ulus of Benito ahead, he
would have given Ramona trouble.

"There is only a little, rough like this, dear," called Alessandro, as
he leaped a fallen tree, and halted to see how Baba took it. "Good!" he
cried, as Baba jumped it like a deer. "Good! Majella! We have got the
two best horses in the country. You'll see they are alike, when daylight
comes. I have often wondered they were so much alike. They would go
together splendidly."

After a few rods of this steep climbing they came out on the top of
the canon's south wall, in a dense oak forest comparatively free from
underbrush. "Now," said Alessandro, "I can go from here to San Diego by
paths that no white man knows. We will be near there before daylight."

Already the keen salt air of the ocean smote their faces. Ramona drank
it in with delight. "I taste salt in the air, Alessandro," she cried.

"Yes, it is the sea," he said. "This canon leads straight to the sea. I
wish we could go by the shore, Majella. It is beautiful there. When it
is still, the waves come as gently to the land as if they were in play;
and you can ride along with your horse's feet in the water, and the
green cliffs almost over your head; and the air off the water is like
wine in one's head."

"Cannot we go there?" she said longingly. "Would it not be safe?"

"I dare not," he answered regretfully. "Not now, Majella; for on the
shore-way, at all times, there are people going and coming."

"Some other time, Alessandro, we can come, after we are married, and
there is no danger?" she asked.

"Yes, Majella," he replied; but as he spoke the words, he thought, "Will
a time ever come when there will be no danger?"

The shore of the Pacific Ocean for many miles north of San Diego is a
succession of rounding promontories, walling the mouths of canons, down
many of which small streams make to the sea. These canons are green and
rich at bottom, and filled with trees, chiefly oak. Beginning as little
more than rifts in the ground, they deepen and widen, till at their
mouths they have a beautiful crescent of shining beach from an eighth to
a quarter of a mile long, The one which Alessandro hoped to reach
before morning was not a dozen miles from the old town of San Diego, and
commanded a fine view of the outer harbor. When he was last in it, he
had found it a nearly impenetrable thicket of young oak-trees. Here, he
believed, they could hide safely all day, and after nightfall ride into
San Diego, be ma