ime; and when they do,
they will never be able to see where the trail ended. And now my Majella
has a very hard ride before her. Will she be afraid?"

"Afraid." laughed Ramona. "Afraid,--on Baba, and with you!"

But it was indeed a hard ride. Alessandro had decided to hide for
the day in a canon he knew, from which a narrow trail led direct to
Temecula,--a trail which was known to none but Indians. Once in this
canon, they would be safe from all possible pursuit. Alessandro did not
in the least share Ramona's confidence that no effort would be made to
overtake them. To his mind, it appeared certain that the Senora would
never accept the situation without making an attempt to recover at least
the horse and the dog. "She can say, if she chooses, that I have stolen
one of her horses," he thought to himself bitterly; "and everybody would
believe her. Nobody would believe us, if we said it was the Senorita's
own horse."

The head of the canon was only a couple of miles from the road; but it
was in a nearly impenetrable thicket of chaparral, where young oaks had
grown up so high that their tops made, as it were, a second stratum of
thicket. Alessandro had never ridden through it; he had come up on foot
once from the other side, and, forcing his way through the tangle had
found, to his surprise, that he was near the highway. It was from this
canon that he had brought the ferns which it had so delighted Ramona
to arrange for the decoration of the chapel. The place was filled with
them, growing almost in tropical luxuriance; but this was a mile or so
farther down, and to reach that spot from above, Alessandro had had to
let himself down a sheer wall of stone. The canon at its head was little
more than a rift in the rocks, and the stream which had its rise in
it was only a trickling spring at the beginning. It was this precious
water, as well as the inaccessibility of the spot, which had decided
Alessandro to gain the place at all hazards and costs. But a wall of
granite would not have seemed a much more insuperable obstacle than did
this wall of chaparral, along which they rode, vainly searching for a
break in it. It appeared to Alessandro to have thickened and knit even
since the last spring. At last they made their way down a small side
canon,--a sort of wing to the main canon; a very few rods down this, and
they were as hidden from view from above as if the earth had swallowed
them. The first red tints of the dawn were comi