They came to the edge of the town, to a dusty, humped bridge, a broken wall, a pale-brown stream flowing full. Below the bridge a cluster of men.
Each one wanted her to hire his boat. She demanded a motor-boat: the boat from the hotel. They said there wasn’t one. She didn’t believe it. Then a dark-faced fellow with his black hair down his forehead, and a certain intensity in his eyes, said: Yes, yes; The Hotel had a boat, but it was broken. She must take a row-boat. In an hour and a half he would row her there.
“How long?” said Kate.
“An hour and a half.”
“And I am so hungry!” cried Kate. “How much do you charge?”
“Two pesos.” He held up two fingers.
Kate said yes, and he ran down to his boat. Then she noticed he was a cripple with inturned feet. But how quick and strong!
She climbed with Villiers down the broken bank to the river, and in a moment they were in the boat. Pale green willow trees fringed from the earthen banks to the fuller-flowing, pale-brown water. The river was not very wide, between deep banks. They slipped under the bridge, and past a funny high barge with rows of seats. The boatman said it went up the river to Jocotlan: and he waved his hand to show the direction. They were slipping down-stream, between lonely banks of willow-trees.
The crippled boatman was pulling hard, with great strength and energy. When she spoke to him in her bad Spanish and he found it hard to understand, he knitted his brow a little, anxiously. And when she laughed he smiled at her with such a beautiful gentleness, sensitive, wistful, quick. She felt he was naturally honest and truthful, and generous. There was a beauty in these men, a wistful beauty and a great physical strength. Why had she felt so bitterly about the country?
Morning was still young on the pale buff river, between the silent earthen banks. There was a blue dimness in the lower air, and black water-fowl ran swiftly, unconcernedly back and forth from the river’s edge, on the dry, baked banks that were treeless now, and wider. They had entered a wide river, from the narrow one. The blueness and moistness of the dissolved night seemed to linger under the scattered pepper-trees of the far shore.