Part 57 (1/2)
O'Malley agreed. ”Yes, and we have no time to lose. That horseman is going to rouse the town. I'm afraid we're--in for it.”
Dave nodded silently.
Leaving the beaten path, the refugees threaded their way through cactus and sage to a gate, entering which they approached the straw-thatched jacal they had seen. A naked boy baby watched them draw near, then scuttled for shelter, piping an alarm. A man appeared from somewhere, at sight of whom the priest rode forward with a pleasant greeting. But the fellow was unfriendly. His wife, too, emerged from the dwelling and joined her husband in warning Father O'Malley away.
”Let me try,” Alaire begged, and spurred her horse up to the group. She smiled down at the country people, saying: ”We have traveled a long way, and we're tired and hungry. Won't you give us something to eat?
We'll pay you well for your trouble.”
The man demurred sullenly, and began a refusal; but his wife, after a wondering scrutiny, interrupted him with a cry. Rus.h.i.+ng forward, she took the edge of Alaire's skirt in her hands and kissed it.
”G.o.d be praised! A miracle!” she exclaimed. ”Juan, don't you see? It is the beautiful senora for whom we pray every night of our lives. On your knees, shameless one! It is she who delivered you from the prison.”
Juan stared unbelievingly, then his face changed; his teeth flashed in a smile, and, sweeping his hat from his head, he, too, approached Alaire.
”It is! senora, I am Juan Garcia, whom you saved, and this is Inez,” he declared. ”Heaven bless you and forgive me.”
”Now I know you,” Alaire laughed, and slipped down from her saddle.
”This is a happy meeting. So! You live here, and that was little Juan who ran away as if we were going to eat him. Well, we are hungry, but not hungry enough to devour Juanito.”
Turning to her companions, she explained the circ.u.mstances of her first meeting with these good people, and as she talked the Garcias broke in joyfully, adding their own account of her goodness.
”We've fallen among friends,” Alaire told Dave and Father O'Malley.
”They will let us rest here, I am sure.”
Husband and wife agreed in one voice. In fact, they were overjoyed at an opportunity of serving her; and little Juan, his suspicions partially allayed, issued from hiding and waddled forward to take part in the welcome.
Shamefacedly the elder Garcia explained his inhospitable reception of the travelers. ”We hear the gringos are coming to kill us and take our farms. Everybody is badly frightened. We are driving our herds away and hiding what we can. Yesterday at the big Obispo ranch our people shot two Americans and burned some of their houses. They intend to kill all the Americans they find, so you'd better be careful. Just now a fellow rode up shouting that you were coming, but of course I didn't know--”
”Yes, of course. We're trying to reach the border,” Father O'Malley told him. ”Will you hide us here until we can go on?”
Juan courtesied respectfully to the priest. ”My house is yours, Father.”
”Can you take care of our horses, too, and--give us a place to sleep?”
Dave asked. His eyes were heavy; he had been almost constantly in the saddle since leaving Jonesville, and now could barely keep himself awake.
”Trust me,” the Mexican a.s.sured them, confidently. ”If somebody comes I'll send them away. Oh, I can lie with the best of them.”
The Garcias were not ordinary people, and they lived in rather good circ.u.mstances for country folk. There were three rooms to their little house, all of which were reasonably clean. The food that Inez set before her guests, too, was excellent if scanty.
Juanito, taking the cue from his parents, flung himself whole-heartedly into the task of entertainment, and since Alaire met his advances halfway he began, before long, to look upon her with particular favor.
Once they had thoroughly made friends, he showered her with the most flattering attentions. His shyness, it seemed, was but a pretense--at heart he was a bold and enterprising fellow--and so, as a mark of his admiration, he presented her with all his personal treasures. First he fetched and laid in her lap a cigar-box wagon with wooden wheels--evidently the handiwork of his father. Then he gave her, one by one, a highly prized blue bottle, a rusty Mexican spur, and the ruins of what had been a splendid clasp knife. There were no blades in the knife, but he showed her how to peep through a tiny hole in the handle, where was concealed the picture of a das.h.i.+ng Spanish bullfighter. The appreciation which these gifts evoked intoxicated the little man and roused him to a very madness of generosity. He pattered away and returned shortly, staggering and grunting under the weight of another and a still greater offering. It was a dog--a patient, hungry dog with very little hair. The animal was alive with fleas--it scratched absent-mindedly with one hind paw, even while Juanito strangled it against his naked breast--but it was the apple of its owner's eye, and when Inez unfeelingly banished it from the house Juanito began to squall l.u.s.tily. Nor could he be conciliated until Alaire took him upon her knee and told him about another boy, of precisely his own age and size, who planted a magic bean in his mother's dooryard, which grew up and up until it reached clear to the sky, where a giant lived. Juanito Garcia had never heard the like. He was spellbound with delight; he held his breath in ecstasy; only his toes moved, and they wriggled like ten fat, brown tadpoles.
In the midst of this recital Garcia senior appeared in the door with a warning.
”Conceal yourselves,” he said, quickly. ”Some of our neighbors are coming this way.” Inez led her guests into the bedchamber, a bare room with a dirt floor, from the window of which they watched Juan go to meet a group of hors.e.m.e.n. Inez went out, too, and joined in the parley.
Then, after a time, the riders galloped away.
When Alaire, having watched the party out of sight, turned from the window she found that Dave had collapsed upon a chair and was sleeping, his limbs relaxed, his body sagging.