Raquel looked as though she thought all the truth might not be in the reply, but she turned quietly away.
"I would have ridden with him if I had known," she said, and went back to Doña Luisa, who was so eager to continue the journey that she would wait for no breakfast but the coffee.
"Cut another strap of the harness and take time to mend it," muttered Jacoba to Pedro; "we are not all so near to being angels that we can live without eating."
Benito made the second crossing where the river bends around the mesa, and there met one of the boys from the village looking for a pair of strayed mules.
"The Don Rafael--he has started for San Diego?" demanded Benito. "Turn and ride with me, José."
"When Don Rafael wake up to-day he much too late to go to San Diego," he said, and the old man uttered a sigh of relief.
"No one sleep in San Juan last night," said José. "There was the supper, and some girls stay. The army men they all start north an hour ago, but maybe the others still dance in the Mission, Don Rafael say he go to get married, this is his last night--no one must sleep, or be sober!"
José thought it a great joke, but Benito muttered, "Jesus and San Vicente!" and ordered the boy to go back for the mules, and rode on down the valley alone.
It took José some time to find the mules, and when he did find them they were even more perverse than usual; he had got them so near home as the hill above San Juan, when one of them went careering along the mesa as though heading for San Jacinto mountain.
By the time he had secured it and got back near the road an astonishing sight met his eyes--something one was not used to seeing at sunrise in San Juan.
A carriage came down the valley road from La Paz cañon. There were only women in it, and two Indian boys rode in the rear. Where could a carriage like that come from at such an hour? No one who rode in carriages lived up those valleys!
In staring at the carriage he failed at first to notice the girl on horseback, who had ridden alone in advance of the carriage, and had halted in the road, on the brow of the hill, looking down across the old pueblo to the sea.
She was so motionless, he was very close before he noticed her, close enough to hear her indrawn breath of delight, to see the soft flush of emotion touch her face. Almost he thought there were tears in her eyes; he thought her the most beautiful lady he had ever seen alive,--though one picture of the Virgin in the chapel was as fine.