d the expiring
limit of the Puritan Sabbath, the landlord at last consented. By the
time the falling snow had muffled the street from the indiscreet clamor
of Sabbath-breaking hoofs, the landlord's noiseless sledge was at the
door and Demorest had departed.

The snow fell all that night; with fierce gusts of wind that moaned in
the chimneys of North Liberty and sorely troubled the Sabbath sleep of
its decorous citizens; with deep, passionless silences, none the
less fateful, that softly precipitated a spotless mantle of merciful
obliteration equally over their precise or their straying footprints,
that would have done them good to heed and to remember; and when morning
broke upon a world of week-day labor, it was covered as far as their
eyes could reach as with a clear and unwritten tablet, on which they
might record their lives anew. Near the wreck of the broken bridge on
the Warensboro turnpike an overturned buggy lay imbedded in the drift
and debris of the river hurrying silently towards the sea, and a horse
with fragments of broken and icy harness still clinging to him was found
standing before the stable-door of Edward Blandford. But to any further
knowledge of the fate of its owner, North Liberty awoke never again.

PART II

CHAPTER I

The last note of the Angelus had just rung out of the crumbling fissures
in the tower of the mission chapel of San Buena-ventura. The sun which
had beamed that day and indeed every day for the whole dry season over
the red-tiled roofs of that old and happily ventured pueblo seemed to
broaden to a smile as it dipped below the horizon, as if in undiminished
enjoyment of its old practical joke of suddenly plunging the Southern
California coast in darkness without any preliminary twilight. The olive
and fig trees at once lost their characteristic outlines in formless
masses of shadow; only the twisted trunks of the old pear trees in the
mission garden retained their grotesque shapes and became gruesome in
the gathering gloom. The encircling pines beyond closed up their serried
files; a cool breeze swept down from the coast range and, passing
through them, sent their day-long heated spices through the town.

If there was any truth in the local belief that the pious incantation of
the Angelus bell had the power of excluding all evil influence abroad
at that perilous hour within its audible radius, and comfortably keeping
all unbelieving wickedness at a distance, it was presum