“And this little room in the corner?”
“Belongs to the servant,” she mumbled, projecting her lips toward a slatternly young female who was at that moment pursuing a thieving pig from the dungeon-like kitchen.
“Anything will do,” sighed Hays, gazing abstractedly after the servant.
But the landlady was in no mood for crude jokes.
“There is a fine house with rooms and beds just four cuadros on,” she lied, after a long silence. Fortunately this was by no means my first experience with the favorite trick of Spanish-speaking races to be rid of importunate guests, or we might have tramped all night on the mountain top in a cold as penetrating as that of January in our own land. I slipped surreptitiously from under my pack, assuming the ingratiating manner that is the last resort with the apathetic people of the Andes. We were resolved to spend the night there, though it be in walking the floor. Nothing is more fatal than to appear anxious in such situations, however, and we affected indifference and a pretense of having accepted her verdict.
What fine, red-cheeked little girls she had, so pretty and healthy. (Indeed, they looked like Irish children). Was she not from the Cauca? She was. Ah, the magnificent Cauca, the most beautiful.... She was soon lost in a panegyric of her native valley, as she shuffled from kitchen to sewing-machine and back again.
“Magnificent, indeed,” I agreed, “and in only a day or two we shall be there. So what matters a night of freezing in the mountains? By the way, la señora can perhaps sell us a bit of coffee and a bite to eat before we set out to tramp all night?”
She grunted assent and a half-hour later we were seated before a plentiful, if not epicurean, meal. Before we had finished it, she remarked casually that we might “arrange ourselves” in the room with the arrieros. The mule-driver is seldom a pleasant bed-fellow, but compared with a night out of doors, probably with rain, at more than two miles above sea-level, any arrangement was welcome.
We fancied lodging had first been refused us because we were foreigners. Soon after supper we were undeceived. Out of the darkness came the sound of horse’s hoofs, and as it ceased there burst in upon us a handsome young Colombian, of somewhat dissolute features, in the ruana, false trouser-legs, ringing cartwheel spurs, and the other hundred and one details of equipment the rules of society require of a Colombian of “gente decente” rank who travels ahorse. He gave greeting in the explosive speech of his class and requested lodging.
“No hay,” answered the woman, in the identical cold monotone she had used toward us.