Felipe, thus left alone with the heaviest responsibility he had ever borne, knit his smooth brows very hard and peered into the vat as if the fate of nations hung on his eyes. For the first time he began to doubt them. He wondered if it were not worked enough—if he had not better stop the hoes and get the molders to work. If only Don Melito would come back and decide for him!
But Don Melito was not here, and there were no signs of his coming. Perhaps he was leaving Felipe to find out the difference between knowing how some one else does a thing and how to do it one’s self. The boy fidgeted up and down and looked at the vat first from one end and then from the other, and grew more doubtful the more he looked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t know,” he cried to himself. “But sure it is that I must do something, for he left me in charge and perhaps is busy with other matters, thinking I would not let it be spoiled. Put it in the molds!”
The men leaned their candied hoes against the wall. The molders began ladling their buckets full, and, in turn, filling the shallow molds. The color there darkened again as sudden crystallization set in; but Felipe felt a great load lifted off his shoulders. He was very sure now that it was a good color—not a hint of the hateful underdone black, but a soft, rich brown, shading to gold at the thin edges.
Now he was free—the laborers could attend to the rest, as usual—and he would go and hunt for Don Melito. He ran up the steps and along the platform—and half way stopped short, as if he had run against a wall.
The rusty irons should never have been trusted with that giant’s strength! They might do for common men, but for Coco—as soon as consciousness came back to him, and with it the old rage, he had snapped them, and, wrenching out the iron bars from the window of the calaboz, had come for his revenge. Even now he was shaking his wrists, one still hooped with the iron band, before the old administrador’s face, and hissing: “You! You did me this! And now I will boil you!”
Don Melito stood still and gray as a stone, looking up into Coco’s eyes. His hat was in his hand on account of the heat; but now he put it on as if scorning to stand uncovered before the fellow—put it steadily upon the curling gray hair that reached barely to the level of those great naked chest muscles.
“I did strike you down and ordered you to be ironed, Coco,” he said quietly, “and I would do so again. Now I am going to send you to Lima. There is no place at Villa for people like you.”
But Coco leaped upon him like the black jaguar, and clutched him with those long, knotted arms. Melito was sinewy and lithe as a cat, but he was no match for this huge foe. He fought for life, but Coco with the equal desperation of hate. Struggle as he would, he was borne back and back until his legs cringed from the glow of the paila. At this he made so wild a lunge that it bore them back a few feet; but it was only for a moment. Inch by inch the negro urged him toward that bubbling roar which seemed to drown all other sounds. And even now, with a wild chuckle, the giant doubled him backward against the edge of the paila, with a black, resistless palm under his chin.