For the Soul of Rafael

Don Antonio had expressed himself thus to the army men, who fumed and fretted at delays incident to the funeral ceremonies of Miguel Arteaga, for whom the Mission bells clanged...

It was quite true that no one was allowed to sleep that night of Rafael's last bachelor supper. Because of Miguel's death, there could be no dancing, but the hours passed merril...

Toward evening Raquel grew more quiet, and Ana, seeing that the fever was abating, gave herself much blame for sending in such haste for Rafael; and what she had written to him...

When Andres Pico and his men rode into San Juan with the doubtful decoration of necklaces of human ears strung on rawhide strings, there was a breath of relief from the natives:...

What Padre Libertad saw or heard he did not particularize. But when Keith Bryton, the day of the Spanish dance, had arisen and dressed, and talked a little with all those known...

Three days later, Keith Bryton opened his eyes within the white walls of a little room in the Mission. The wooden shutters of the barred window were open, and all was still. A m...

When the night was old, and others slept, Raquel Arteaga crept in silence to the bedside of the old Indian woman of the hill tribe who had been her nurse, who was still her maid...

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 H...

He did not go north for a month. His letter to Angela contained a check, which she at once invested in very becoming mourning, for which she of course had to journey to Los Ange...

From Las Flores, where the Indian village still held together in a shiftless sort of way, Raquel Estevan and her friend Ana Mendez galloped north mile on mile over the mesa abov...

The padre himself rode away very early. Don Enrico lent him a horse to ride to San Juan, and wondered a little that the San Gabriel people had not done as much; but times were c...

"I wasted the holy water on the doorway of the sala and the bedroom," grumbled old Polonia, ensconced among the serapes on the carreta; "I should have kept it for the road to th...

That same evening a gay party from the south rode along the sea to San Juan Capistrano. Dona Maria and Don Eduardo rode in a carriage, but the Dona Angela had received riding le...

The dark was falling when the two girls reached the sheep-herders' cabin in Trabuco. Jose, the boy with the pack-mules and the led horse, had arrived before them, and, shaking w...

It was two days later, before the sun was high, that Raquel Arteaga rode into the plaza, and, slipping from her horse, walked directly into the little private chapel and closed...

A good breakfast had been cooked, but the devil had got among the horses in the night; there had been a stampede--or something. Every one had got into the saddle and ridden that...

Tea made of Castillian rose petals, and all the other little helps of the herb family, were brewed and steamed in the kitchen of the ranch for the saving of Raquel from the gras...

Over the valley of the Mission of the Tragedies, the grass was knee-deep in March that year. The horses galloping from the mesa trail down to Boca de la Playa (the mouth of the...

Only an instant he gave to it all, but in that instant he made certain that every man and woman on the place was at prayers, except the old Indian woman, who squatted with cover...

Many things had happened, and it had been a bad day. "A day cursed of God!" said Pedro Gallardo, the driver; and against such ill fortune the carriage of Senora Luisa Arteaga ma...

"Ana Mendez knows; she has told your wife," she said, abruptly. "Two nights and a day we have; that is all. Raquel says I am not more to you than a brown girl in the willows. Yo...

Raquel knelt no more at the shrine of the Madalena, but she went there nightly as the afterglow flooded the valley. Sometimes she rode her horse alone up the dusk shadows of Tra...