Page:Helen Hunt--Ramona.djvu/310

304 panionship, indeed, worthy of Baba's best powers. Not in all the California herds could be found two superber horses than Benito and Baba. A wild, almost reckless joy took possession of Alessandro. Ramona was half terrified as she heard him still talking, talking to Benito. For an hour they did not draw rein. Both Benito and Alessandro knew every inch of the ground. Then, just as they had descended into the deepest part of the cañon, Alessandro suddenly reined sharply to the left, and began climbing the precipitous wall. “Can you follow, dearest Majella?” he cried.

“Do you suppose Benito can do anything that Baba cannot?” she retorted, pressing on closely.

But Baba did not like it. Except for the stimulus of Benito ahead, he would have given Ramona trouble.

“There is only a little, rough like this, dear,” called Alessandro, as he leaped a fallen tree, and halted to see how Baba took it. “Good!” he cried, as Baba jumped it like a deer. “Good! Majella! We have got the two best horses in the country. You'll see they are alike, when daylight comes. I have often wondered they were so much alike. They would go together splendidly.”

After a few rods of this steep climbing they came out on the top of the cañon's south wall, in a dense oak forest comparatively free from underbrush. “Now,” said Alessandro, “I can go from here to San Diego by paths that no white man knows. We will be near there before daylight.”

Already the keen salt air of the ocean smote their faces. Ramona drank it in with delight. “I taste salt in the air, Alessandro,” she cried.

“Yes, it is the sea,” he said. “This cañon leads straight to the sea. I wish we could go by the shore, Majella. It is beautiful there. When it is still, the