She groped to the door, and opened it enough to take a greasily odorous candle from a dusky hand outside. As the sickly glimmer awakened the shadows, she called the woman back in sudden dismay. “My trunk, señora, kindly have it sent up at once. No,” she added, catching a fluffy garment from a chair, “in five minutes.”
There was a brief silence, followed by positive lament. “Niña, it is not here. I believe, niñ-a, it is at the mesón, with Don Anastasio.”
“F-flute!” cried Jacqueline. The word means nothing at all, but it may express a lass’s exasperation in a wardrobe crisis, and that is nothing except a catastrophe. “Now just possibly,” she soliloquized, “they permit themselves to imagine that one can wear a white frock two days together,” whereupon she sat herself down despairingly among the crisp things that had already had their poor little day. To mock her there was the jaunty handsatchel packed for an hour’s shore leave. She let petulance have sway, and informed herself that she should not go a step, when the voice in the hall pleaded insidiously that Her Mercy make haste.
“But I am, señora, I’m making fast haste,” and she sat three minutes longer, communing with her tragedy. “Oh, this bitten, biting country,” she cried, gazing ruefully at arms and shoulders, and fiery blotches on the soft white skin. “Still, if there’s a brigand for every mosquito, it may yet be worth 57while.” Hopefully she rose and called Berthe from the next room to help her dress.
When the two girls came downstairs, the landlord’s wife took their satchel, and led them over broken sidewalks to the mesón, where the street was filled with torches and laden burros and blanketed shadows. Murguía’s caravan was forming, making a weird, stealthy scene of activity. Jacqueline picked up a lantern, and searched here and there.
“Now where can it be?” she cried.
The rebosa about the shoulders of the Mexican woman rose. She knew nothing. But the gesture was an unabridged philosophical system as to the resignation and the indifference that is seemly when one knows nothing. Jacqueline refrained from pinching her, and pursued the quest of her trunk even into the mesón.
Hardly had she passed within when a greatly agitated little old man tried to overtake her. But at the door he thought better of it and vented his chagrin on the Mexican woman.
“Why did you let her go in there?” he cried. “She will wake the Gringo, she will wake the Gringo!”
Jacqueline reappeared. “No trunk,” she announced. “Do you know, Berthe, I do not believe it came at all?”