The leader did not await this. As soon as he had murdered the haciendado, he left the hall, and proceeded at once, and without hesitation, to the room where Canelo had so shortly before changed his wife’s resolve of sharing his fate. He looked through this apartment as though he was seeking some person, and then ran hurriedly into the other rooms, but with the same result. What he sought was not there.
Calling to his men in a tone choked with rage and baffled vengeance, he cried to one, a huge, herculean man:
“Mil diablos, Barajo, the birds have both vanished! But they can’t be gone far, for they were here an hour since. Take you a few men and circle around the place. Scatter, and look well, for if they are lost, what we have done here is all for nothing. Find them and a thousand pesos are yours. Al monte—al monte! Capa de Dios! why do you wait?” raged the disguised Mexican or Spaniard, for surely an Indian tongue never mastered the lingua Espagnol so perfectly.
But at length the men returned from a fruitless search, and then, half wild with rage and disappointment, the leader reluctantly gave the order for marching, and they filed out from the hacienda. The building was left intact, with the exception of what injury had been done by the cannon. The outhouses were undisturbed; the stock, both horses and cloven-footed animals, were abandoned. Truly they were a strange war-party of Comanches in more ways than one.
CHAPTER II.
A STORY TOLD AND A SURPRISE.
“Madre mia, why so sad this bright and beautiful day, when all should be as gay and happy as it is out of doors?” exclaimed a young girl, as she entered the room, and, kneeling at her mother’s feet, lifted the bowed head, holding it between her two dainty palms, and pressed affectionate kisses upon the pale cheeks and lips.
“Ah, child, if you knew what anniversary this sad day is, you would not wonder at my grief,” returned the elder lady, mournfully. “Luisa, child, how old are you?” she added, half vacantly.
“Why, mother, need you ask that?” laughed her daughter. “I am nearly nineteen! Almost an old woman, aren’t I?” and her soft, gleesome laugh again rung out.
“Listen, Luisa; you have never learned the true way in which your father—my husband, died. But you are old enough now, and I think I can bear to tell it all. I have been thinking of the past this morning—of your father and brother, child, who was stolen when you were a babe.”
“Stolen!” exclaimed Luisa, eagerly. “I thought you said he was dead?”