Carlota sat up, amazed and indignant.
“Girls don’t have gizzards, Carlos Manuel. Only chickens and geeses and things like those. You haven’t paid attention when my father teached you.”
Carlos laughed; so merrily and noisily that old Marta came to the door of the adobe house to see what was the fun. Nobody knew the housekeeper’s real age, it was so very great. None could remember things so far back as she, but she had ceased to count the years long, long ago, why not? What matter, if she still had the heart of a child, yes?
Certainly, neither Carlos nor Carlota cared. To them she had never changed, either in appearance or kindness, and they found no birthdays worth remembering except their own. These only, probably, because of the gifts and fiestas[1] then made upon the whole rancho.
“Perhaps, I didn’t, little sister, but neither did you, or you’d never have said ‘geeses’ nor ‘teached’.”
“Both of us was wrong, weren’t we?” returned the girl, with as fine a disregard of grammar as of ill temper. “We’ll be more ’tentive when our father comes home, won’t we? When will that be, Carlos?”
It was a perplexing question, and the boy put it aside, as he put all difficulties, until a more convenient season. Crossing his arms above his head, he gazed unblinkingly upward into the brilliant sky, proposing:
“Let’s find things in the clouds, Carlota. I see a ship, I do, truly. It’s just like the pictures in the books. All its sails are set and flying. Oh! can’t you see? Right there? There! It’s moving northward fast—fast! It might be the ship in which our father will come home.”
He meant to comfort her, but Carlota would not look up. She could not. The sunbeams made prisms of the teardrops on her lashes and blinded her. She buried her face in the grass to escape these tiny “rainbows,” and all at once fell to sobbing bitterly.
Carlos hated that. He hated anything dark or unhappy. He sat up and patted his sister’s shoulder, soothingly, entreating: