militude of their old
routine. But nothing was really the same. No one was so happy as before.
Juan Canito was heart-broken. There had been set over him the very
Mexican whose coming to the place he had dreaded. The sheep had not done
well; there had been a drought; many had died of hunger,--a thing for
which the new Mexican overseer was not to blame, though it pleased Juan
to hold him so, and to say from morning till night that if his leg had
not been broken, or if the lad Alessandro had been there, the wool-crop
would have been as big as ever. Not one of the servants liked this
Mexican; he had a sorry time of it, poor fellow; each man and woman on
the place had or fancied some reason for being set against him; some
from sympathy with Juan Can, some from idleness and general impatience;
Margarita, most of all, because he was not Alessandro. Margarita,
between remorse about her young mistress and pique and disappointment
about Alessandro, had become a very unhappy girl; and her mother,
instead of comforting or soothing her, added to her misery by
continually bemoaning Ramona's fate. The void that Ramona had left in
the whole household seemed an irreparable one; nothing came to fill it;
there was no forgetting; every day her name was mentioned by some one;
mentioned with bated breath, fearful conjecture, compassion, and regret.
Where had she vanished? Had she indeed gone to the convent, as she said,
or had she fled with Alessandro?

Margarita would have given her right hand to know. Only Juan Can felt
sure. Very well Juan Can knew that nobody but Alessandro had the wit and
the power over Baba to lure him out of that corral, "and never a rail
out of its place." And the saddle, too! Ay, the smart lad! He had done
the best he could for the Senorita; but, Holy Virgin! what had got into
the Senorita to run off like that, with an Indian,--even Alessandro!
The fiends had bewitched her. Tirelessly Juan Can questioned every
traveller, every wandering herder he saw. No one knew anything of
Alessandro, beyond the fact that all the Temecula Indians had been
driven out of their village, and that there was now not an Indian in the
valley. There was a rumor that Alessandro and his father had both
died; but no one knew anything certainly. The Temecula Indians had
disappeared, that was all there was of it,--disappeared, like any wild
creatures, foxes or coyotes, hunted down, driven out; the valley was rid
of them. But the Senorita! She w