Rapid travelling was not possible here.  There were no valleys worthy the name.  The sharp peaks, multiplying mile after mile, were like teeth of gigantic rakes, black and bare.  A wilderness of mountain-tops, desolate as eternity, arid, parched, baked by the awful heat, the silence never broken by the cry of a bird, a hut rarely breaking the barren monotony, only an infrequent spring to save from death.  It was almost impossible to get food or fresh horses.  Many a night De la Vega and his stoical guide slept beneath a cactus, or in the mocking bed of a creek.  The mustangs he managed to lasso were almost unridable, and would have bucked to death any but a Californian.  Sometimes he lived on cactus fruit and the dried meat he had brought with him; occasionally he shot a rabbit.  Again he had but the flesh of the rattlesnake roasted over coals.  But honey-dew was on the leaves.

He avoided the beaten trail, and cut his way through naked bushes spiked with thorns, and through groves of cacti miles in length.  When the thick fog rolled up from the ocean he had to sit inactive on the rocks, or lose his way.  A furious storm dashed him against a boulder, breaking his mustang’s leg; then a torrent, rising like a tidal wave, thundered down the gulch, and catching him on its crest, flung him upon a tree of thorns.  When dawn came he found his guide dead.  He cursed his luck, and went on.

Lassoing another mustang, he pushed on, having a general idea of the direction he should take.  It was a week before he reached Loreto, a week of loneliness, hunger, thirst, and torrid monotony.  A week, too, of thought and bitterness of spirit.  In spite of his love, which never cooled, and his courage, which never quailed, Nature, in her guise of foul and crooked hag, mocked at earthly happiness, at human hope, at youth and passion.

If he had not spent his life in the saddle, he would have been worn out when he finally reached Loreto, late one night.  As it was, he slept in a hut until the following afternoon.  Then he took a long swim in the bay, and, later, sauntered through the town.

The forlorn little city was hardly more than a collection of Indians’ huts about a church in a sandy waste.  No longer the capital, even the barracks were toppling.  When De la Vega entered the mission, not a white man but the padre and his assistant was in it; the building was thronged with Indian worshippers.  The mission, although the first built in California, was in a fair state of preservation.  The Stations in their battered frames were mellow and distinct.  The gold still gleamed in the vestments of the padre.

For a few moments De la Vega dared not raise his eyes to the Lady of Loreto, standing aloft in the dull blaze of adamantine candles.  When he did, he rose suddenly from his knees and left the mission.  The pearls were there.