The boys dropped to the ground and sat in silence, staring ahead of them. Would that rushing, heaving, bellowing mass have no end? It was indeed a long time before the last line, curiously compact, swept by. Occasionally the earth jumped with brief abruptness, causing hair to crackle at the roots, and dust-laden as it was, make as if to rise on end. The squirrels were screeching in the trees. The birds pitifully twittered. Even the leaves rustled in response to those terrible quivers. The cattle were a red streak at the end of the perspective. The boys rose, shook themselves, and walked heavily to their tethered mustangs. The poor beasts were trembling and whinnying; they greeted their young masters with a quavering neigh of relief. The boys mounted; but although they rode rapidly, with ever increasing impatience, they paused every few moments to listen; there was likely to be a return stampede at any moment. More than once they were obliged to swerve suddenly aside from yawning rifts, and they passed a spring of boiling water, spouting and hissing upward, which had not been there in the morning. They were too frightened to talk; not only the paralysing awe of the earthquake was upon them, but the least imaginative saw his home levelled to the ground, his relatives and friends trodden down into the cracking earth. Hills lay between them and the Casa Encarnacion. There were two exits from the valley where the branding had taken place: one, very narrow, to the right, which led directly to the house, the other straight ahead, almost as broad as the valley itself. The boys saw at a glance that pursued and pursuers had taken the more spacious way, and they followed without consultation. The crushed grass looked like green blood, but there was no other evidence of slaughter; the mustangs had been fleeter than the cattle. The latter had evidently kept well together, for on either side of a swath some three hundred yards in width, the grass stood high. They were in a wide valley now; they could see the great mountains, still faint under their vapourous mist, the redwoods as rigid of outline as if the heart of the world beneath had never changed its measure. Just beyond this valley was a wood, then the Mission. Were twenty thousand hoofs trampling among its ruins? They left the valley, entered the wood, galloped down its narrow path, and emerged. The Mission stood on its plateau above the river, as serene and proud as the redwoods on the mountain. She had held her own against many earthquakes and would against many more. But there was not a horn, a horse, a man, nor a woman to be seen.