“Beasts or humans, all one to your lips. Well, no matter. It’s nature. Some are made that foolish way. As for me–old horses––”
“Wolfgang Winkler, shame! Now, sir, you’ll wait till you ask before I kiss you again!”
“Then I ask right quick. Now! Eh? No? Well, before you go then, to prove you bear no malice; and because I’ll show you a new vein I didn’t show Antonio. Ach! He’ll mine his own coal when once he comes–‘the master’–as he said! And so I think, though I know not, will all the others say. Sobrante will not be Sobrante with us all gone. So?”
“You’ll not be gone. It is my mother’s.”
“He is big and strong. He can plot evil, I believe.”
Wolfgang spoke as if he were disclosing a mystery and not a fact well known to all who really knew the Senor Bernal.
“I will be stronger. He shall not hurt my mother. I will fight the world for her and for my brother!”
The miner had been arranging the rope upon the windlass and now held the rude little car steady with his foot.
“Step in.”
“Is he below? Down in the mine?”