Stories in Light and Shadow

B >> Bret Harte >> Stories in Light and Shadow


Presently I was aware of the sound of galloping hoofs. I remembered
then--what I had at first forgotten--that a few moments before we had
crossed an arroyo, or dried bed of a stream, depressed below the level
of the field. How foolish that I had not remembered! He had evidently
sought that refuge; there were his returning hoofs. I galloped toward
it, but only to meet a frightened vaquero, who had taken that avenue of
escape to the rancho.

"Did you see Don Enriquez?" I asked impatiently.

I saw that the man's terror was extreme, and his eyes were staring in
their sockets. He hastily crossed himself:--

"Ah, God, yes!"

"Where is he?" I demanded.

"Gone!"

"Where?"

He looked at me with staring, vacant eyes, and, pointing to the ground,
said in Spanish: "He has returned to the land of his fathers!"

We searched for him that day and the next, when the country was aroused
and his neighbors joined in a quest that proved useless. Neither he
nor his innocent burden was ever seen again of men. Whether he had been
engulfed by mischance in some unsuspected yawning chasm in that brief
moment, or had fulfilled his own prophecy by deliberately erasing
himself for some purpose known only to himself, no one ever knew. His
country-people shook their heads and said "it was like a Saltillo." And
the few among his retainers who knew him and loved him, whispered
still more ominously: "He will yet return to his land to confound the
Americanos."

Yet the widow of Enriquez did NOT marry Professor Dobbs. But she too
disappeared from California, and years afterward I was told that she was
well known to the ingenuous Parisians as the usual wealthy widow "from
South America."