The girls, on seeing him, quickened their steps, eager for his talk, and when they were in the porch they all began to tease him for a story to pass away the time still left them before nightfall—not much, for the setting sun was slanting his rays across the earth, and the shadows of the mountains grew larger moment by moment all along the plain.
Uncle Gregorio smiled as he listened to the pleading of the lasses, who, having once coaxed from him a promise to tell them something, let down their water-jars upon the ground, and sitting all about him, made a circle with the patriarch in the centre; then he began to talk to them after this fashion:
“I will not tell you a story, for though several come into my mind this minute, they have to do with such weighty matters that the attention of a group of giddypates, like you, would never hold out to the end; besides, with the afternoon so nearly gone, I would not have time to tell them through. So I will give you instead a piece of good counsel.”
“Good counsel!” exclaimed the girls with undisguised vexation. “Bah! it isn’t to hear good counsel that we are stopping here; when we have need of that, his Reverence the priest will give it to us.”
“But perhaps,” went on the old man with his habitual smile, speaking in his broken, tremulous voice, “his Reverence the priest will not know how to give you, this once, such timely advice as Uncle Gregorio; for the priest, busy with his liturgies and litanies, will not have noticed, as I have noticed, that every day you go earlier to the fountain and come back later.”
The girls looked at one another with hardly perceptible smiles of derision, while some of those who were placed behind Uncle Gregorio touched finger to forehead, accompanying the action with a significant gesture.
“And what harm do you find in our lingering at the fountain to chat a minute with our friends and neighbors?” asked one of them. “Do slanders, perhaps, go about the village because the lads step out on to the road for a pleasant word or two, or come offering to carry our water-jars till we are in sight of the houses?”
“Ay, people talk,” replied the old man to the girl who had asked him the question for them all. “The old dames of the village murmur that to-day the girls resort for fun and frolic to a spot whither they used to go swiftly and in fear to draw the water, since only there can water be had; and I find it much amiss that you are losing little by little the dread which the vicinity of the fountain inspires in all your elders,—for so it might come to pass that some time the night should overtake you there.”
Uncle Gregorio spoke these last words in a tone so full of mystery that the lasses opened wide their frightened eyes to look at him, and with blended curiosity and mischief, again pressed their questions:
“The night! But what goes on in that place by night that you should scare us so and throw out such dark and dreadful hints of what might befall? Do you think the wolves will eat us?”