to the horizon-line, was distinctly undulating!  The faint haze of the hills was repeated over its surface, as if a dust had arisen from some grinding displacement of the soil.  I threw myself from my horse, but the next moment was fain to cling to him, as I felt the thrill under my very feet.  Then there was a pause, and I lifted my head to look for Enriquez.  He was nowhere to be seen!  With a terrible recollection of the fissure that had yawned between us, I sprang to the saddle again, and spurred the frightened beast toward that point.  But it was gone, too!  I rode backward and forward repeatedly along the line where I had seen it only a moment before.  The plain lay compact and uninterrupted, without a crack or fissure.  The dusty haze that had arisen had passed as mysteriously away; the clear outline of the valley returned; the great field was empty!

Presently I was aware of the sound of galloping hoofs.  I remembered then—­what I had at first forgotten—­that a few moments before we had crossed an arroyo, or dried bed of a stream, depressed below the level of the field.  How foolish that I had not remembered!  He had evidently sought that refuge; there were his returning hoofs.  I galloped toward it, but only to meet a frightened vaquero, who had taken that avenue of escape to the rancho.

“Did you see Don Enriquez?” I asked impatiently.

I saw that the man’s terror was extreme, and his eyes were staring in their sockets.  He hastily crossed himself:—­

“Ah, God, yes!”

“Where is he?” I demanded.

“Gone!”

“Where?”

He looked at me with staring, vacant eyes, and, pointing to the ground, said in Spanish:  “He has returned to the land of his fathers!”

We searched for him that day and the next, when the country was aroused and his neighbors joined in a quest that proved useless.  Neither he nor his innocent burden was ever seen again of men.  Whether he had been engulfed by mischance in some unsuspected yawning chasm in that brief moment, or had fulfilled his own prophecy by deliberately erasing himself for some purpose known only to himself, no one ever knew.  His country-people shook their heads and said “it was like a Saltillo.”  And the few among his retainers who knew him and loved him, whispered still more ominously:  “He will yet return to his land to confound the Americanos.”

Yet the widow of Enriquez did not marry Professor Dobbs.  But she too disappeared from California, and years afterward I was told that she was well known to the ingenuous Parisians as the usual wealthy widow “from South America.”