frame shook. He was nearly beside himself with rage and despair.
“You see, it is as I said, Majella. There is no place safe. We can do nothing! We might better be dead!”
“It is a long way off, that cañon Doctor Morong had,” said Ramona, piteously. “It wouldn't do any harm, his living there, if no more came.”
“Majella talks like a dove, and not like a woman,” said Alessandro, fiercely. “Will there be one to come, and not two? It is the beginning. To-morrow may come ten more, with papers to show that the land is theirs. We can do nothing, any more than the wild beasts. They are better than we.”
From this day Alessandro was a changed man. Hope had died in his bosom. In all the village councils,—and they were many and long now, for the little community had been plunged into great anxiety and distress by this Doctor Morong's affair,—Alessandro sat dumb and gloomy. To whatever was proposed, he had but one reply: “It is of no use. We can do nothing.”
“Eat your dinners to-day, to-morrow we starve,” he said one night, bitterly, as the council broke up. When Ysidro proposed to him that they should journey to Los Angeles, where Father Gaspara had said the headquarters of the Government officers were, and where they could learn all about the new laws in regard to land, Alessandro laughed at him. “What more is it, then, which you wish to know, my brother, about the American laws?” he said. “Is it not enough that you know they have made a law which will take the land from Indians; from us who have owned it longer than any can remember; land that our ancestors are buried in,—will take that land and give it to themselves, and say it is theirs? Is it to hear this again said in your face, and to see
