“Might we,” Jacqueline interposed, “pay our respects to Señor Murguía’s daughter?”
116The poor fellow begged Their Mercies’ indulgence, but Doña Matilde, the señora aunt of Doña Luz, lay sick in the house. As for Doña Luz, yes, Doña Luz had gone to the chapel, as she often did of an evening lately, to pray for her aunt’s recovery. Doña Luz had vowed to wear sackcloth for six months if her dear patron saint, María de la Luz, would but hear her petition. Out of compassion, Jacqueline said no more.
Next morning Driscoll was astir early. He wandered through a thick-walled labyrinth of corridors and patios, and came at last into a rankly luxuriant tropical garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree blossoms filled his nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda buildings, a sugar mill, a cotton factory, warehouses, stables with corrals, and entered a tortuous street between adobes, where he found the hacienda store. Here the administrador was watching the clerks who sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly women, barefooted and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, which they carried away in their aprons. They made tortillas of it for their men laboring in the hacienda fields, or on the hacienda coffee hills. The store was a curious epitome of thrift and improvidence. One wench grumbled boldly of short measure. She dared, because she was comely and buxom, and her chemise fell low on her full, olive breast. She counted her purchase of frijoles to the last grain, using her fingers, and glaring at the clerk half coaxingly, half resentfully. But an intensely scarlet percale caught her barbarian eye, and she took enough of it for a skirt. A dozen cigarettes followed, and by so much she increased her man’s debt to the hacienda.
A shrunken and ancient laborer was expostulating earnestly with much gesturing of skeleton arms, while the administrador listened as one habituated and bored. The feeble peon protested that he could not work that day. He parted the yellow 117rags over one leg and revealed decaying flesh, sloughing away in the ravages of bone leprosy. He showed it without emotion, as some argument in the abstract. And he was arguing for a little corn, just a little, and he made his palm into a tiny cup to demonstrate. The administrador opened a limp account book, held his pudgy forefinger against a page for a second, then shut it decisively. “No, no, Pedro, not while you owe these twelve reales. Think, man, if you should die. You have no sons; we would lose.”
“But, mi patron, there’s my nephew.”
“True, and he has his own father’s debt waiting for him.”
“Just a wee little,” begged the man.
The overseer shook his head. “When you’ve worked to-day, yes. Then you may have six cents’ worth, and the other six cents of the day’s wages counted off your debt. There now, get along with you to the timber cutting.”
The administrador brightened on perceiving Driscoll. “How was His Mercy? How had His Mercy passed the night? How––”
“Where,” interposed Driscoll, “might one find the nearest stage to Mexico?”