"Oh, what a cruel fate. Poor, ill-starred Ivarene! It was that unfortunate bride that I so strangely resemble. But how mysterious that it should be so! Now I do not wonder at your father's agitation at meeting one who reminded him of his lost friend and benefactress. That was why he gazed so pathetically into my eyes:—I recalled the days of his youth, his lost fortune, and the tragic fate of his dear friends."
Hugh Estill said:—
"Oh, this is not the first time I have heard the particulars of that tragedy. It was often talked of in the days of my boyhood; but I was a child at the time when it was still fresh in the memory of the few settlers in the upper valley of the Cottonwood. It was fully ten years after the event that I heard the version from one of our herders, who said it was whispered that white men were engaged in the massacre. Father was unnecessarily irritated, I thought, when I repeated what the fellow said, and he went so far as to discharge him, and forbade me ever mentioning the subject again."
"Your parents were living on your ranch at that time?" said Clifford, in a strange eager tone of inquiry.
"Yes; we have lived on the same place for the past twenty-seven years, and both Mora and myself were born on the old ranch," replied Hugh.
After remaining rapt in silence a moment, Miss Estill said, as she and Clifford stood apart from the others, while he stooped to gather a spray of the sensitive-plant:—
"What is this strange, haunting sense of danger and grief that always assails me on this spot? It is like the dim remembrance of some tragic event connected with my own life—a half-forgotten night-mare, as it were—the very elusiveness of which is distressing to me. I feel that same sensation now which I mentioned having always felt on this spot, when you told me how strangely you were affected when passing Antelope Butte."
"I often experience that peculiar sentiment here, also, Miss Estill,—a kind of perception or impression of some dire calamity with which not only myself, but you likewise, have been connected here," Clifford replied with troubled face.
"I am afraid we shall mould if we stay in this gloomy shade any longer," cried Grace, springing up with a little shiver; but the bright look which young Estill beamed upon her showed plainly that he, at least, was in no danger of such a blighting fate.
It was a beautiful scene that burst upon their view as they emerged from under the low, sweeping boughs, and stood in the sunlight south of the gothic cottage. Around the knoll, on which they were standing, purled and gurgled the stream, fringed by feathery willows and stately elms, and, after half embracing the hill in its tortuous folds, winding away down the widening valley. Where the timber, which skirted the serpentine river, grew in groves of deepest green, there the stream had expanded into placid lakelets, which flashed like silver in the slanting sunbeams.