"Mother of God," said Father Felipe, eyeing Arthur curiously. "You know not then for whom was this mass? You know not that a saint has gone--that Donna Dolores has at last met her reward?" "I have heard--that is, Donna Maria's despatch said--that she was missing," stammered Arthur, feeling, with a new and unsupportable disbelief in himself, that his face was very pale and his voice uncertain. "Missing!" echoed Father Felipe, with the least trace of impatience in his voice. "Missing! She will be found when the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity is restored--when the ruins of the _casa_, sunk fifty feet below the surface, are brought again to the level of the plain. Missing, Don Arturo!--ah!--missing indeed!--for ever! always, entirely!" Moved perhaps by something in Arthur's face, Padre Felipe sketched in a few graphic pictures the details of the catastrophe already forecast by Arthur. It was a repetition of the story of the sunken corral. The earthquake had not only levelled the walls of the Rancho of the Blessed Trinity, but had opened a grave-like chasm fifty feet below it, and none had escaped to tell the tale. The faithful _vaqueros_ had rushed from the trembling and undulating plain to the Rancho, only to see it topple into a yawning abyss that opened to receive it. Don Juan, Donna Dolores, the faithful Manuela, and Alejandro, the _major domo_, with a dozen peons and retainers, went down with the crumbling walls. No one had escaped. Was it not possible to dig in the ruins for the bodies? Mother of God! had not Don Arturo been told that the earth at the second shock had closed over the sunken ruins, burying beyond mortal resurrection all that the Rancho contained? They were digging, but hopelessly--a dozen men. They might--weeks hence--discover the bodies--but who knows? The meek, fatalistic way that Father Felipe accepted the final doom of Donna Dolores exasperated Arthur beyond bounds. In San Francisco a hundred men would have been digging night and day in the mere chance of recovering the buried family. Here--but Arthur remembered the sluggish, helpless retainers of Salvatierra, the dreadful fatalism which affected them on the occurrence of this mysterious catastrophe, even as shown in the man before him, their accepted guide and leader--and shuddered. Could anything be done? Could he not, with Dumphy's assistance, procure a gang of men from San Francisco? And then came the instinct of caution, always powerful with a nature like Arthur's. If these people, most concerned in the loss of their friends, their relations, accepted it so hopelessly, what right had he--a mere stranger--to interfere?