Americans who chanced to be working near. But the effect was magical; in an instant pick and shovel were laid aside, and before the astonished miners could comprehend it, the entire gang of Chinamen had dispersed, and in another instant were scattered over the several trails leading out of One Horse Gulch, except one.
That one was luckily taken by Ah Ri. In half an hour he came upon the object of his search, seated on a bowlder by the wayside, smoking his evening pipe. His pick, shovel, and pack lay by his side. Ah Ri did not waste time in preliminary speech or introduction. He simply handed the missive to his master, and instantly turned his back upon him and departed. In another half-hour every Chinaman was back in the ditch, working silently as if nothing had happened.
Gabriel laid aside his pipe and held the letter a moment hesitatingly between his finger and thumb. Then opening it, he at once recognized the small Italian hand with which his wife had kept his accounts and written from his dictation, and something like a faint feeling of regret overcame him as he gazed at it, without taking the meaning of the text. And then with the hesitation, repetition, and audible utterance of an illiterate person, he slowly read the following:
"I was wrong. You have left something behind you—a secret that, as you value your happiness, you must take with you. If you come to Conroy's Hill within the next two hours you shall know it, for I shall not enter that house again, and leave here tonight forever. I do not ask you to come for the sake of your wife, but for the sake of the woman she once personated. You will come because you love Grace, not because you care for
There was but one fact that Gabriel clearly grasped in this letter. That was that it referred to some news of Grace. That was enough. He put away his pipe, rose, shouldered his pack and pick and deliberately retraced his steps. When he reached the town, with the shame-facedness of a man who had just taken leave of it forever, he avoided the main thoroughfare, but did this so clumsily and incautiously, after his simple fashion, that two or three of the tunnelmen noticed him ascending the hill by an inconvenient and seldom used by-path. He did not stay long, however, for in a short time—some said ten, others said fifteen minutes—he was seen again, descending rapidly and recklessly, and, crossing the Gulch, disappeared in the bushes at the base of Bald Mountain.
With the going down of the sun that night, the temperature fell also, and the fierce, dry, desert heat that had filled the land for the past few days fled away before a strong wind which rose with the coldly rising moon, that during the rest of the night rode calmly over the twisting tops of writhing pines on Conroy's Hill, over the rattling windows of the town, and over the beaten dust of mountain roads. But even with the night the wind passed too, and the sun arose the next morning upon a hushed and silent landscape. It touched, according to its habit, first the tall top of the giant pine on Conroy's Hill and then slid softly down its shaft until it reached the ground. And there it found Victor Ramirez, with a knife thrust through his heart, lying dead!
CHAPTER XXXVI.
MR. HAMLIN'S RECREATION, CONTINUED.
When Donna Dolores, after the departure of Mrs. Sepulvida, missed the figure of Mr. Jack Hamlin from the plain before her window, she presumed he had followed that lady, and would have been surprised to have known that he was at that moment within her castle, drinking aguardiente with no less a personage than the solemn Don Juan Salvatierra. In point of fact, with that easy audacity which distinguished him, Jack had penetrated the court-yard, gained the hospitality of Don Juan without even revealing his name and profession to that usually ceremonious gentleman, and after holding him in delicious fascination for two hours, had actually left him lamentably intoxicated, and utterly oblivious of the character of his guest. Why Jack did not follow up his advantage by seeking an interview with the mysterious Senora who had touched him so deeply I cannot say, nor could he himself afterward determine. A sudden bashfulness and timidity which he had never before experienced in his relations with the sex, tied his own tongue while Don Juan, with the garrulity which inebriety gave to his, poured forth the gossip of the Mission and the household. It is possible also that a certain vague hopelessness, equally novel to Jack, sent him away in lower spirits than he came. It is remarkable that Donna Dolores knew nothing of the visit of this guest, until three days afterward, for during that time she was indisposed and did not leave her room, but it was remarkable that on learning it she flew into a paroxysm of indignation and rage
