Gathering up the cakes and loaves she had emptied from the basket, she proffered them to the strangers, beginning with the gray haired man as she had seen his son do with the water.
“Yes, thank you. Though it’s not long since we stopped to eat, those cakes smell very appetizing. Let us all sit about the spring and enjoy them together. So, this is your schoolroom. What do you learn in it?” he asked.
“I could better tell you what we don’t. First, there’s geography. See that white line?”
“Yes. It suggests a tennis-court. What is it for?”
Carlos sprang up and merrily bestrode the line-mark, crying:
“One leg is in my native land and one upon foreign soil! That’s the way my father says it. This—” putting his hand upon a tuft of grass—“is in Mexico. This other in the United States. Our rancho is the southeast boundary of our own country. Our house was built hundreds of years ago by the good priests who came to teach the Pueblos about our Lord. That’s why they named it Refugio, the House of Refuge. Because it wasn’t only to help folks to go to Heaven, it was to give them shelter when they were persecuted. Somebody must always have been fighting then, I think.”
“So history says. Do you learn that, too?” inquired the younger gentleman.
“Yes. Not out of books, though. Father says we’re to study that way, later. Now, he just brings out old Guadalupo—who’s a hundred and fifteen years—and, sometimes, Marta, and makes them what he calls his ‘texts.’ He says that they’re living history. Carlota and I are history-makers, too. If we should live as long as those old folks somebody might find us just as interesting as we do them.”
“Far more so, maybe. I find you extremely interesting even now. I would like to hear a great deal about your lives and doings.”
Carlos thoughtfully studied the young gentleman’s face, then asked: