“Felipe!” she cried, “Ramona is not here.”
“I know it,” he replied in an angry tone. “That is what I told you we should do,—drive her to running away with Alessandro!”
“With Alessandro!” interrupted the Senora.
“Yes,” continued Felipe,—“with Alessandro, the Indian! Perhaps you think it is less disgrace to the names of Ortegna and Moreno to have her run away with him, than to be married to him here under our roof! I do not! Curse the day, I say, when I ever lent myself to breaking the girl's heart! I am going after them, to fetch them back!”
If the skies had opened and rained fire, the Senora had hardly less quailed and wondered than she did at these words; but even for fire from the skies she would not surrender till she must.
“How know you that it is with Alessandro?” she said.
“Because she has written it here!” cried Felipe, defiantly holding up his little note. “She left this, her good-by to me. Bless her! She writes like a saint, to thank me for all my goodness to her,—I, who drove her to steal out of my house like a thief!”
The phrase, “my house,” smote the Senora's ear like a note from some other sphere, which indeed it was,—from the new world into which Felipe had been in an hour born. Her cheeks flushed, and she opened her lips to reply; but before she had uttered a word, Luigo came running round the corner, Juan Can hobbling after him at a miraculous pace on his crutches. “Senor Felipe! Senor Felipe! Oh, Senora!” they cried. “Thieves have been here in the night! Baba is gone,—Baba, and the Senorita's saddle.”
A malicious smile broke over the Senora's countenance, and turning to Felipe, she said in a tone—what a tone it was! Felipe felt as if he must put his hands to his ears to shut it out; Felipe would never forget,—“As you were saying, like a thief in the night!”
With a swifter and more energetic movement than any had ever before seen Senor Felipe make, he stepped forward, saying in an undertone to his mother, “For God's sake, mother, not a word before the men!—What is that you say, Luigo? Baba gone? We must see to our corral. I will come down, after breakfast, and look at it;” and turning his back on them, he drew his mother by a firm grasp, she could not resist, into the house.