Ahard gallop of eight miles carried Francesca to the forks where the path to and from Santa Gertrudis joined the main valley trail, and she had traveled no more than a hundred yards beyond before she was roused from renewed musings by the thud of hoofs. Turning in her saddle, she saw Sebastien coming along the valley trail at a gallop. Passing themozo, whose beast had lagged, the hacendado pulled his beast down to a trot, and as Tomas, answering a question, nodded backward toward the hills, vexation swept the girl’s face.
It cleared, however, as quickly, and while waiting for Sebastien she measured him with a narrow glance. The straight, lithe figure, easy carriage, dark, quiet face could stand inspection, and she paid unconscious tribute. “If I hadn’t gone to Europe I suppose—” A decided shake of the head completed while dismissing the thought. In the next breath she murmured, “Now for a fight.” Yet her expression, saluting him, displayed no apprehension.
“Yes, I was at Santa Gertrudis.” She quietly answered his question. “Two of our people shotone of the gringos as he was leaving our place, and the goodmamawould have it that it was our duty to cure him.”
“Ah! the good mother?” He raised his brows. “And she chose you for her doctor?”
“As you see.”
“Yes, I see. ‘No, Francesca, thou canst not go. It would not be right for a young girl—well, if you must—’ I hear it as though I had been there, and wonder that the señora, who was brought up in the letter of our conventions, should send her daughter to a gringo camp with only amozofor escort. But Don Luis? Is he also mad?”
“No, only wise.” She answered with irritating simplicity. “Take care that you do not put heavier strains on a slight kinship. Third, fifth, tenth, just what is the degree of our cousinship?”
“God knows!” He shrugged. “The slighter the better. ’Twill serve till replaced by a closer.”
“Which will be never.”
“Only the gods say ‘never.’” He quoted the proverb. “But returning to youramigos, the gringos—”
“Myamigos?”
“You have received and repaid their visits. But listen! It is not that I would set bounds for your freedom, but if you had stood, as I have, on a street corner in Ciudad, Mexico, and had heard the gringo tourists pass comments on ourwomen—Dios! I choke at the thought! If you but realized their coxcombry, conceit, the contempt in which they hold us—”
She had flushed slightly, but with a toss of her head she broke in: “It is not necessary. I have heard young Mexican men comment on both our own and American women. If the gringos can teach them anylessons—”
“Apes!” he burst angrily in. “Fools! The degenerate apes who put on the vices of civilization with its collars!”
“Perhaps. But, even so, it makes for the same point—there are gringos and gringos just as we have MexicansandMexicans.”
“And these, of course, are the other sort?”
“Exactly!” She robbed his sarcasm by her quiet. “If one judges, as one must, by their behavior. I am pleased to find you, for once, of my opinion.”
“Of your opinion?” He regarded her with sudden sternness. “That is, to be friends with these men who have forced themselves in on your lands? I had never expected to hear it fall from the lips of a Garcia. Now listen! What if your people did wound this man? Is he the first? Will he be the last?” His face darkening under a rush of blood, he continued: “I had thought this pair would soon ruin themselves as did the other fools before them. But since they are working on a surer plan—”
“What do you mean?” She searched his face.
“So anxious?” he laughed bitterly. “What is it to you?”
“Only that I would not have them murdered.”
“And would they be the first? Is there a foot of Mexican soil which has not been soaked with good Mexican blood that you should be so careful for a gringo?” Slanting through an opening in the trees overhead the sun shone on his face, transforming it into a red mask of hate. “As yet no one of them has secured himself in the Barranca de Guerrero! So long as a Rocha is left to do the duty that belongs to the Garcias no one of them ever will.”
But now he had touched another string, and, straightening in her saddle, she gave him look for look. “When the Garcias need the Rochas to settle their quarrels it will be time for you to interfere. I should not advise you to speak thus to my uncle.”
Nevertheless she flinched a little at his answer. “That is my intention—this very night.”
With that they rode on, in silence for a while, then speaking of other things. But when he left her in the upper courtyard an hour later she stood at her door, listening apprehensively to the jingle of his spurs along the gallery. When he took a chair beside Don Luis, who sat there smoking, she listened for a while. Then, flushing suddenly, she hastily went in.
If she had remained there was nothing to hear, for during many minutes the conversation ranaltogether on the herds as they came winding in from distant pastures to the corrals in the square. Night had reduced everything to a dark blur before Sebastien commented on a yellow twinkle high up on the Barranca wall.
“That will be the gringos’ light at Santa Gertrudis.” After a long pause, “It is now a month past since they came, and—they are still here.”
Don Luis flicked the ash from his cigar. “What hurry?”
“But this new business? The smelter you spoke of the other day.”
“Si, the smelter?”
Sebastien gave his own interpretation to the other’s slow tone. “Then there is something forward?”
“What need? The gringo at the station tells me they have no money. A single mistake and they are done.” After a sententious pause he added, “It is the part of youth to make mistakes.”
The dusk did not conceal the other’s impatience. “But why this tender care? Are they so different from the others? A word from thee and—”
“Yes, yes, a nod and it would have been done long ago. There speaks young blood—the hot blood that lost us Texas and Alta California. These lads are of good family, Sebastien, and there can be no disappearance without inquiry. Their death would be but one more thorn in the side of the rabid beast that requires small urgingto devour us. No, let them make their own end.”
“And Francesca? Is she to have the run of their camp?”
Don Luis’s deep laugh rumbled through the courtyard. “At last from a long cast we come to the quarry. Francesca? She is a wild filly, the despair of every staid tabby in the countryside. Long ago I discovered that the one way to manage her was to let her have her head. Nor will it be the part of wisdom for thee to interfere.”
“Neither would I try—yet. Commands are for husbands; lovers must wait. That which I propose she will never know. It is—” Answering the other’s interrogative look, he leaned over, whispering in rapid Spanish.
Don Luis emitted an amused chuckle. “Sebastien, thou art truly a devil. Had thy father possessed but the half of thy wit, some things had gone different in the last war. Yes, feet that are still spoiling good sod would now be rotten bones.” After a pause he went on: “It seems a scurvy trick, yet it depends on the men themselves. But—if they rise not at the bait?”
“If?” Sebastien repeated it with bitter scorn. “Was there ever a gringo that would not bite at such? They are kind as goats. I ask only that you go there with Francesca at the close of the week.”
“And thou?”
“I shall go there to-morrow.”
Living in the letter of his intention, Sebastien was up next morning and had covered ten miles of the trail before the sun rose over the Barranca wall. Early as it was, however, others were already abroad. The sudden increase in his family had obliged Seyd to make a journey out to the railroad for more provisions, and when Sebastien paused to breathe his beast halfway up the grade to the bench, a good glass would have shown him Light and Peace gingerly picking their way along the trail that had been built by Don Luis’s orders around the slide on the opposite wall.
As usual, Sebastien’s approach was announced by the ring of hoofs, but, imagining it to be some charcoal-burner, Billy, who was already at his bricks, did not look up till warned by Caliban’s stealthy hiss. In his surprise he forgot to reply to Sebastien’s greeting, and simply answered the other’s question.
“Don Roberto? He is not here?”
“No, gone out to the railroad. Won’t be back for three days.”
“Caramba!After I had climbed these heightsto see him!” Though his eyebrows and hands both testified to Sebastien’s disappointment, a sharper eye than Billy’s might have discerned the underlying satisfaction. Moreover, if he appeared merely inquisitively friendly during the hour he stayed to chat, not one minute was wasted. From the first question to his final comment on Billy’s work, “You gringos are certainly a wonderful people,” all was directed to one end.
“Yes, we usually get there,” Billy modestly admitted, and his next words paved a lovely road for Sebastien to come to his purpose. “The building would go faster if I hadn’t so many things to do. After laying bricks all day I have to turn in and cook, and, though it’s pretty tough, there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it. We tried both of the peons at the cooking and nearly died of the hash they served up.”
“Tut! tut!” Sebastien was there with ready sympathy. “This is too bad. Soon you will be completely worn out.” After a pause, during which he may be imagined as taking Billy’s mental temperature, he said: “Bueno!I have it! I shall send you a cook—one than whom there is no finer in all this country.”
If he had harbored any suspicions, Billy’s beaming smile now wiped them out. “That’s awfully good of you. Seyd will be ever so glad. When can we expect your cook?”
“To-morrow afternoon.” Scenting hospitalityin Billy’s glance toward the hut, Sebastien hastily added, “That is, if I reach home to-night—to do which I shall have to be going.” And refusing the offer of lunch which justified his premonition, he rode away, leaving Billy puffed up with pride.
“I rather think I turned that trick well,” he congratulated himself. “Seyd couldn’t have done it a bit better.” Occasional fat chuckles emitted during the afternoon testified to his increasing opinion of his own diplomacy. But his rising pride did not attain its meridian until, midway of the following afternoon, a pretty brown girl came driving a burro up the trail.
Having anticipated a man cook, it required five minutes of vehement Spanish, helped out by a wealth of gesticulation, to convince Billy that the girl was not an estray from a neighboring hamlet, and while her dark eyes, white teeth, and shapely brown arms were engaged in explanation they wrought other work. By the time Billy was finally able to understand the fact he was hardly in condition to pass upon it.
It is only right to state that he had little time for reflection, for from the very beginning the girl took the direction of affairs into her own hands. Driving her burro over to the stable she unpacked a stonemetate, or grinding-stone, a pestle, and a quantity of soaked corn. She turned the beast out to graze, then dropped at once on her knees and began grinding paste forthe supper tortillas, or cakes. When, toward evening, Billy dropped in for a drink he found her mantle spread on his bed and certain articles of feminine wear depending from the nails which had hitherto been sacred to his own clothing.
Blushing furiously, he went out—without the drink. But, though his colors would have done credit to a girl, they were not to be weighed in the same balance with the green peppers stuffed with minced beef that she served at supper with the tortillas. While eating with an appetite born of a protracted canned diet it is to be feared that he fed just as ravenously on the atmosphere shed by her luxurious presence. When, after supper, he sat in the doorway and watched the blood-reds of the sunset flow through the valley he might, with his fiery stubble, have passed for some ancient Celt at the mouth of his cave. Not until he caught a second glimpse of the mantle while stealing a look at the girl washing up dishes did he return to his usual bashful self. Slipping quietly inside, he gathered up the blankets off Seyd’s bed and carried them out to make his own couch under a tree.
This procedure on his part the girl watched with a certain astonishment which she vented on Caliban while giving him his breakfast next day. “I had thought differently of the gringos. Be they all like this one—”
“Give time, give time!” the hunchback advised. “Big fish are ever slow at the hook, butwhen they once rise—” The tortilla he used for illustration vanished at one gulp. “Wait till thou seest Don Roberto. There’s a man! Of his own strength he threw a burro off the trail into the Barranca and so turned the train that would otherwise have driven him and the ‘Red Head’ into the cañon. ’Tis so. The history of it was written by Don Sebastien’s whip on the shoulders of Mattias and Carlos. And what of the magic that turned my bullet fired at twenty yards, then found me and Calixto in black jungle and shot us down from the high cliff? Si, chief of the other is he, so waste not thy freshness.”
“Bah! am I a fool?” She elevated her nose.
This conversation undoubtedly explains the staidness of her demeanor that day. Not that it was necessary to keep Billy at his distance. Leaving his painful modesty out of the question, in his ignorance of the Mexican peon folk he placed her in his imagination on the same plane as a white girl, and as the color of a skin cuts no figure in the calculations of the little god, providing that it be fitted smoothly over a pretty body, she found favor in his sight. At work both the next and the following days he kept always an eye open for the flash of her white garments in the doorway. When, with the earthen jar on her head, she went to draw water from the spring his glance followed the swaying rhythms of her figure. If not actually in love by the time Don Luis and Francesca put in their appearance nextmorning, Billy was at least living a tropical idyl, one not a whit less beautiful because its object departed far from his ideal in all but her physical perfection.
The visit had been skilfully timed to miss lunch, and Billy was already back at his work. Crossing the bench, Don Luis’s eye went instantly to the girl who had been drawn to the door by the sound of hoofbeats. But his expression gave no hint of his grim amusement. The keenest ear would have found it difficult to detect sarcasm in his remark.
“I see, señor, that you have added to your family.”
Also it need not be said that Francesca’s woman’s eye had summed at a glance the smooth oval face, rounded arms, shapely figure; yet their undeniable comeliness brought no pleasure to her expression. If Billy had overlooked Don Luis’s sarcasm it was impossible to miss her scorn.
“A capable housekeeper—if one may judge from her looks—and quite at home. You are to be congratulated, Mr. Thornton.”
Looking up in quick surprise, Billy noticed the absence of the sympathy that she had shown him during her last visit. Feeling the cold anger behind, and sadly puzzled, he was not sorry when, after a few minutes of strained talk, Don Luis asked to be shown the vein. Judging by his backward glance from the mouth of the tunnel, it would appear that he had coined the requestto pave the way for that which happened the instant they disappeared. For, walking her beast over to the house, Francesca spoke to the girl.
“Thy name?”
“Carmelita, señorita.”
“Of what village?”
“Chilpancin—I am the daughter to Candelario, the maker of hair ropes.”
Though she answered with the glib obsequiousness of her class, the appraising glance which swept Francesca from head to heel carried a mute challenge and conveyed her full knowledge that a battle was pitched such as women fight all the world over. Neither could Francesca’s patrician feeling smother equal recognition. It was revealed in her next question.
“How long hast thou been in this employment?”
The girl paused. Then, whether it was due to Sebastien’s tutoring or her own malice, she gave answer. “Eight days, señorita.”
“Who hired thee?”
Downcast lashes hid the sudden sparkle of cunning. “Don Roberto.” But they lifted in time for her to catch the sudden hardening of Francesca’s face.
“Then see that thou renderest good service, for these be friends of ours.”
As beforesaid, neither the cold patronage of the one nor the sullen obsequiousness of the othercould hide the issue from either. Francesca’s calm, as she turned her beast, did not deceive. Malicious understanding flashed out as the girl called after, “Si, he shall have the best of service.”
Returning to the smelter, Francesca began to talk to Caliban, yet while questioning him concerning his new employment she could not be unconscious of Carmelita lolling in the doorway, hands on shapely hips, an attitude gracefully indolent and powerfully suggestive of possession. Perhaps it was her acute consciousness of it which injected an extra chill a few minutes later into her refusal of Billy’s invitation to dismount and rest. His suggestion that Seyd was likely to arrive any moment drew a still more decided shake of the head. Moreover meeting Seyd as they rode downgrade she passed with the slightest nods, nor even looked back to see if her uncle were following.
Doubtless because he felt that he could well afford it, Don Luis did stop, and before riding on he once more threatened Calixto, the rice-huller, who was with Seyd. “This fellow—he still gives good service?” His courtesy, however, did not remove the chill of Francesca’s snub. Hurt and wondering, Seyd passed on up to the bench—to have his eyes opened the instant that he saw the girl in the doorway. When, after dismounting, he walked across to where Billy was at work on the foundation, her big dark eyes took him infrom tip to toe in a flashing embrace. She studied him while he stood there talking.
“What isshedoing here?”
He cut off Billy’s welcome with the sharp question, and while listening to explanations his gray eyes drew into points of black. In the middle of it he burst out, “You don’t mean to say that you fell for it as easily as that?”
“Fell for what?”
Billy’s round eyes merely added to his irritation. “You chump! didn’t you see the trap?”
“The trap?”
“Yes, trap!T-r-a-p,trap! Got it into your fat head? Don’t you see that you have catalogued us with the San Nicolas people as a pair of blackguards forever? Oh, you fat head!”
That was not all. While he stormed on, saying things that he would willingly have taken back a minute later, every bit of its usual mercurial humor drained out of Billy’s face. Over Seyd’s shoulder he could see the girl in the doorway. A certain dark expectancy in her glance told that she knew herself to be the bone of contention. As a doe might watch the conflict of two bucks in the forest, she looked on, and, meeting Billy’s eye, her glance touched off his anger.
“Stop that!” he suddenly yelled. “Stop it or I’ll hand you one! I will, for sure! What do I care for your San Nicolas people? I didn’t come down here to do a social stunt, and why should the opinions of a lot of greasers cut any ice?Let ’em go hang. The girl looks all right to me.”
“All right! You innocent!” Shaking with anger, Seyd turned and spoke to Caliban, who was mixing mortar close by. “As I thought! If half he says is true her reputation would hang a cat.”
But Billy’s jaw only set the harder. While he might easily have been persuaded out of his idyl, he was not to be driven. Out of pure obstinacy he growled: “What of it? I reckon her morals won’t spoil the food. She’s proved she can cook, and that is all I want. She’s going to stay.”
“She’s not.”
“She is.”
For a pause they eyed each other. Though their friendship had survived, nay, had been cemented by many a quarrel, never before had a disagreement gone such lengths.
“Look here, Billy.” Seyd spoke more mildly. “This won’t do. She’s got to go.”
“Not till you’ve shown me—not now,” he hastily added, as Seyd began to strip. “I’d hate to hit a cripple, and—”
“Come on.”
But, ducking a swing, Billy gave ground, genuine concern on his face. “No, no, old man! You are still weak. Let it go for another week. That left fin of yours—”
Landing at that precise moment on his ear,however, the member in question proved its convalescence and ended the argument by toppling him sideways. Up in a second, he closed, and for the next ten minutes they went at it, clinching and breaking, jabbing and hooking, with an energy and science that would have filled the respective souls of a moralist and a prize-fighter with disgust and delight. Avoiding both of these extreme viewpoints, the account may very well be given in the terms used by Caliban in describing the affair next day to one of hiscompañeros, a charcoal-burner.
“Like mad bulls they go at it, grappling and tearing, each striking the other so that the thud of their blows raise the echoes. It is in the very beginning that the Red Cabeza fells Don Roberto, but instead of splitting his head with the spade that stands close by—was ever such folly!—he helps him up from the ground. I then think it the finish, but no, they go at it again, hailing blows in the face hard as the kick of a mule, and so it continues for a time with only pauses to catch their breath. I am beginning to wonder will it ever come to an end when—crack! sharp as the snap of thy whip and so swift that I do not see the blow, it comes. The Red Cabeza lies there quietly on the ground. Believe it or not, Pedro, he is knocked senseless by a blow of the hand.”
The immediate consequences may also be left to Caliban. “Their quarrel, as I have said, isover Carmelita, the dove of Chilpancin, and I now expect to see Don Roberto take her for his own. That she is of the same mind is proven when she comes running with her knife for him to finish up the Red Cabeza. But again, no! who shall understand these gringos?—he gives her the sharpest of looks.
“‘Vamos!’ He shouts it with such anger that she stumbles and falls, running back to the house. Also she makes such a quick packing that she is driving her burro out to the trail before the Red Cabeza comes to his senses.”
Billy’s eyes, indeed, opened on the departing flash of her garments. “You didn’t lose much time,” he commented, with a quizzical glance upward. “Well, to the victor the spoils—or the rejection thereof. That was a peach of a punch—the bum left, too, wasn’t it?” The old merry look flashing out again from the blood and bruises, he asked: “How’ll you trade? In exchange for one admission from you I’m willing to grant you’re right.”
“Shoot!” Seyd grinned.
“Would you have been as careful of the proprieties if the señorita were out of the case?”
Smiling, Seyd raised doubtful shoulders. “Quien sabe, señor?”
“Ahem!” Billy coughed. “Now you justify the continuance of my wretched existence. All the same, while it may be correct in theory your darned morality is mighty uncomfortable practice.That girl could cook. The next time you fall in love please—”
”Now, what are you talking about?”
“What have I done?”
Before his look of hopeless surprise Seyd’s anger faded. “I beg your pardon. Of course you didn’t know, but—I’m already married.”
“You?”
“Me.” With grim sarcasm he added, “And you know that it is against the law of both God and man for a married man to fall in love.”
Feeling dimly that something was expected of him, but debarred from congratulations by the other’s irony, Billy floundered, bringing several attempts at speech to a lame conclusion. “When—when did it—happen?”
“Happen? That’s it.” Seyd jumped at the word. “Ithappenedin New Mexico three years ago when I was down there ‘experting’ the Calumet group. She was the daughter of a mine foreman, pretty and neat as a grouse in the fall, but of the hopelessly common type. I don’t have to describe her. You’ve seen them, in pairs, swinging their skirts along the boardwalks of any small town, their eyes on every man and a burst of giggles always on tap. I should never have paid her any serious attention if several of her admirers hadn’t done me the honor of getting jealous. Until one big lout warned me to leave her alone under penalty of broken bones it was never more than a mild flirtation, but after thatI went deeper—so deep that it was soon impossible for me to withdraw. At least, I thought it was then, though I have since come to regard my marriage with her almost as a crime. You see, I thought it would break her heart, but in less than a week after the marriage I discovered that she was nothing but a bundle of small vanities bound up in a pretty skin, that she hadn’t a thought above the money and position she expected to gain through me. And how she changed! As a girl she was soft, fluffy, and innocent as a kitten, but one by one her small vanities and frivolities developed into appetites and passions, and I awoke to the fact that she was altogether animal—a beautiful animal, prettier than ever in her young wifehood, but without the slightest capacity for intellectual or spiritual development.
“If that had been all—one can love a handsome horse or a dog, and I have seen women of as low a type to be lifted out of themselves by the strength of their love. But she was absolutely selfish—loved only herself. What made it even more unbearable, she was conceited with the supreme conceit of absolute ignorance that scorns all that is unknown to itself. She would try to impose her own inch-and-a-half notions of things upon me, and she did not hesitate to pit the scraps of knowledge she had picked up around the mines against my professional training. She was bound to remold me on herown crude model. Actual wickedness would have been easier to bear, and I can assure you that the third month of our married life found me absolutely miserable. Fortunately, I received a commission just then to ‘expert’ a group of Mexican mines, and, as she preferred civilization as it goes in New Mexico to the hardships of a trip through the Sonora desert, I left her behind. Later I came south on a prospecting trip through the Sierra Madres, and have never seen her since.”
All through he had spoken with the furious vehemence of a man easing a load off his mind. Thrusting a letter into Billy’s hand, he finished, walking away: “Read that—I got it at the station yesterday. It reveals more than I could tell you in the next twenty-four hours.”
And it surely did. The stiff round hand, as much as the bald statement of want and desires, revealed a nature blind to all but its own ends. Every phrase was a cry or complaint. He had no business to go off and leave her alone! All her friends agreed that it was a “shame and a disgrace.” But he needn’t think that she would stand such treatment forever! He had better come home, and that at once! So far she hadn’t tried to “better herself.” But it wasn’t for lack of the chance! There was a gentleman—no fresh dude or college guy, but a rich mining man, eminently respectable, who had shown a decided interest! He(Seyd) had better look out. Thus and so did the awkward hand run over many pages, and, while Billy’s eye followed, his expression gradually settled in complete disgust.
“Hopelessly common! You poor chap,” he muttered, looking after Seyd, who was now helping Caliban to arrange the goods as he carried them from the mules into the adobe. “To think that you have had this on your mind all this time!” After a moment’s reflection he added, “But—married or unmarried, you are still in love.”
Unaware of this frank opinion, Seyd went on arranging the stores. While working, the eager vehemence of his manner settled into heavy brooding, and it was not for some time that a cheerful flash indicated his arrival at some conclusion.
“I’ve got it!” he murmured. And turning so suddenly that Caliban dropped the package he was carrying in, he asked, “Hast thou any acquaintance at San Nicolas?”
Reassured that the strange gringo madness was not to be vented on him, the hunchback nodded. “One of the kitchen women is daughter to my sister.”
He nodded again in answer to a second question as to whether his niece could convey certain information to the señorita Francesca’s ear?
“Si, there is always gossip moving among thewomen. It could be passed through Rosa, her maid.”
For a man who had just taken offense at the very suggestion that he was in love Seyd’s face expressed a surprising amount of satisfaction. A little sheepishly he now went on: “It must be that thou wouldst care to see thy relative? To-morrow is Sunday, and, as thy service has been good, it shall be a holiday, and thou shalt have a mule to ride to San Nicolas.”
To tell the truth, the hunchback did not seem overjoyed at the prospect, at least not until Seyd tossed a silver peso on the table. “This is to buy thee meat and drink by the way, and if it be that thy niece can whisper—”
His beady eyes glittering with comprehension, the hunchback broke in, “That the dove flew at thy coming. She shall know it, señor—also from whose hand she came hither.”
The quickness with which the fellow leaped to his meaning was rather disconcerting, and Seyd blushed. But, commanding his guilty colors, he brazened it out. “But see! She is not to know that it proceeds from me.”
“Si, señor.” The man’s quick grin indicated an unearthly comprehension. “It will be a bit of gossip from the mouth of a muleteer.”
It was at this juncture that Billy, who had just returned to work after washing the blood from his face, heard a cheerful whistling inside. When, an hour later, he went in to help withsupper he found Seyd his usual cheerful self. Next morning his spirits were still higher, but did not attain their meridian until Caliban departed for San Nicolas, bravely attired in a gaudy suit which he had dug from some obscure corner of the stable. Toward evening, however, a touch of anxiety dampened his mood. It might almost have been regarded as premonitory of the news Caliban delivered in the dusk outside.
“The señorita Francesca has gone to visit her mother’s people at Cuernavaca. It is not known when she will return.”
“Very well; thou hast done thy share,” Seyd answered.
His quiet tone, however, did not deceive the hunchback. “Did I not say these gringos were a mad people?” he demanded of Calixto, showing two pesos by the light of the stable lantern. “He pays me a peso to bring him good news, and gives me two when I return with bad—and to think that I was minded to feed him lies. Truly, there is no knowing when to have them! ’Tis the truth serves best with fools and gringos.”
“
Done—at last!”
Sprawled on the flat of his back, with his curly head propped on his hands and his lime-eaten boots spread at a comfortable angle, Billy gazed upon their completed labor. The “well”—into which the liquid copper matte would presently be flowing—crucible, slag spout, blast pipes, or tuyeres, and canvas blowers, even the inclined way that led up to the platform over the loading trap, all were finished, and from the solid bed to the tip top of the brick chimney shaft Billy’s vision embraced it all. Including the tons of charcoal that Caliban had burned and brought in from the woods, and the piles of ore which Seyd and Calixto had broken into smelting size with “spalling” hammers, all stood ready for the match that Seyd scratched while echoing Billy’s observation.
“Done—at last!”
When the shavings and wood were fairly started under the mixed charge of charcoal and ore Seyd also lay down to watch the first smoke. Under the vigorous blast it quickly appeared—a thin blue spiral which waxed in volume andblackness. In thirty minutes it laid a sooty finger halfway across the Barranca above the hills, a sinister portent to the rancheros and peons, one that found a dark reflection in Don Luis’s frown as he looked out from the upper patio of San Nicolas, far away.
Unconscious, however, of alien observation, Seyd watched the fluctuations of the black smoke with lazy enjoyment. He permitted his fancy to float with the waving pennon out over the valley down the river, where it set him aboard a log raft with his first shipment of copper matte and set him drifting down to the coast, where he could either sell to the United Metals Company or ship by sea to California smelters. There was nothing impractical about his musings. Independent of the gold values it carried, one smelting would transmute their thirty-dollar ore into copper matte worth a hundred and twenty dollars a ton. At a liberal estimate the extra twenty would pay expenses, and with a profit of a hundred dollars on an output of sixty or seventy a week during the two months before the rains, there was a small fortune in it. Next year they could both import their labor and put in a regular plant. Thereafter they would be in a position to deliver “blister” copper instead of matte to the market. Why, flaming under the breath of this first success, fancy leaped out to all sorts of possibilities, raised wharves, bunkers, storehouses in the jungle below, set a fleet offlat-bottomed sternwheelers on the river. And never was there such a river! He was traveling its long reaches in thought when fancy suddenly steered his argosy of dreams into the San Nicolas landing.
The next second he was sitting again in the shaded gallery of the upper patio, its flowers and bird song, sunshine and fountain splash in his eyes and ears. As on the other day, he watched Francesca bending over her godchild, and while he was contrasting her air of tender solicitude with the cold hauteur of her face a month ago he thought she looked up with a smile. He was answering it when the smiling eyes were wiped out by the intrusion of some unpleasant thought.
“You fool!” he chided himself. Then, sitting suddenly up, he smote Billy on the thigh with force that drew a yell of anguish. “It’s a mint, boy! A blooming mint! I wouldn’t trade my share for the best gold mine in Tonopah. Next year we’ll put in a big plant—”
“Reverberatories with water jackets!” Billy enthusiastically took up the tale.
“Sure, and we’ll build down on the flat by the river and deliver the ore by—”
“Gravity. Aerial cable—self-dumping buckets—”
“We’ll refine our own matte—”
“Market our own copper and gold.” His blue eyes shining, Billy ran on: “In five years we’ll be rich, then for a rest and a trip. New York,London, Paris, with Nice and Monte Carlo thrown in. Europe in a touring-car, by golly! Egypt and the Pyramids! A steam yacht and a trip around the world! Hurray for us!”
“In the mean time”—Seyd led him gently back to earth—“remember, please, that this is your trick. Go and stoke up, or there’ll be no Paris in yours.”
And surely their days of ease lay a long way off. Long and hard as they had labored, the completion of the smelter merely marked the beginning of still more strenuous tasks. Upon them and the two peons would rest the entire weight of running the smelter at its full capacity. Besides the breaking of the ore, tapping of the slag, continuous firing, they would have to burn their own charcoal after the first supply ran out. Though they had spread the strain by dividing day and night into shifts, it would have been work enough for four times their number.
Seyd’s first shift ended at twelve that night, but, though he sent Caliban off to his sleep, he himself sat up to wait for the first matte, which was due to come trickling from the spouts at any moment. Reclining his head, propped on his hand, he watched Billy and Calixto, both now of one color, each at his task, one working the blowers while the other dumped fresh ore and charcoal into the loading trap. At such times the blast would send a burst of flame high over the chimney top, lighting the house, stables,green ore mounds, showing ghostly trees beyond as under a calcium glare. Though the roar of the blast fell like a lullaby on his tired ears, excitement kept him awake till the first matte flowed in a red stream out of the tap.
“She’ll go a hundred and fifty to the ton!” Billy exclaimed, after a careful examination of a cooled sample. Then, waving his hand at the huge ore mounds, he groaned: “What a shame that we hadn’t enough labor and capital. We could have run it all through before the rains.”
“Pig! Hog!” Seyd found a vent for his own surplus feelings by punching Billy in the chest. “Think how much worse off we should have been if we had had to mine it. Go down on your American knee bones and thank your lucky stars for the English Johnnies.”
Still smiling, he lay again to watch the glowing matte as Billy ladled it out of the well. It was the culmination of their long labor, but he was too tired even to think, and, giving himself up to a dim luxurious feeling, he insensibly passed into sleep.
“Wake up, Bob, and go to bed. You still have four hours.”
Only half aroused, he arose and stumbled across to the adobe, threw himself down on the bunk without waiting to remove even his boots, and fell into slumber at once so dead and dreamless that it seemed as if his head had no more thantouched the pillow before Billy’s voice again rang in his ear.
“Seven o’clock, Bob. I gave you an extra hour.”
“Oh, quit your joshing.” He murmured it, rolling over, and was again almost asleep when a sudden report, louder than thunder, but with a peculiar vibrant note, brought him swiftly to his feet. A second later the door banged to and stuck, but not before they had caught a glimpse of a huge cloud plume, densely yellow, shooting upward above the smelter.
During the moment required to wrench the door from its frame the adobe rocked under the concussion and scattered mud bricks, and there was a rain of stores from the shelves to the floor. It did not require Caliban’s frightened yell on the outside, “Explosion! Una explosion, señores!” to tell them what had happened. The first glance, as they rushed out over the broken door, merely filled in the details of the vivid mental picture each had formed for himself. Hundreds of feet in mid air, the explosion cloud floated like a yellow balloon above the stump of a stack, the half-fused bricks of which were scattered over the bench. A cavity had been torn downward through the solid brick bed to the clay beneath, and, looking down into it, Seyd read the sign.
“Dynamite! What was the last thing you did?”
“Stoked up and sent Calixto to call Caliban while I came for you. Luckily for him that I did.”
The charcoal piles were also leveled and spread over half an acre, and, walking to and fro, Seyd began to pick up and break the larger pieces. And it was only a few minutes before he called out: “Look here! Stick dynamite, broken in two and gummed over with charcoal dust—a bushel of it right here.”
“Do you suppose—” Billy glanced toward the peons, who stood close by.
Seyd shook his head. “No, they had nothing to gain by it, and everything to lose. It was the easiest thing in the world for anybody to steal into the woods at night and slip a ton of this into the charcoal piles.”
“Man, why didn’t we think of it?” Billy groaned.
In moments of stress no two natures will express themselves in quite the same way. As they stood looking gloomily over the wreck big tears slowly forced themselves out of Billy’s inflamed eyes and washed white runnels down the soot. Heartbroken, he looked up in sudden fright as Seyd burst out laughing.
“Bob! Bob!” he pleaded. “Have you gone crazy? Get a grip on yourself, there’s a good fellow!”
But his pathetic anxiety merely caused Seyd to laugh the more. It was not that he was hysterical. Somehow the thought of the painand travail, trouble, anxiety, and discomforts they had endured during the past three months touched his sense of humor.
“We have to allow that they made a pretty clean job,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Let’s be thankful that you were out of the way.”
“Where are you going?” Billy called out, as he began to walk away.
“To finish my sleep and catch up a few hours on all that I have lost in the last three months. Take a nap yourself.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
He undoubtedly thought so, yet when Seyd came out again, having slept the clock round, it was to find Billy curled up and snoring hard under the shade of the palm mat that Caliban had stretched between him and the sun. “Quit your fooling,” he broke in severely on Seyd’s chaffing. “Don’t you know that we are down to our last dollar?”
“Thirty-three dollars and sixty cents Mex,” Seyd gravely corrected. Kicking a chunk of cooled matte, he added: “But we now have this. It ought to stake us for a new start.”
Billy, however, was not to be so easily separated from his grief. “Where are you going to raise capital,” he demanded, “with every spare dollar in California locked up in the Nevada gold fields? If this had happened a year ago, before the Tonopah rush, we might have done it. But now?” He shook a doleful head.
“Well—New York?”
“Worse and more of it. The New Yorkers want all the bacon for killing the pig. Might as well give them the mine at once. No, Bob, it’s all off. We’re done—cooked a lovely brown in our own grease. Whydidn’twe guard those piles! Who do you suppose did it? Don Luis?”
Seyd shrugged. “Quien sabe?Doesn’t look like his style. Of one thing, however, we can be certain. Your common peon doesn’t habitually walk around with dynamite in his jeans. If I was going to lay any money, I’d place it on your friend Sebastien. But we haven’t any time to fool on detective work. The question is—what’s to be done?”
It was no light problem. As Billy had said, every dollar of Western mining capital was invested in Nevada, and Mexican projects, however good, would have to wait till the new gold fields were completely exploited. A canvass of moneyed friends yielded no results, for, while the wreck lay there under their eyes to emphasize the possibility of similar future troubles, they could not but feel it to be a hazardous venture for any person of limited means. Night brought no conclusion. But, having slept on it again, they arose and began once more, unconscious of the fact that while they lay in the heavy shade of a wild fig tree, proposing, debating, rejecting various plans, the solution was fast approaching upon its own legs.
Obviously, neither of them recognized the solution in the person of Don Luis when, about the middle of the forenoon, his horse lifted him up over the edge of the grade. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether smiling fortune was ever met with a blacker scowl than Billy’s. Growling, “He’s come up for a huge gloat,” he would undoubtedly have returned some insult to the old man’s greeting but for Seyd’s stealthy kick on the shins.
Prepared as he was by the reports that charcoal-burners had brought to San Nicolas, Don Luis’s face expressed his utter astonishment at the extent of the ruin. “We but heard of it last night,” he told them. “It was, I suppose, accidental? I understand that these furnaces—dynamite?Señor?” He glanced with an interrogative frown at the peons asleep in the shade of the adobe. “It was not they?”
Reassured on that point, he nodded in confirmation of Seyd’s statement that it would be foolish to hunt for the culprit. “As well try to single out a flea on a peon’s dog. I warned you, señor, to expect an enemy in every stone of the Barranca. It would have been well had you listened. But”—his eyes, hands, and shoulders expressed his acceptance of fate—“it is done. And now?”
“We shall rebuild—as soon as we can raise the money.”
Turning to survey the destruction, Don Luishid a sudden gleam that was evenly compounded of admiration and irritation. When he spoke again, shrewd calculation peered from his half-closed eyes. “This time you will build a larger—”
“—Plant?” Seyd supplied the word. “No.”
“But I am told, señor, that the larger the plant the greater the profits.”
Seyd raised comical brows. “Fifty thousand dollars, señor—gold?”
“A small sum to your rich American capitalists.”
“But we are not capitalists. No, we shall have to get along with a small furnace.”
The calculation deepened in the old man’s brown eyes. After a pause, to their utter astonishment, it took form in words. “But if you could raise the money?”
“What’s the use of talking; we can’t.”
“If I were to lend it to you?”
“You!” It was Billy who expressed their wonder. Seyd added, after a pause, “But we have no security to offer—that is, nothing but the mine.”
“And if we ran away?” Billy suggested, grinning. “Took your money and never came back?”
For the first time in their acquaintance a touch of humor lightened the heavy bronzed face. “There are some in this valley, señor, who might not count it too high a price. But as you say”—he bowed to Seyd—“the mine is security enough.Now that you have shown how, I might even work it myself. To put in a complete—”
“—Plant.” Billy supplied the strange word.
“How long?”
“Between six and nine months. We should then require a little time to smelt some ore and realize. We could not—”
“Si, si!” In his impatience Don Luis relapsed into Spanish. “Si, one would not expect immediate repayment. Perhaps five thousand pesos at the end of a year—”
“Oh, we could do better than that. Ten thousand of a first payment, fifteen for the second, the remainder at a third with interest—”
“Interest? I had not thought of that.” But he yielded to their insistence. “Very well, if you will have it! Shall we say five per-cent.?Bueno!You will, of course, have to make a trip to the United States to buy your material. If you will call at San Nicolas on your way the administrador will have letters prepared to my bankers in Ciudad, Mexico.”
With a shrug that expressed relief at the conclusion he changed the subject. Riding forward to obtain a closer view of the furnace, he again clucked his surprise at the complete destruction, wagged a grave head over the half bushel of dynamite that the peons had picked out of the charcoal, curiously examined a piece of copper matte, lifting heavy brows over the statement of its values, then rode quietly away, leavingSeyd and Billy to recover as best they could from this fortunate stroke.
“Am I dreaming?” Billy’s exclamation defined their mental condition. “Hit me, Bob. I want to make sure that I’m awake.”
Convinced, he gasped with his first breath: “Fifty thousand dollars! By golly! Why, we can put in a complete outfit.”
“Reverberatories with water jackets.” Seyd took up the tale again. “We’ll build down in the valley.”
“Aerial cable—”
“—With iron self-dumping buckets—”
“—A flat-bottomed sternwheeler to—”
“—Take our copper down to the coast.”
Blinded by the sudden light that had flashed out of their black despair they stood for some time looking out over the Barranca with shining eyes which saw a small mining town rising out of the jungle’s tangles. It was fully ten minutes before Seyd came back to earth.
“I wonder what is behind all this? Seems rather funny that the old chap should come to our help?”
“Not knowing, can’t say and don’t care a darn! So far as I am concerned, at fifty thousand a throw he can be just as inconsistent as he jolly well likes.”
“Nevertheless,” Seyd mused, “I’d give three cents to know.”
Meanwhile, Don Luis pursued his quiet way, now at a heavy canter, again on a stately trot, through the jungle out to the first village beyond the forks of the trail. As he passed the littlefondaSebastien Rocha rode out from a group of rancheros who stood drinking at the rough bar.
“They told me of the passing,” he said, nodding backward. “And I waited. What news? Did the gringos go up with their furnace? No? Still they will now have their bellies full of Guerrero?”
But his face dropped at Don Luis’s answer. “No, they are to build again.”
“But I thought—was it not the agent at the station who said they had no money?”
“Neither had they.” It was always difficult to read the massive face, but now it expressed just a shade of malicious amusement. “I have lent them fifty thousand pesos.”
“Thou!” For once the man’s usual cynical calm was completely disrupted. In his vast astonishment he whispered it: “Thou? Fifty thousand pesos?”
“Yo.” Smiling slightly, he went on: “Now listen, Sebastien. Not to mention thy little attempt on their virtue, this is the third on their lives, and all badly bungled. So do not wonder that I thought it time to take them into my own hand. Now that they are there, let there be no mistake—the meddling finger is likely to be badly pinched. From this time—they aremine.”
“But—why give them money?”
“To forestall others.” Had he been there to hear, the following words would fully have answered Seyd’s question. “The elder of these lads is no common man. By hook or by crook he would have raised a company—if he had to rope and tie down his men on the run. Then, instead of these two, we should have a dozen gringos, with Porfirio and his rurales to back up their charter. But do not fear.”
From the cleared fields through which they were riding it was possible to see Santa Gertrudis, and, turning in his saddle, he extended his quirt toward its green scar.
“Do not fear.”
It was in the middle of the rainy season. Stepping out of his office, where he had just added a few drops of Scotch to the water he was absorbing at every pore, the station agent came face to face with the engineer of the down train.
“Nine hours late?” The engineer gruffly repeated the other’s comment. “We are lucky to be here at all. Besides being sopping wet, the wood we’re burning is that dosey it’d make a fireproof curtain for hell. This kind of railroading don’t suit my book, and I’m telling you that if they don’t serve us out something pretty soon that smells like wood I know one fat engineer that will be missing on this line.” Jerking his thumb at the lone passenger who had descended at the station, he added: “But for that chap we’d never have got through. When the track went out from under us at La Puente he pitched in and showed us no end of wrinkles. If you’ve got anything inside just give him a nip for me.”
“Hullo, Mr. Seyd!” Coming face to face with the passenger after the train had gone on, the agent thrust out his hand. “What a pity youweren’t on the other train. She was twenty hours late—in fact, only pulled out a couple of hours ago. Miss Francesca was aboard, and she just left.”
“Not alone?”
The agent laughed. “Sure! She don’t care. Three weeks ago she came galloping in through one of the heaviest rains and took the up train.”
“So she has been home since I left?”
“Let me see—that’s nigh on three months, isn’t it? Sure, she came home just after you left.”
With this bit of information lingering in the forefront of his mind Seyd, a little later, rode out from the station. Not that it engrossed, by any means, the whole of his thought. Even had he been free, the hard work and bitter disappointment of the first venture, and the equally hard thought and careful planning for the second during his long absence in the States, would have been sufficient to keep her in the background. If he had never happened to see Francesca again she would probably have lingered as an unusually pretty face in the gallery of his mind. While it was only natural that he should wonder if the news that he sent in by Caliban had ever reached her ear, it was merely a passing thought. His mind soon turned again to his plans. Up to the moment that, four hours later, he came slipping and sliding downhill upon her she was altogether out of his thought.
For that very reason his fresh senses leaped to take the picture she made standing in the gray sheeting rain beside her fallen horse, and through its very difference from either the tan riding habit or virginal batiste of his memory her loose waterproof with its capote hood helped to stamp this figure upon his brain. Before she said a word he had gone back to the feelings of four months ago.
The pelting rain had washed all but a few clay streaks off her coat. Touching them, she explained: “The poor beast fell under me. I fear it has broken a leg.”
While speaking she offered her hand; and if that had not been sufficient, her friendly smile more than answered his speculation. Caliban’s niece had certainly done her duty! Indeed, while he was stooping over the fallen animal a quick glance upward would have given him a look evenly compounded of mischief and remorse. It gave place to sudden sorrow when he spoke.
“It is broken, all right. There is only one thing to be done. If you will lead my horse around the shoulder of the hill I will put the poor thing out of its pain.”
Her life had been cast too much in the open for her to be ignorant of the needs of the case. Nevertheless, he saw that her eyes were brimming as she led his horse away; and, remembering their black fire on the day that she had ordered the charcoal-burners flogged, he wondered. Itwould have been even harder to reconcile the two impressions had he seen the tears rolling down her cheeks when the muffled report of his pistol followed her around the hill. But she had wiped them away before he rejoined her. If the sensitive red mouth trembled, her voice was under control.
“No, I had not waited long,” she answered his question. “You see, the poor creature lost a shoe earlier in the day, and I had to ride back to have it replaced. It would have been better had I stayed there.”
For the moment he was puzzled. An hour ago he had ridden past the last habitation, a flimsy hut already overcrowded with the peon, his wife, their children, chickens, and pigs. All around them stretched wide wastes of volcanic rock and scrub. They were, as he knew, on the hacienda San Angel, but the buildings lay five leagues to the north. With hard riding he had expected to make the inn at the foot of the Barranca wall that night. She might do it by taking his horse. But if anything went wrong? She would be alone—all night—in the rain! He felt easier when she refused the offer of his beast.
“And leave you to walk? No, sir.”
A second offer to walk by her side not only ran counter to the prejudice of a race of riders, but also aroused her sympathies. “I could never think of it!” After a moment of thought she propounded her own solution. “Your beast isstrong. I have ridden double on an animal half his size. We will both ride.”
Now, though Seyd had long ago grown to the sight of rancheros on their way to market in the embrace of their buxom brown wives, the suddenness of it made him gasp. But by a quick mounting he succeeded in hiding the rush of blood to his face. Also he managed to control his voice.
“Fine idea! Give me your hand.”
Just touching his foot, she rose like a bird to the croup. When, as the horse moved on, she slid an arm around his waist his demoralization was full and complete. If he glanced down it was to see her fingers resting like small white butterflies on his raincoat. Did he look up, then a faint perfume of damp hair would come floating over his shoulder. He thrilled when her clasp tightened as the horse broke into a gentle trot, and was altogether in a bad way when her merry laugh restored order among his senses.
“Now we can play Rosa and Rosario on their way to market. It will be for you to grumble at prices while I rail at the government tax that puts woolens beyond the purse of a peon.”
“I prefer to ask what brought you out in such weather.” He returned her laugh. “A pretty pickle you would have been in if I had not come along.”
He felt the vigorous shake of her head. “I should have walked back to the last hut, andan oxcart would have taken me in to the station.”
“But then you would have been out all night.”
“I should have loved it.” Though he did not see the sudden blooming under her hood, he felt the unconscious squeeze which testified to the sincerity of her feeling. “I love them—the roar of the wind, black darkness, the beat of the rain in my face. Mother would have had me stay in Mexico till the rains were over, but when Don Luis wrote that the river was at flood nothing could hold me.” He had thrilled under her unconscious pressure, but her conclusion proved an excellent corrective. “I am afraid that the site for your new buildings must be under water.”
“How can that be?” He spoke quickly. “We are building well back from last year’s mark, and Don Luis said that it was the highest known.”
“But this year it has gone even higher—and all because of the Yankee companies that are stripping the upper valley of timber. There were great fires, too, last year which broke away from their servants and burned hundreds of miles of woods.”
Her quiet answer went far to allay his sudden suspicion, but not his anxiety. He spoke of Billy. “It is over a month since he came out to the station for stores, and the agent told me that none of your people had seen him for weeks.”
“But he has with him Angelo”—she gaveCaliban his correct name—“and he, as I once told you, was counted Sebastien’s best man in his war against the brigands. Though he may not show it to you, he is not ungrateful for the gift of his life. If food is to be had in the country, Mr. Thornton will not go lacking.”
He spoke more cheerfully. “Then I don’t care; though if the siteisflooded we shall be thrown back at least three months with our work.”
“And what is three months?” she added, laughing.
To him it was a great deal. Before paying over the loan Don Luis’s lawyers had taken Seyd’s signatures upon certain instruments which exhibited the General in the new light of a shrewd and conservative business man. Withal, having still plenty of time, he answered quite cheerfully when she turned the conversation with a question concerning his plans. Under the stimulation of her curiosity, which surprised him by its intelligence, he went into details, talking and answering her questions while the horse trudged steadily on into the darkening rain. If the trail had not suddenly faded out, night would have caught them unnoticed.
In that volcanic country, where for long stretches a hoof left no impression, the loss of a trail was a common experience, and, trusting to the instinct of the beast, Seyd gave it the rein. Left to its own devices, however, it gradually swerved from the beating rain and presentlyturned on to a cattle track which swung away into gum copal trees and scrub oak at an imperceptible angle. Had he been alone Seyd would have soon noticed the absence of the Aztec ruin. As it was, but not until an hour later, Francesca was the first to speak.
“That’s so,” he agreed, when she drew his attention. “We ought to have passed it long ago. The animal evidently picked up a wrong track coming out from the rocks.” After a moment’s reflection he said: “It would be worse than foolish to try to go back. We could never find the trail in this black rain. Better follow on and see where it will bring us.” With a sudden remembrance of what it might mean to her, a young girl brought up in the rigid conventions of the country, he repentantly added: “I’m awfully sorry for you. I ought to be kicked for my carelessness.”
“No, I have traveled this trail much oftener than you,” she quietly protested. “If any one is blamed I should be the one.”
Sitting there in black darkness, lost in those lonely volcanic hills, with the rain dashing in his face and the roar of the wind in his ears, he was prepared to appreciate her quiet answer. “You are a brick!” he exclaimed. “Nevertheless, I feel my guilt.”
“Then you need not.” She gave a little laugh. “Did I not say that I enjoyed being out at night in the rain?”
“And now the gods have called your bluff.”
“Bluff?” She laughed again at the meaning of that rank Americanism. “It was no bluff, as you will presently see.”
And see he did—during the long hour they spent splashing along in black darkness, up hill, down dale, fording swollen arroyos, through chaparral which tore at them with myriad claws and wet woods whose boughs lashed their faces. Up to the moment that the roof of a hut suddenly loomed out against the dim, dark sky she uttered no doubt or complaint. When, having tied his horse under the wide eaves, he lit a match inside, its flare revealed her face, quiet and serene.
Also it showed that which, while not nearly so interesting, had its immediate uses—a candle stuck in atequilabottle; and its steadier flare presently helped them to another find—a chemisette and other garments of feminine wear, spotlessly clean and smoothly ironed, arranged on a string that ran over a bunk in one corner.
“The fiesta wear of our hostess,” Francesca remarked. “How lucky! for I am drenched.”
“And look at that pile of dry wood!” he exclaimed. “The gods are with us. I’ll build a fire, then while I rub down the horse you can change. What’s this?”
It was a rough sketch done with charcoal on the table. Two parallelograms with sticks for legs were in furious pursuit of certain hornedsquares which, in their turn, were in full flight toward a doll’s house in the far corner.
“Oh, I know!” the girl cried, after a moment of study. “Here, in the wild country where they never see man, are raised the fighting bulls for the rings of Mexico. This hut belongs to a vaquero of San Angel, and this is an order, left in his absence, to drive the bulls into the hacienda.” Laying her finger on a triangle which had evidently been added later, she continued, laughing: “This shows that his woman has gone with him. They were evidently called away unexpectedly, for she had already set the corn to soak in thisollafor the supper tortillas. And the saints be praised! Here are dried beef, salt, and chilis. Now hurry the fire, and you shall see what a cook I am.”