"I do not know them," she said.
"Hum!" the general remarked sarcastically, "you only know people, it appears, by their baptismal names. That's worth knowing."
This time the girl really blushed, and retired in great confusion. Don Sebastian made a sign to a peon who was standing respectfully a few paces off.
"Gregorio," he said, "go and present the compliments of General Don Sebastian Guerrero to the Señores Don Louis and Don Cornelio, and beg them to honour him with a visit. You understand me?"
The peon bowed and went out.
"We must be polite with these people," the general observed. "Now that the discovery of the Californian placers has overthrown all classes of society, who knows with whom we may have to deal?"
And he accompanied this remark by a sarcastic laugh, in which the captain, as the worthy Mexican he was, noisily joined.
We will observe parenthetically that General Guerrero, like the majority of his countrymen, professed the most inveterate hatred for Europeans, a hatred which nothing justified, unless it was that superiority which the Creoles are obliged to recognise in the Europeans—a superiority which they submit to unwillingly, but before which they are forced to bow their heads.
Several minutes elapsed, and then the peon returned.
"Well?" the general asked him.