Why had no one
mentioned, why had he not himself known, of these villages?
Perhaps there were yet others he had not heard of. Hope sprang in
Felipe's impressionable nature as easily as it died. An hour, a
moment, might see him both lifted up and cast down. When he
rode into the sleepy little village street of San Bernardino, and
saw, in the near horizon, against the southern sky, a superb
mountain-peak, changing in the sunset lights from turquoise to
ruby, and from ruby to turquoise again, he said to himself, "She is
there! I have found her!"
The sight of the mountain affected him, as it had always affected
Aunt Ri, with an indefinable, solemn sense of something revealed,
yet hidden. "San Jacinto?" he said to a bystander, pointing to it
with his whip.
"Yes, Senor," replied the man. As he spoke, a pair of black horses
came whirling round the corner, and he sprang to one side,
narrowly escaping being knocked down. "That Tennessee fellow'll
run over somebody yet, with those black devils of his, if he don't
look out," he muttered, as he recovered his balance.
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