“Oh! I love them, too, and I’m so glad we live on one, or the place where one used to be. That hedge is prickly-pear and was meant to keep the Indians out of the inclosure, if they were ugly. But it’s a hundred years old, and Pedro could remember when it was ever so much smaller than now.”
It was a weird stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian’s shoulder, still green on top, but too unlovely to have been preserved for any reason save its antiquity and history. One end of it was close to the kitchen part of the house, and the other reached beyond the fall of the farthest old adobe.
“A formidable barrier, indeed! It reminds me of some of Dore’s fantastic pictures,” said the reporter.
“Doesn’t it? My mother has books with his drawings in, and I have thought that, too. It is a trouble sometimes, because anybody coming across the field from yonder must go either way around the quarters or all along the back of the house, 179 before he can get in here; when if it weren’t there at all, it wouldn’t be two steps. But we will never have it cut down because my father said so. He wouldn’t have anybody break a single leaf, if he could help it, and––oh, oh!”
Mr. Sharp lifted his head from his close examination of a branch that had particularly interested him and saw Jessica pointing in astonishment at the very heart of the great hedge.
“What is it? Something especially curious?”
“Curious! It’s––it’s––dreadful! You can see right through it! Somebody has ruined it!”
The reporter stooped and followed the direction of her guiding finger and saw that a strange thing had indeed been done. For a considerable length the terrible barrier had been literally tunneled, though the fact was not easily discernible. Walls of the bare and twisted branches were still left unbroken on either side, but a sufficient space had been scooped out to admit the passage of a human being should such desire a hiding place.
“Oh! isn’t that dreadful? Who could have done it, and why?” cried the captain, in distress; and her companion could only think of Aunt Sally’s declaration, made to him at breakfast, that Sobrante was “bewitched.”