It had been a sad two years in the Moreno house. After the first excitement following Ramona's departure had died away, things had settled down in a surface similitude of their old routine. But nothing was really the same. No one was so happy as before. Juan Canito was heart-broken. There had been set over him the very Mexican whose coming to the place he had dreaded. The sheep had not done well; there had been a drought; many had died of hunger,βa thing for which the new Mexican overseer was not to blame, though it pleased Juan to hold him so, and to say from morning till night that if his leg had not been broken, or if the lad Alessandro had been there, the wool-crop would have been as big as ever.
Not one of the servants liked this Mexican; he had a sorry time of it, poor fellow; each man and woman on the place had or fancied some reason for being set against him; some from sympathy with Juan Can, some from idleness and general impatience; Margarita, most of all, because he was not Alessandro. Margarita, between remorse about her young mistress and pique and disappointment about Alessandro, had become a very unhappy girl; and her mother, instead of comforting or soothing her, added to her misery by continually bemoaning Ramona's fate.
Where had she vanished? Had she indeed gone to the convent, as she said, or had she fled with Alessandro? Margarita would have given her right hand to know. Only Juan Can felt sure. Ay, the smart lad! The fiends had bewitched her. Tirelessly Juan Can questioned every traveller, every wandering herder he saw. No one knew anything of Alessandro, beyond the fact that all the Temecula Indians had been driven out of their village, and that there was now not an Indian in the valley.
There was a rumor that Alessandro and his father had both died; but no one knew anything certainly. The Temecula Indians had disappeared, that was all there was of it,βdisappeared, like any wild creatures, foxes or coyotes, hunted down, driven out; the valley was rid of them. She was not with these fugitives.
That could not be! Heaven forbid! Ay, drove her to it! That's what I say, Luigo. She gets power over one. On the morning after Ramona's disappearance, words had been spoken by each which neither would ever forget.
