“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 substitute 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 reassure 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 passed 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.