"But, at least, you will do one thing," he said, emphatically. "You have heard enough of the curse to show you why it is no place for human beings to live. Only half the curse is carried out. The tiles have been baptized by human blood--but not the altar. You will stay here with live people, and let the old ruin wait alone for the curse to be lifted."
"I will go back," she said, with sudden decision, dropping the serape from around her shoulders and beginning to braid her hair. "No, you need not swear like that, Rafael; God would shut His ears if He heard you. You have told me a fine story of fear, and some of it may be true, but our duty lies there. We may lift the curse; we can go back and try."
Her husband sprang to his feet and flung his chair crashing into the low window opening on a veranda. The shattered glass fell in a glittering heap, but the noise of it did not drown his oaths.
"It is no use at all to break the windows of our friends, Rafael," observed his wife; "and neither the saints nor Our Lady the Virgin will allow such curses as yours to be heard. There are dangers here for--for both of us, perhaps,--dangers more to be afraid of than the walls of the good padres. I ride back to-day."
"You think of it as all past, that curse?" he demanded, threateningly. "Well, you think so! Priests have gone mad there, though the Church keeps it quiet. Since the year Don Eduardo and Doña Maria bought it, what has happened? All their land is slipping away. To-day she is building an adobe on the old Mission ranch, to hold one hundred and sixty acres in case they lose all the rest of their thirty miles of ranches. Two of her sons have been killed in the streets--one by a woman. All that remains is slipping slowly through their fingers. It is like a handful of wheat: the closer they try to hold it, the less they have in their hands. All they try is of no use. When they first bought those old walls of the Mission at Pico's auction, they were masters of the land, but what of that?"
"If it is a curse, they earned it by tearing down the temple consecrated to God, that is all!"
"All? Miguel, my brother, blew down no walls; he did no harm to anything at all. He only bought an interest in the Mission lands, and claimed some living-rooms as his share, and he is struck like the others by the curse, and does not die in his bed either, but is trampled into the earth until no one can see him!"