The man who kept the store was young, but with the pallid skin and sad, hollow eyes that denote a mortal illness. He could move about but slowly in the little room, and take down and display and put away only with much effort.
As he waited upon her, Paloma walked to and fro with a gay step, all the while talking: “Show me the calico with the yellow flower, señor. Yes—a yard, please. Did you hear that Señor Gordon is to paint me? Well, he is—and with the padre’s peacock. I am to wear a certain white dress that I shall not use for the purpose it was once intended. No; I shall buy another white dress—very soon, I think—a much richer dress. And, look, señor, is this ring not beautiful? The stone came from beyond the Pacific Ocean.”
Behind the stove, as she sauntered about, boasting, sat a figure wrapped to the ears in a torn serape. But the figure did not move, or appear to see, or even so much as cough.
“Yes,” babbled Paloma, “first I’m to be put in a picture. Then—who knows?—I may go on a long trip. Oh, farther than Albuquerque, señor. Yes, one spool of white thread, very fine. I may even go as far as Chicago.” She tossed her pretty head with meaning. “A girl cannot always live in Los Morales,” she added. “It is but a poor place.” Thereupon, she gathered up her packages, put down some coins upon the counter, gave the sick young man a saucy smile, and went out.
Perhaps it was ten—perhaps fifteen—minutes later when Anastacio rose from his seat by the stove. A change had come over him—a change that was not good to see. His thin face was as ghastly white as the face of the man behind the counter. Out of it gleamed his black eyes, which were so wide open that each was rimmed with white. And his lips were purple under his long moustache and parted to show the line of his set, white teeth. Now his hat was not hiding his forehead, but back upon his shining hair; nor was the torn serape about his shoulders—it was wound around his left arm. He went down through the village, out upon the path which led to the chapel, along this to where Señor John was still painting under the belfry, and so on to the ford, where he disappeared from sight under the high bank that stood a little way back from the river.
The day had begun warm and still, and the noon had been hot, without a breath of air to stir the drooping flowers in Father José’s garden or wave the bright fan of the strutting peacock. But at the middle of the afternoon black clouds suddenly lowered upon river and town, dropping from off the high dirt-cliffs to the west, and bringing twilight with them. A gusty wind marshalled the clouds along, bent the reeds in the marsh, drove through the winding streets of the pueblo and caught at the blankets of the Indians who were scurrying to cover, and brushed all the surface of the river into a white lather. Then came great drops of rain.
Señor John fled into Father José’s kitchen. “Do you think I’d better start home now?” he inquired, “or wait a while?”
“Wait,” advised the father. “There will be tamales for supper, and a loaf of bread heated with butter. After a day like this one, señor, the storm soon passes.”
But as night came on swiftly the wind grew to a gale and the rain began to drive, beating upon the panes of the wide-ledged window like whips of grass.