfish globe, the
fishes already dead; the rocking chair, the sewing machine, the great
round table of yellow oak, the lamp with its deep shade of crinkly
red tissue paper, the pretty tinted photographs that had hung on the
wall--the choir boys with beautiful eyes, the pensive young girls in
pink gowns--the pieces of wood carving that represented quails and
ducks, and, last of all, its curtains of crisp, clean muslin, cruelly
torn and crushed--the bed, the wonderful canopied bed so brave and gay,
of which Hilma had been so proud, thrust out there into the common road,
torn from its place, from the discreet intimacy of her bridal chamber,
violated, profaned, flung out into the dust and garish sunshine for all
men to stare at, a mockery and a shame.

To Hilma it was as though something of herself, of her person, had been
thus exposed and degraded; all that she held sacred pilloried, gibbeted,
and exhibited to the world's derision. Tears of anguish sprang to her
eyes, a red flame of outraged modesty overspread her face.

"Oh," she cried, a sob catching her throat, "oh, how could they do it?"
But other fears intruded; other greater terrors impended.

"Go on," she cried to Vacca, "go on quickly."

But Vacca would go no further. He had seen what had escaped H