“Must think this is a summer resort!”
Rickard threw himself back in his chair. “Take this letter, MacLean. To Marshall.” Then his worry diverted him. “Who in thunder is selling liquor to my Indians?”
“Just that way?” quizzed MacLean.
“Hold on; that letter can wait. You get the horses up, MacLean, and we’ll ride down to Maldonado’s. He’ll have to get busy, and clear up this thing, or I’ll know why. I’ll threaten to report him for laziness. It’s his place to stop this liquor business, not mine.”
A few hours later, they were approaching the adobe walls of Maldonado. They found the gate locked. A woman, whose beauty had faded into a tragic whisper, a ghastly twilight of suggestion, came to their knock, and unbarred the gate for the white strangers. She left them by the white oleander whose trunk was like that of a tree. MacLean sniffed like a young terrier. “What’s the matter with the place?”
Mystery hung over the enclosure like a pall. Their voices fell inevitably to a whisper. Once, it had been a garden; now, only the oleander defied the desert. Dry ditches told the story of decadence. Once, the river had wandered by, a stone’s throw away. Maldonado had turned some of its flow into his adobe court. But the river channel was dry, and a dead vine clung to the house walls; fell, shrinking in the breeze, from the roof.
The woman came out to say that Maldonado would follow in “un momento.” To Rickard she looked like the dried vine quivering from the wind. She asked the señors would they sit? The house was not fit; she was cleaning.
Maldonado, his face creased from his nap, came out, but not in “un momento.” He had been busy—“some wretched fellows!” Rickard knew the man was lying. He had been asleep. The woman had interrupted his siesta. His eyes were almost lost; he blinked; he said it was the sun. The day was so hot. Dios mio, why did she stand there and not take pity on the señors, dying of thirst as they must be. A glass of water. It was his shame that he might not offer them wine—but he was a poor man—with wife and children. His eyes shifted from Rickard to MacLean.
The woman quivered away from the group. She disappeared in the house.
“Glasses,” called Maldonado after her.