The morning after her interview with Essex Mariposa had appeared at breakfast white-cheeked and apathetic. She had eaten nothing, and when questioned as to her state of health had replied that she had passed a sleepless night and had a headache. Mrs. Garcia, the younger, in a dingy cotton wrapper belted by a white apron, shook her head over the coffee-pot and began to tell how the late Juan Garcia had been the victim of headaches due to green wall-paper.
“But,” said Mrs. Garcia, looking up from under the lambrequin of blond curls that adorned her brow, “there’s nothing green in your wall-paper. It’s white, with gold wheat-ears on it. So I don’t see what gives you headaches.”
“Headaches do come from other things besides green wall-paper,” said Pierpont; “I’ve had them from overwork. I’d advise Miss Moreau to give her pupils a week’s holiday. And then she can come down some afternoon and sing for me.”
This was an old subject of discourse at the Garcia table, Mariposa continually refusing the young man’s invitations to let him hear and pass judgment upon her voice. Since he had met her he had heard further details of the recital at the opera-house and the opinion of Lepine, and was openly ambitious to have Mariposa for a pupil. Now she looked up at him with a sudden spark of animation in her eyes.
“I will some day. I’ll come in some afternoon and sing for you—some afternoon when I have no headache,” she added hastily, seeing the prospect of urging in his eyes.
Barron, sitting opposite, had been watching her covertly through the meal. He saw that she ate nothing, and guessed that the headache she pleaded was the result of a wakeful night. The evening before, when he had gone in to see the little boys in bed, he had casually asked them if they had been playing games that afternoon in which shouting had been a prominent feature.
“Indians?” Benito had suggested, sitting up in his cot and scratching the back of his neck; “that’s a hollering game.”
“Any game with screams. When I came in I thought I heard shouts coming from somewhere.”
“That wasn’t us,” said Miguel from his larger bed in the corner. “We was playing burying soldiers in the back yard, and that’s a game where you bury soldiers, cut out of the papers, in the sandy place. There’s no sorter hollering in it. Sometimes we play we’re crying, but that’s quiet.”
“P’raps,” said Benito sleepily, “it was Miss Moreau’s gentleman in the parlor. I let him in. They might have been singing. Now tell us the story about the Indians and the pony express.”