He had crossed the ranges twice and returned, but the City of the Angels
had lost its old witchery.
The rose-tinted dawns, and the amethystine dusks were beautiful as ever,
but to banish the memories he had once dreamed over there, he galloped
alone to the harbor called "The Hell of California," and lay all one day
on the beach, and stared moodily at the waves whipping the yellow sands
of San Pedro.
To the south there, far beyond the prosaic stretch of grazing-lands
bordered by the sea, beyond all the tame levels where the water was
green or yellow in the shallows, beyond all the jutting points, veiled
in the miles of mists, he could follow in his mind each curve, until
the one valley of beauty would gleam like a green jewel seen from the
cliffs of San Juan.
And at the foot of those cliffs there were no flat stretches of color
such as make weary the eye; the water there held all the shimmering,
bewitching, iridescence of a peacock's feathers,--the gold and purple,
the greens and the blues ever changing,--the strange touch of pink
making it all glorious in certain glints of the sunlight; and at the
edge of it all, the fringe of foam--a string of pearls shattered on the
brown cliffs or sandy beach, and gathered up to be dashed again and
again and again--the endless garniture of old Ocean's robe.
Never on any other shore had mere waves, running to the sand, the same
witchery. Alvara had said that all men came back some day to San Juan.
What witchery was it by which its mesa and its valley and its wonderful
shore were forever set apart from other shores of California? Some
mystery of life brooded there from sea to mountain, suggesting so much
which was left for poor humanity to solve; it was only a whispered
suggestion, dim and delightful, as the music of the waves heard from the
Mission plaza, or as dreamy as the high film of fog, drifting high up
and tempering the sun's rays until they fell softly as a benediction on
the valley between blue sea and blue summit.
[Illustration: "NEVER ON ANY OTHER SHORE"]
His own life stretched before him like the brown levels and yellow
flatness of San Pedro; and there to the south, miles across the ranges,
was the heart of the dreamland he must not enter: another man had that
claim under fence. He gave voice to some self-condemnation of a sort
reserved for men who go _loco_ over a woman who forgets, and after hours
of brooding there alone by the shore, arrived at only one decision--the
California of the south ranges was no longer his own. All the width of
it was now narrowed to one little valley, where the poppies flamed over
forgotten graves and adobe walls, and the doves circled above a ruined
chancel.
He rode into town, where some kind friends mentioned that Don Rafael
Arteaga and his bride were being _feted_ by the leading Spanish families
of Los Angeles, and he was invited to a dinner in their honor a week
hence.
"I go to Mexico--I start to-day," he answered, briefly. Ten minutes
before, he had not thought of it.
"To Mexico? You cover ground fast these days, Don Keith. On the new road
of iron they mean to make, you could not go so much faster than on the
horses you ride; you have the good American luck in the pick of them."
"Yes, the good American luck!" said Keith Bryton, with a touch of
bitterness. "May your saints send you a better!"
A man who stood near, and who much desired the invitation Bryton had
refused, shrugged his shoulders as the Americano mounted his horse and
rode away.
"What better luck could a man have, than a chance to meet Dona Raquel
Estevan de Arteaga?" he queried of any who might care to answer. "The
bishop himself shows her honor, and they say she is working for the
Church against Downing, the Englishman, who holds the Mission lands
under Pico's sale. Sixteen years has the Church fought for those lands
in the courts; if she gets them back, she deserves the pope's blessing.
And the fool boy of an Americano rides south when he could meet
her--perhaps touch her hand!"
But the fool Americano rode south and kept on riding south for many
dusty days. He crossed a corner of the Yaqui country, and then across
the ranges to the old mine, called the Mine of the Temple--the one of
which he had told Don Juan Alvara--was it so few weeks ago? It might
have been years instead of weeks, by his own feeling and attitude of
mind. He was riding back a different man. He evaded the few Mexicans as
he neared the mine; no turn of the trail was lonely for him. Memory
kept pace, and the murmur of one girl's voice spoke through the rustling
leaves of the mountains.
A travelling priest, jubilant at the idea of comradeship, hailed him in
one of the mountain passes, and found him but a sorry companion.
"This is a country," said the padre, "where the sight of a white face is
most welcome. Six months since I was sent to this parish, and few of
them have I seen. Now, I ride out of my way just to talk with an
American who works a mine up here. Your brother, is it? Well, he has a
good name with the brown folks. A lot of pagans they are! It is not a
priest they need here; it is a missionary the bishop should send to
teach them their religion anew. If ever they had any, it has been lost."
But it was evidently the opinion of the padre that they had never really
secured any to lose. He discoursed at some length on the failure of the
Church to impress upon them the advantage of marriage. Few were the
wedding fees to be obtained from the Mexicans, while the heathen Indians
had some form of their own, arranged by the head of their clan, and it
was a disgrace to a land held under cross and crown for two
centuries--an endless shame!
Keith assented, without heeding the list of Indian iniquities. He was
rather glad, after all, that Teddy had a civilized neighbor, willing to
be companionable. Teddy liked people too well to exile himself from them
but for the one thing--to go back north, able to cover one white throat
with pearls, or two white hands with diamonds.
His greeting of his half-brother was a bit shy, though wholly glad, and
the padre served to bridge over the first few awkward moments. Both men
recognized the fact of a change in each since the Los Angeles days.
Teddy thought it due only to his clandestine marriage, and Keith felt
guilty as he realized how little, how very little, Teddy's marriage
meant to him now. While the padre was getting acquainted with the
Mexican, the two brothers walked apart, and talked of the chances of the
mine's success, and the failure of the backers to see the necessity of
using money more freely on the enterprise.
"It's there, you know," insisted Teddy; "all this district is flooded
with stories of the ore taken out of it in the first days of the
Spaniards; then the Indians descended upon them, and there was a
slaughter, and no Spaniard dared venture into these hills for a
century."
"Yes. We put in a good many fruitless days trailing those old legends,"
assented Keith, "but only the Indian superstition tends to show that
this is the real mine of that history. The rich one may not have been
on this side of the mountain, since you have not yet struck the lode."
"Don't let's talk about it, if you feel that way," suggested Teddy, "I
hear plenty of that from the others; and you didn't really come all the
way down here to talk mines. Say, old chap, you acted like a prince over
the--well, the wedding. I felt pretty nearly three inches higher when I
got your letter. I--I know I acted like a kid, but Angela wanted it
arranged so; and--as she about filled the whole horizon--"
"Cut out the explanation, Teddy. A man is never sure of himself until
the right woman crosses his trail--or the wrong one. God knows I'm not
fit for alcalde in the case. At least, you married your wife."
Teddy stared at him an instant, and then shouted with laughter.
"Married my wife? Well, rather! How else could she be my wife?"
Keith avoided the frank boyish blue eyes of Teddy, and turned away,
seating himself on a great bowlder and staring across the little
semicircle of the canyon basin, to where gnarled century-old trees
reached grotesque arms above some old stone ruins and fragments of
marble. Teddy looked at him an instant, and then whistled softly.
"If it were any other man than you, Keith, I'd think--but it's too
ridiculous!"
"Say it," suggested Keith.
"Well, I'd say the wrong woman had crossed _your_ trail."
"Not the wrong one."
"Good Lord! you don't mean that by any chance it is at last the right
one?"
"At last--the right woman."
"And you sit there looking as solemn over it as a wooden Mexican god!
Wake up, old fellow, and tell about her."
"There is nothing to tell. She is the right woman, and I shall never see
her again."
"Keith!"
"And I've come back here to tell myself so," continued Keith, doggedly;
"to say it over and over, and beat it into my brain, if I have any left.
The desert didn't help me--I thought this might."
"This?"
"These hills, and--speaking of it."
His brother said nothing, only looked at him in wonder, as he rose with
hands thrust in pockets and walked the length of the little terrace
formed by the refuse of the mine. The two brothers had changed places.
It was now Keith, the cool, the indifferent, who had crossed some line
of emotional experience where speech was a relief--Keith, of all men!
Teddy wondered who the woman could be; she would be worth seeing.
"So you see, Ted," observed the other, with a forced laugh, "you need
not explain things to me. When the woman comes, none of us cares much
what the other fellow thinks."
"If she is the right woman, I'm mighty sorry, old man, that it's going
to be as you say--that you are not going to see her again."
"Don't waste good sorrow! I'm the only fool in the case--she doesn't
care."
"That's not so easy to believe," declared Teddy, loyally. "You probably
only asked her once, and then hit the trail before she could change her
mind."
"Ask her. When people care, words are not so necessary."
"Perhaps not, but girls do expect words; though the right girl--"
"She doesn't know that she was the right girl; I may not have made it
clear. I was a fool who dreamed dreams and believed them true. Talking
about it doesn't help. I thought it might; that's all."
He continued to walk the terrace, as though with a certain impatience at
having let go of himself. Teddy regarded him for a few moments of
awkward silence. Keith had never been demonstrative, and this sudden
confidence caught Teddy unprepared. He felt ill at ease, realizing that
it was no light sentiment, causing him to let go of himself and speak.
"I reckon this particular mountain must be bewitched," he said at last.
"The only other time you talked of a girl--any special girl--was after
we were led across yon range by that girl of the convent. Even then you
talked of her only when the knock on your head sent you luny. What was
the name they called her? Spirit--Dona Spirit--Dona Espiritu! That is
it! I really thought for a few days of your ravings that we were going
to have a nun in the family; and now it's a new girl!"
Keith regarded him for a moment, then in silence took out tobacco and
made a cigarette. Of what use were words?
"I always wondered who that girl was and what became of her," continued
Teddy. "The old padre was as dumb as an oyster on the subject. Did you
learn more than her name?"
"Not much," said Keith, briefly.
"I always meant to. Funny how those crack-brained Indians let up on the
attack that night, when she slipped that ring on your finger and held up
your hand for them to see. It was the last thing I noted before I
keeled over. Those Indians have not forgotten that. They knew when I
came back here, and they seemed to watch either the mine or me,--I don't
know which it is. Once they asked an old Mexican for you; he speaks
their lingo. They described you as 'the man of the ring.'"
"That's queer."
"Did the girl tell you what the ring meant?"
"Meant?" repeated Keith, questioningly.
"Yes. To the tribe, it means more than a mere ring. The old Mexican
gathered that much. It had something the significance of a sceptre, and
was worn only by one of the rulers in the old days. When that girl put
it on your finger, the tribe thought it meant that she had picked you
out for marriage. She didn't tell you?"
"No, she didn't tell me."
"Well, it's all that saved our lives that night. You know the old padre
is dead. It was he did the sleight-of-hand work in getting the girl out
of sight before you got on your feet again. With some threat of eternal
flames, he shut the lips of every Mexican I tried to bribe to find her."
Keith took the cigarette from his lips, and looked at him without
speaking. Teddy smiled and nodded.
"Yes, I looked for her without your knowing it. You came nearer going
'over the range' in that fever than you ever realized. The English
doctor down there asked me who the devil 'Espiritu' was, and said that
she could probably do more to lower your temperature than his drugs. I
tried to locate her, as soon as I could hobble on a crutch, but it was
no use. The padre said she had taken the black veil: that shut us out."
"Yes, of course," assented Keith, absently.
"You never mentioned her name after you got on your feet, so I figured
that it did not really mean anything. Girls never did mean much to you,
individually, Keith,--until now."
"Until now."
"And now it's no use, since you can't see her again."
Keith puffed away in thoughtful silence before he spoke.
"Perhaps not. Yet--_quien sabe_? A sentiment may be like a sunrise,
lifting clouds for you and making you see things--things within yourself
you never suspected were there. Our trail in these hills followed the
light of the morning star once, and we got out of the wilderness to
safety: that star has meant something to me ever since. I can't possess
it, but the meaning of it is mine. I can't give myself to the right
woman,"--and he held out his hand and looked at it,--"but no conventions
of the world, no man-made walls can prevent the thought of me from going
to her--the thought which, after all, is the real me. When that is so,
who can say that even an unknown love has not its own uses? It may prove
the illumination of a whole lifetime."
Teddy, with wonder in his eyes, laid his hand on his brother's shoulder.
"Old man, that kind of feeling is beyond me. I want my girl with me, and
I want her mighty bad. I've lived beside you all my life, and never
dreamed it was in you to care like that for any woman. It only shows how
little we know, after all."
"Yes; how little, after all, until the right woman crosses the trail."
"The chances are that we can never talk of it again. I know you _that_
much! I told you this old hill of the temple was uncanny--bewitched,--and
it is. You never would have mentioned this to me in civilized places."
"Perhaps not," agreed Keith. "And you're right--I could never speak of
it again."
They never did. That night they talked only of Teddy's enterprise, and
covered much paper with many figures, and made fine plans for the
future.
The next day it was that Keith, hunting in the hills, heard an unusual
blast from the mine, felt the ground tremble from the shock, and turning
back on the trail, met a Mexican with a bleeding hand and a cut face,
who urged him to hasten. It was the word of the padre!
He reached Teddy's side only in time to accept "Angela--poor little
Angela--" as a life-long legacy. There had been an explosion. Graves
were made for the young engineer and three of his Mexican miners on the
side of the mountain. When it was all over, Keith Bryton climbed to the
heights above, where the broken walls of stone showed white and gray
among forest growth on the temple terrace. Below, and beyond the ranges,
lay the world. In his isolation of grief, he felt as alone as the
solitary mountain rising from the plain below, through which a river
ran. Far down the river, miles away, gleamed a cross on the chapel of a
convent. It was the old Mexican pueblo of which he had told Alvara. He
remembered saying to the old man that he would never come back; yet here
he was. How useless to say what one will or will not do in this world!
One must make allowance for the moves fate insists upon in the game of
life.
Back of him, on a slight elevation, stood some broken columns, and
half an arch yet showed where an entrance had been, and under a dwarfed
and twisted oak half covered with tropical vines a bench of marble
gleamed. Two birds fluttered to the ground near him and turned
inquisitive eyes on the intruder. He watched them carelessly, until one
of them perched on a fallen block of stone ornamented with the
sculptured sun of the Aztecs. It brought back like a flash that other
day when he went from the presence of death to a ruined altar-place,
where the Aztec sun and the cactus commemorated some unknown Mexican
sculptor who cut the symbol of the faith of his people into the walls of
a Christian church.
He closed his eyes, and the vision of that other day was only
intensified. The wind in the oaks back of him sounded like the surf on
San Juan's beach; and through it the slow, fateful words of a girl
kneeling in her wedding-veil echoed in his ears as it had done a
thousand times:
"So long--as--we--both--shall live!"
There were no weeping girls here, and no bells to toll out the death
message; but otherwise the atmosphere of the place, and the illusion,
were perfect. How--how had he chanced to enter into this half-pagan
atmosphere of death? Unconsciously, automatically, he turned and
re-turned on his finger the onyx ring at which Angela had laughed.
He was still seated there when the miners who had filled the graves came
up the path, and with them the priest from the plains below. The
Mexicans halted outside the broken walls. Only one Indian, who had
followed at a distance, crossed the line of entrance, and stood apart,
watching and listening in a furtive way--watching the American
especially.
"Many times I have heard of this place," said the priest, "but never
before have I been so far into the mountain. There are strange old
traditions of it in the accounts some of the early padres left. Their
king or chief became Christian and gave his sons to the Church, but the
main body of the people kept to many of their pagan rites. And this was
their temple. The men ask me if you continue with the mining, senor."
He noticed they all listened for the answer, and looked relieved when he
said, "No."
"They are all very glad, senor. They ask me to tell you they have no ill
will, but they say not any of their men will go into the mine of the
temple."
"Some superstition?"
"It seems so. They say one man always dies when outsiders meddle with
the mountain, but never before have three men died at once. They ask
you to let the company know that none of them will come back."
"Very good," and Bryton arose and picked up the sombrero he had dropped
beside him. "I will tell them to bring foreigners if they mean to keep
on; but I doubt it. The cave-in down there means a fortune to dig out. I
don't think they have the capital."
He was turning away, when he noticed the Indian.
"Is he a workman?"
The others exchanged glances, and then one of them stepped forward.
"No, senor. He is one of the mountain people. No one knows where they
live. I know a little of their talk. He says for us all to go away, or
worse things will always happen. He--he wants to speak to you."
"Well?"
The man hesitated, and then said a few words, and the Indian replied in
a strange jargon with peculiar aspirated syllables.
"He says," continued the interpreter, hesitatingly, "to ask if she is to
come back."
"She?"
Bryton's face flushed, as the priest looked at him curiously.
"You have known those people before?"
"I--my brother and I were lost once in the forest here. We--well, we
were made to feel we had trespassed; but some one--a sort of missionary
among them--made them lead us to the plain. It would have been better if
my brother had never come back."
"And--?"
The priest noticed Bryton's hesitation; so did the Indian, for he walked
direct to him, and pointed to the ring he wore, and looked from the ring
to Bryton's face.
"Tell him," said the American, "that she is a man's wife, and lives in a
lovely land."
"You see her--some day?" asked the Indian.
"No--not ever again--perhaps."
The Indian bent his head, and with a slight gesture as of farewell,
turned and walked swiftly away from them, around the bend of the
mountain.
"Your words have an unusual interest," said the priest, as they walked
down toward the plain. "They suggest that the missionary might be the
one they spoke of here as the Indian nun."
"This lady was not Indian," said Keith, decidedly. "Her skin was whiter
than either yours or mine. The Indians called her Dona Espiritu! It was
the only name they knew her by."
"It was the same, and her father's name was Estevan," said the priest,
quietly.
"Yes, I know now. His name was Estevan, but--"
"And he was the man who died the awful death up there." And he pointed
back to the temple.
"No!" Bryton stopped on the path and faced the priest, thus halting the
entire procession at a point where a yawning gulf of a canyon reached to
unseen depths below.
"For the love of Christ--senor!" screamed the priest, while the Mexicans
in the rear clung to their burros and swore.
"The man who was killed left no child," persisted Bryton. "I heard the
story."
"A daughter was born six months after his death--after the wife had
taken the black veil of eternal renunciation of the world," declared the
priest, solemnly. "Now, senor, for the love of God, will you let us find
safer footing?"
"Oh, yes. Pardon me!" and Bryton continued thoughtfully along the trail
to the plain below. When they reached a broader road where it was
possible to ride abreast, he asked one more question.
"Father, does she know?"
"Not unless some in the world have told her. Here, the old priest, her
uncle, had power enough over the wild tribe to make them promise they
would not tell her until she had lived twenty years. He died ten years
ago, but they kept faith. There are some people in the world who had to
know,--the lawyers and judges who settled the estate,--for Estevan was a
man of wealth. He carried wounds here from the war for California. The
child thought he died from the effects of those. Out in the world where
she has gone, that wild barbaric outbreak of her mother's people will
never be known; and of the few who have learned it who would tell her?"
"True, father: who would?"
[Music: _La Passion Funesta_]