Kate paid the chauffeur, and the Ford started rattling. After rattling a while, it moved in a curve round the courtyard, and lurched through the zaguan, disappearing as fast as possible.
Ramón spoke to his two mozos with the guns. They went to the outer doorway, obediently.
“Why do you have to have armed men?” she said.
“Oh, they’re afraid of bandits,” he said. “Whenever there’s a rebellion anywhere, everybody is afraid of bandits. So of course that calls bandits into life.”
“But where do they come from?” said Kate, as they passed into the inner doorways.
“From the villages,” he said, closing the heavy door of that entrance behind him, and putting the heavy iron bars across, from wall to wall.
The inner archway was now a little prison, for the strong iron gates at the lake end of the passage were shut fast. She looked through, at the little round pond. It had some blue water-lilies on it. Beyond, the pallid lake seemed almost like a ghost, in the glare of the sun.
A servant was sent to the kitchen quarters, Ramón and Kate climbed the stone stairs to the upper terrace. How lonely, stonily lonesome and forlorn the hacienda could feel! The very stone walls could give off emptiness, loneliness, negation.
“But which villages do the bandits come from?” she insisted.
“Any of them. Mostly, they say, from San Pablo or from Ahuajijic.”