he became conscious that the silence
which had fallen between them was shaken by a loud whir. He glanced
upward. Natalie was standing with her back to one of the band-wheels. It
had begun to revolve; in the moment it increased its speed; and he saw a
glittering web on its surface. With an exclamation of horror, he pulled
her toward him; but he was too late. The wheel, spinning now with the
velocity of midday, caught the whole silver cloud in its spokes, and
Natalie was swept suddenly upward. Her feet hit the low rafters, and she
was whirled round and round, screams of torture torn from her rather
than uttered, her body describing a circular right angle to the shaft,
the bones breaking as they struck the opposite one; then, in swift
finality, she was sucked between belt and wheel. Mikhailof managed to
get into the next room and reverse the lever. The machinery stopped as
abruptly as it had started; but Natalie was out of her agony.

Her lover flung himself over the cliffs, shattering bones and skull
on the stones at their base. They made her a coffin out of the copper
plates used for their ships, and laid her in the straggling unpopulous
cemetery on the knoll across the gulch beyond the chapel.

"When we go, we will take her," said Rotscheff to his distracted wife.

But when they went, a year or two after, in the hurry of departure they
forgot her until too late. They promised to return. But they never came,
and she sleeps there still, on the lonely knoll between the sunless
forest and the desolate ocean.

THE VENGEANCE OF PADRE ARROYO

I

Pilar, from her little window just above the high wall surrounding the
big adobe house set apart for the women neophytes of the Mission of
Santa Ines, watched, morning and evening, for Andreo, as he came and
went from the rancheria. The old women kept the girls busy, spinning,
weaving, sewing; but age nods and youth is crafty. The tall young Indian
who was renowned as the best huntsman of all the neophytes, and who
supplied Padre Arroyo's table with deer and quail, never failed to keep
his ardent eyes fixed upon the grating so long as it lay within the line
of his vision. One day he went to Padre Arroyo and told him that Pilar
was the prettiest girl behind the wall--the prettiest girl in all the
Californias--and that she should be his wife. But the kind stern old
padre shook his head.

"You are both too young. Wait another year, my son, and if thou art
still in the sam