Ana closed the door tightly and came back and sat down beside Raquel and took her hand. "My aunt and the girls are over their heads in delight out there," she remarked, dryly; "and I will tell you a thing no one has been told concerning that ride from San Luis Rey. Rafael lost some fine horses that night--do you remember?" Raquel did not; she might have heard--but Dona Luisa's death, all that sorrow, all the many and quick changes, had blotted out the fainter records of that day. "Well, when we stopped for coffee at the camp the cook told us; you may not have heard. However, they were taken after you went into the river. You have not forgotten that?" "How could I? Oh, yes, I remember! The priest told me that night. How strange it should have all been crowded out of my mind! He told me to give Rafael a message of warning. What was it? What was it?" She clasped her hands over her brows and tried to remember. Her first meeting with Rafael beside the dead body of his mother had driven out of her mind the message she was to have delivered. It was a warning, a warning of some sort; that much she was sure of, and--what was it about her father--her father's name? "I think," said Ana, speaking softly and watching her, "that he told you Felipe Estevan's daughter had saved Rafael Arteaga a treasure that night." "Anita! So he did; and you know the words, the very words he spoke to me!" "I know more, Raquel mia; I know what the treasure was." "And--?" "It is not nice to tell," and Ana hesitated. "But he saw you there that evening with his own eyes." "The priest?" "Yes, the priest. He saved you from being carried to the hills by the Juan Flores robbers, while Capitan took others of the men and secured the chests of wedding gifts from the old Mission. Oh, it was all planned for the one big revenge on Rafael Arteaga. But he saw you, and so--" "And that priest saved me from them, Anita?" "Yes, he saved you--the priest--and sent you back to your friends, and sent the men across the mesas--because you were Estevan's daughter. But he did not try to save Rafael's horses; that night many of the finest were headed eastward and never came back." "And if--if the padre had not been there at the right moment, I--" "It is not a nice story, at all," acknowledged Ana. "They are rough men. One of them would have married you, and you would never have cared to see your friends again, and Rafael never would have found you." "Mother of God! He hates Rafael like that, yet lets him live?" Ana laughed a little and shrugged her shoulders. "Capitan is like that," she observed. "No one is like him. If Rafael's life were in danger this hour, Capitan would ride to save him. Oh, he does not mean that he shall die while young, and handsome, and rich, and beloved!"