Felipe longed to say, “Yes, come to my estate; there you shall have work!” In the olden time he would have done it without a second thought, for both the man and the woman had good faces,—were young and strong. But the pay-roll of the Moreno estate was even now too long for its dwindled fortunes. “No, my man, I am sorry to say I do not,” he answered. “I live a long way from here. Where were you thinking of going?”
“Somewhere in San Jacinto,” said the man. “They say the Americans have not come in there much yet. I have a brother living there. Thanks, Senor; may the saints reward you!”
“San Jacinto!” After Felipe returned home, the name haunted his thoughts. The grand mountain-top bearing that name he had known well in many a distant horizon. “Juan Can,” he said one day, “are there many Indians in San Jacinto?”
“The mountain?” said Juan Can.
“Ay, I suppose, the mountain,” said Felipe. “What else is there?”
“The valley, too,” replied Juan. “The San Jacinto Valley is a fine, broad valley, though the river is not much to be counted on. It is mostly dry sand a good part of the year. But there is good grazing. There is one village of Indians I know in the valley; some of the San Luis Rey Indians came from there; and up on the mountain is a big village; the wildest Indians in all the country live there. Oh, they are fierce, Senor!”
The next morning Felipe set out for San Jacinto. Why had no one mentioned, why had he not himself known, of these villages? Perhaps there were yet others he had not heard of. Hope sprang in Felipe's impressionable nature as easily as it died. An hour, a moment, might see him both lifted up and cast down. When he rode into the sleepy little village street of San Bernardino, and saw, in the near horizon, against the southern sky, a superb mountain-peak, changing in the sunset lights from turquoise to ruby, and from ruby to turquoise again, he said to himself, “She is there! I have found her!”
The sight of the mountain affected him, as it had always affected Aunt Ri, with an indefinable, solemn sense of something revealed, yet hidden. “San Jacinto?” he said to a bystander, pointing to it with his whip.
“Yes, Senor,” replied the man. As he spoke, a pair of black horses came whirling round the corner, and he sprang to one side, narrowly escaping being knocked down. “That Tennessee fellow'll run over somebody yet, with those black devils of his, if he don't look out,” he muttered, as he recovered his balance.
Felipe glanced at the horses, then driving his spurs deep into his horse's sides, galloped after them. “Baba! by God!” he cried aloud in his excitement and forgetful of everything, he urged his horse faster, shouting as he rode, “Stop that man! Stop that man with the black horses!”