Part 10 (1/2)

”Can't understand this jargon,” Adair MacKenzie laid the menu that had been given him down and looked utterly disgusted.

”No sense in their making it like this,” he continued as though it was a personal insult that anyone should presume to speak or write any other language than English. ”Can't see how they can understand it themselves.”

In the end, it was Walker Jamieson who did the ordering. ”How about some nice mode de guajolote?” he grinned at Nan and her friends as he put the question. ”It's turkey to you,” he explained when they laughed, ”stuffed turkey to be exact and a choice bit here. With it, we'll have tortillas, the Mexican subst.i.tute for bread, and frijoles, the favorite Mexican bean. Sound all right?”

The girls nodded as they tried to find the items on their own menus. And Adair MacKenzie grunted that he would take the same.

The meal wasn't entirely a success. Nan and her friends enjoyed it, but Adair MacKenzie grumbled throughout despite all that Alice could do to mollify him.

”Never mind, daddy,” she said at last, ”in a couple of more days we'll be at the hacienda--”

”Yes, and that housekeeper of ours better be there, or I'll fire her.”

Adair was off again.

Alice restrained a smile. For twenty years now, Adair had been firing the housekeeper and for twenty years she had been running him and his house just as she pleased. It was a joke that the motherly old lady and Alice shared.

”She'll be there,” Alice tried to rea.s.sure him, ”and so will that Chinese cook that we have heard so much about.”

Nan and the rest looked up from their turkey, half expecting a story, but Alice said nothing further. They finished the meal in silence and followed Adair to the car.

Then, by way of Zimapan, an attractive hillside village, remembered ever afterwards by the girls for its huge cacti, some more than thirty-five feet high, they continued on toward Mexico City. They pa.s.sed through Tasquillo, and then over a sandy road between other tall cacti to Ixmiquilpan, a picturesque town where native Indians were tending sheep and spinning along the streets.

Here Nan took a picture, the first of many she was to take, of the girls as they stood in a market where they had just bought some gayly woven baskets. The sight of the Indians brought more stories to Walker's mind and so, in the few miles that lay between them and their stopping place for the night, he told more tales.

He told stories of buried treasure left by the Aztecs in deep underground chambers, of turquoise and jade that was more lovely than any the modern world has discovered. He told of gold so plentiful that it had no value, of great temples that American Museums were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild.

He knew all the stories, because, since his early childhood, spent in California where Mexican labor was plentiful because it was cheap, he had been interested in the country.

When, on the third day of their journey, they approached Mexico City, Walker Jamieson was in a particularly expansive mood, one designed to keep their minds off the question of what word they would find from Rhoda in the capital.

”Below you, ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a great sweep of his arm, ”you see Mexico City, the capital of this surprising republic of Mexico. There you will find romance, adventure, everything.”

CHAPTER XI

A LEGEND

”Mexico City,” he went on, as though he were a guide introducing a party of tourists to its first sight of a city, ”lies, as you can see from here, in a mountain valley on the Great Central Plateau. Constructed on a former lake by those Aztecs who once made of this whole region a grand and glorious place, it was called by them 'Tenocht.i.tlan', an Aztec word meaning 'Belonging to the property of the Temple.'

”When the Spaniards conquered Tenocht.i.tlan, they found grand palaces and elegant homes under the shadow of the mountains that lie all about.

They found gardens more beautiful and more highly cultivated than any they had ever known. They found wealth and splendour such as not even their vivid imaginations had ever constructed. They found everything,”

he finished dramatically, ”and they drove the people who had conceived it out, and they took it unto themselves, and it went to ruin. You see now, the modern city, and as you go through its streets, you will find everywhere evidences of all these changes living side by side with the new that the present generation is in the process of building up.”

Walker Jamieson had started his little harangue half in fun, but as always when he talked about the old city, he grew serious as he went on.

Now, as he noted the half scowl on Adair MacKenzie's face, the look of interest on Alice's, and the attention of Nan Sherwood and her friends, he paused.

”How am I doing?” he directed the question to the group in general.