"Hi tunket!" he murmured. "Don't these folks down here beat ev'rything you ever saw Janice?"
The old women mourners scuttled out of the way. A band of three musicians, whose instruments consisted of a cornet, a piccolo, and a drum, appeared and headed the procession. All the village fell in behind the band and the pall-bearers, two and two, and when they turned out of the main street to mount the hill toward the cemetery, Carlitos cranked up again and the car went on, leaving the funeral cortège marching blithely to the strains of a well-known Mexican air.
The wail of the cornet, the squealing of the piccolo, and the rattle of the drum accompanied the automobile out of town and a long way into the country. They began to mount into higher ground the farther they got from the river. It was almost sunset as Carlitos had prophesied when they saw La Gloria lying above them on a cheerful mesa.
The town was nearly ringed around by green trees. The main streets were paved. The plaza, or central square, was gay with shops and there was a bandstand. Señor Tomas Lopez's hotel was about on a par with the Pez hostelry at Fort Hancock.
But after the dusty and nerve-racking ride in the automobile a chance for quiet, a bath, and relaxation between the clean coarse sheets of a bed, seemed heavenly to Janice Day. She really did not want to get up for supper.
Marty, however, kept calling to her and would not be denied. He had found out that there was beefsteak—of a sort—for supper.
"I never did realize before," he sadly admitted, "how tired a feller could get of just beans. I never want ma, when I get home again, to have 'em on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings—never! Shucks! I feel like I was turning into a bean myself. I bet if you planted me I'd sprout into a beanstalk."
They sat in the window till late in the evening and watched the people in the square. There was a band and it played some of the popular airs they were familiar with in the North. But when it essayed the native music Janice liked it better.
Old and young promenaded, the girls in bright costumes, the young caballeros in garments quite as gay—sashes, short velvet jackets, sombreros with cords of silver bullion, and some of them with clattering silver spurs on their heels. Here and there scuffled an Indian through the throng in a brightly dyed serape. The older women sat on benches or in the arched doorways, many of them smoking big, black cigars. And the children were everywhere, but more nearly dressed than they had been at the Border. Up here on the mesa the nights were chilly.
They got out of La Gloria very early in the morning, for Carlitos assured them it would be a long day's journey to San Cristoval even if nothing happened to the automobile.