azed fits came on him,
he was wholly irresponsible. Farrar knew this. The only explanation of
Farrar's deed was, that on seeing his horse spent and exhausted from
having been forced up that terrible trail, he was seized by ungovernable
rage, and fired on the second, without knowing what he did. "But he
wouldn't have done it, if it hadn't been an Indian!" mused the judge.
"He'd ha' thought twice before he shot any white man down, that way."

Day after day such thoughts as these pursued the judge, and he could not
shake them off. An uneasy sense that he owed something to Ramona, or, if
Ramona were dead, to the little child she had left, haunted him. There
might in some such way be a sort of atonement made to the murdered,
unavenged Alessandro. He might even take the child, and bring it up in
his own house. That was by no means an uncommon thing in the valley. The
longer he thought, the more he felt himself eased in his mind by this
purpose; and he decided that as soon as he could find leisure he would
go to the Cahuilla village and see what could be done.

But it was not destined that stranger hands should bring succor to
Ramona. Felipe had at last found trace of her. Felipe was on the way.

XXV

EFFECTUALLY misled by the faithful Carmena, Felipe had begun his search
for Alessandro by going direct to Monterey. He found few Indians in the
place, and not one had ever heard Alessandro's name. Six miles from the
town was a little settlement of them, in hiding, in the bottoms of the
San Carlos River, near the old Mission. The Catholic priest advised him
to search there; sometimes, he said, fugitives of one sort and another
took refuge in this settlement, lived there for a few months, then
disappeared as noiselessly as they had come. Felipe searched there also;
equally in vain.

He questioned all the sailors in port; all the shippers. No one had
heard of an Indian shipping on board any vessel; in fact, a captain
would have to be in straits before he would take an Indian in his crew.

"But this was an exceptionally good worker, this Indian; he could turn
his hand to anything; he might have gone as ship's carpenter."

"That might be," they said; "nobody had ever heard of any such thing,
however;" and very much they all wondered what it was that made the
handsome, sad Mexican gentleman so anxious to find this Indian.

Felipe wasted weeks in Monterey. Long after he had ceased to hope, he
lingered. He felt as if he wou