Miss Holmes went within, and soon there was a savory smell of fish frying and cakes baking on a bed of coals.
"That will do for to-night, Pablo," Jason Chadsey said. "Come early to-morrow morning and I will show you about the posts."
The Mexican nodded slowly, and walked to the kitchen door, where Miss Holmes gave him a chunk of bread and a fish, and he went his way.
Uncle Jason washed hands and face in true Yankee fashion, with a great splurge. He had enlarged the rude cistern and led a rivulet of clear water down to it. In many of the outlying districts there were but few conveniences, and yet San Francisco had flashed into existence as if a new Kubla Khan had decreed it. Perhaps no city in the world could boast such rapid advances, or gain in population. Those early years will always sound like a fairy tale. But it had some of the best and most energetic brain and brawn from the East, whose forefathers had settled other wildernesses much less promising.
The pony shared interest with the visit and the promise of the Estenega girls coming up every morning. She was a very happy little girl to-night; Uncle Jason thought she had not been quite so bright of late, but now her eyes flashed with an eager light, and her pretty lips melted from one curve to another, while her voice had a bird-like gayety. The day had been so full and taken so much energy, that she laid her head in Miss Holmes' lap and went fast asleep. Jason Chadsey read his paper by the light of the smoky lamp, and Miss Holmes dreamed of clean, orderly Boston even if its streets did run crooked.
The Estenegas were certainly not bright scholars. But the Yankee schoolma'am had seen obtuse children before. They were extremely narrow and incurious as to real knowledge, but anxious to get on with English. Laverne flashed up and down the walk. Pablo set up the frame, put on a rude roof, then filled in the chinks with a common kind of adobe. The pony would not live much indoors, to be sure, but he needed some shelter.
"Do you know what his name is, Pablo?" the child asked.
Pablo shook his head. He was a dried-up specimen, with a skin like leather and small deep-set eyes, quite bowed in the shoulders, which made him no taller than some boys of a dozen years. He had a little hut of his own down in the wilds, and he often lay on the sand when the sun was too hot, and drowsed from pure laziness.
Uncle Jason led the pony home at night. He had been well kept, for his coat was smooth, just far enough off of black to be a rich brown. Shapely, with slender legs, a head not too large for his body, a flowing mane, now braided up in tails, flexible nostrils that quivered with every breath, and the most beautiful large, dark eyes that looked as if they could laugh and understand many things.
She had been somewhat dubious all along. She had really felt afraid of Bruno at first, but as she looked at the merry eyes she laughed.