Señor John ate his supper in silence, getting up nervously every now and then to open the front door a trifle in order to look out, or he shaded his eyes from the lamplight as he peered through the window. The father touched little food, and following supper took his seat in the cane chair before the open grate of his stove—his head lowered and his eyes closed.
Before long the young painter could not contain his impatience further. “I think I’d better start,” he said. “It doesn’t act like quitting for sometime.”
Father José rose. “Why go home to-night?” he asked. “You will not be able to see the cross on the other side, señor. You are welcome here.”
“Oh, I must get over somehow. They would worry about me.”
The father looked grave. “The storm still increases,” he said.
The rain was coming in sheets against the window now, but at short intervals, so that it was as if a white wraith were returning noisily again and again to peer through the blurred glass. The blue blinds outside the father’s bedchamber were banging forward and back with a rattle of loose laths. Upon the level roof overhead sounded the unbroken roar of the tempest.
“A cloudburst and a hurricane,” went on the father. He also opened the front door a little to look out. “I have never seen its like before, señor. They will surely not expect you to brave this.”
The young painter’s face had grown suddenly anxious. “But she might try to come—looking for me,” he said.
“Señorita Roberta? No. She knows how dangerously the river rises in a storm and how the sands shift.”
Señor John was pulling his soft hat down to his ears. “You said yourself, though, father, that she doesn’t know what it means to be afraid of the Rio Grande. I must go. My horse is all right. He’ll take me over.”