"Alas for me!" laughed Ana, "for I tell you now I am going to copy after her. She makes the other women look like sheep. If she would go with me, I would ride to the San Joaquin ranch this night and have no fear."
Teresa shrugged her shoulders.
"You grow like a child, Ana, as you get more years. Your letter makes you young again—so?"
But Ana was out of the gate, and crossing the plaza with a light springy step, as if indeed the days of girlhood had come back. In her eyes was a smile, but back of the smile was a light of new determination. All at once she seemed to have found herself: he was in danger, and had called her.
At the Mission she found the Indian boy with a dish of frijolles.
"How did the letter come?" she asked, but he did not know. It was found under the door, and it had frightened Doña Refugia, and she wanted it out of the house when the men were away. She thought it, maybe, was a demand for money, such as the outlaws had sent Señor Eduardo Downing, and she asked Ana for the love of God to send word back quick what it meant.
"It is only from the padre who borrowed the horse, and he thanks her," said Ana, coolly. "Ride straight home, and talk to no one, or you will get a reata instead of frijolles."
The Indian boy nodded silently. He knew the Doña Ana always kept her promises of that sort.
A little later, Teresa looked out at the sound of horse-hoofs thundering by, and saw Ana on the road to the sea.
She let her horse have his head until she came to the Rancho de la Playa, when she halted to scan the meadow and sand of the shore, and then bent her attention to the ground, and paced slowly along until she found the tracks of Raquel's horse turning to the right. There was only one road to be followed to the right; she had gone through the little cañon of the cactus and up to the heights above. More than once Doña Ana halted to examine the ground, to be sure that no later tracks had been made on a return trip. Then, away across the mesa she saw Raquel's horse browsing among the sage-brush on the cliff above the sea. Raquel was nowhere in sight; but, knowing she was near, Ana rode quietly along the bluff, until right at the edge of the cliff she saw her stretched at full length in the odorous grasses, her chin propped on her hands, staring down the steeps where yellow poppies nodded to the surf below. A cluster of the blossoms was beside her, and her skirt was torn. She had evidently been down there after them, and was resting after her climb.