Presently Snowball appeared with the dead rabbit in his teeth. Dropping it on the ground, he looked up at the dogs, as much as to say, "There! Can't I hunt rabbits as well as you do?" Then they all three, the two dogs and he, fell to eating the rabbit in the friendliest manner.
"Don't you think!" cried Jusy. "He's been hunting this way, with these dogs, all this time. You see they are so big they can't get in under the bridge, and he can; so they drive the rabbits in under there, and he goes in and gets them. Isn't he smart? Harry first saw him doing it two weeks ago, he says. He didn't know it was our cat, and he wondered whose it could be. But Snowball and the dogs are great friends. They go together all the time; and wherever he is, if he hears them bark, he knows they've started up something, and he comes flying! I think it is just splendid!"
"Poor little thing!" said Rea, looking at the fast-disappearing rabbit.
"Why, you eat them yourself!" shouted Jusy. "You said it was as good as chicken, the other day. It isn't any worse for cats and dogs to eat them, than it is for us; is it, Uncle George?"
"I think Jusy has the best of the argument this time, pet," said Uncle George, looking fondly at Jusy.
"Girls are always that way," said Harry politely. "My sisters are just so. They can't bear to see anything killed."
After this day, Rea spent most of her time in the cañon, watching the men at work on Ysidro's house.
The cañon was a wild place; it was a sort of split in the rocky sides of the mountain; at the top it was not much more than two precipices joined together, with just room enough for a brook to come down. You can see in the picture where it was, though it looks there like little more than a groove in the rocks. But it was really so big in some places that huge sycamore trees grew in it, and there were little spaces of good earth, where Mr. Connor had planted orchards.
It was near these, at the mouth of the cañon, that he put Ysidro's house. It was built out of mud bricks, called adobe, as near as possible like Ysidro's old house,—two small rooms, and a thatched roof made of reeds, which grew in a swamp.
But Mr. Connor did not call it Ysidro's house. He called it Rea's house; and the men called it "the señorita's house." It was to be her own, Mr. Connor said,—her own to give as a present to Ysidro and Carmena.