ot alone, dear Alessandro, but it was so long!" replied Ramona;
"and I feared the men had taken you, as you feared. Was there any one
there?"

"No! No one has heard anything. All was well. They thought I had just
come from Pachanga," he answered.

"Except for Carmena, I should have ridden after you half an hour ago,"
continued Ramona. "But she told me to wait."

"She told you!" repeated Alessandro. "How did you understand her
speech?"

"I do not know. Was it not a strange thing?" replied Ramona. "She spoke
in your tongue, but I thought I understood her, Ask her if she did not
say that I must not go; that it was safer to wait; that you had so said,
and you would soon come."

Alessandro repeated the words to Carmena. "Did you say that?" he asked.

"Yes," answered Carmena.

"You see, then, she has understood the Luiseno words," he said
delightedly. "She is one of us."

"Yes," said Carmena, gravely, "she is one of us." Then, taking Ramona's
hand in both of her own for farewell, she repeated, in a tone as of dire
prophecy, "One of us, Alessandro! one of us!" And as she gazed after
their retreating forms, almost immediately swallowed and lost in the
darkness, she repeated the words again to herself,--"One of us! one of
us! Sorrow came to me; she rides to meet it!" and she crept back to her
husband's grave, and threw herself down, to watch till the dawn.

The road which Alessandro would naturally have taken would carry them
directly by Hartsel's again. But, wishing to avoid all risk of meeting
or being seen by any of the men on the place, he struck well out to
the north, to make a wide circuit around it. This brought them past
the place where Antonio's house had stood. Here Alessandro halted, and
putting his hand on Baba's rein, walked the horses close to the pile of
ruined walls. "This was Antonio's house, Majella," he whispered. "I wish
every house in the valley had been pulled down like this. Old Juana was
right. The Americans are living in my father's house, Majella," he went
on, his whisper growing thick with rage. "That was what kept me so long.
I was looking in at the window at them eating their supper. I thought I
should go mad, Majella. If I had had my gun, I should have shot them all
dead!"

An almost inarticulate gasp was Ramona's first reply to this. "Living in
your house!" she said. "You saw them?"

"Yes," he said; "the man, and his wife, and two little children; and the
man came out, with his gun, o