The girl's eyes brightened softly as she turned to him.
“Do tell me,” she said, with an anticipatory smile and flash of white teeth. “Won't you?”
She certainly was very pretty and simple, in spite of her late speech. Jarman briefly explained to her the movements of the semaphore arms and their different significance. She listened with her capped head a little on one side like an attentive bird, and her arms unconsciously imitating the signs. Certainly, for all that she SPOKE like an American, her gesticulation was Italian.
“And then,” she said triumphantly when he paused, “when the sailors see that sign up they know they are coming in the harbor.”
Jarman smiled, as he had not smiled since he had been there. He corrected this mistake of her eager haste to show her intelligence, and, taking the telescope, pointed out the other semaphore,—a thin black outline on a distant inland hill. He then explained how HIS signs were repeated by that instrument to San Francisco.
“My! Why, I always allowed that was only the cross stuck up in the Lone Mountain Cemetery,” she said.
“You are a Catholic?”
“I reckon.”
“And you are an Italian?”
“Father is, but mother was a 'Merikan, same as me. Mother's dead.”