On nearing the mine a strange feeling of tenseness filled the girls and Carlitos; and yet that was not surprising, as the mine had been the scene of the most thrilling adventures they had ever experienced. It was here that they had been rescued from the treacherous mine foreman who had stolen the mine from Carlitos’s father.
On their arrival at the great stone house that this foreman had so proudly built for his own use, they found José’s wife, Maria, the nurse who had reared Carlitos as one of her family. Though she was only a poor ignorant woman of the peon class, the girls as well as Carlitos loved her.
“Maria has a heart of gold,” Jo Ann told Miss Prudence as they watched her enfold Carlitos in her arms and kiss him on each cheek. “She loves him as she does her own Pepito and her girls.”
A few minutes later Maria proudly showed Carlitos to his room, into which she had put the best of everything, then took Miss Prudence and the girls to adjoining rooms, which looked bare and forbidding with their concrete floors, scant furniture, and curtainless, iron-barred windows.
“Looks like a soldiers’ barracks,” Miss Prudence said crisply after a swift glance about.
Jo Ann laughed, then said, “You should have seen this house as it was the first time I saw it. There was a grand piano in every room with a game rooster tied to one of the piano legs.”
Miss Prudence gasped. “A rooster in every room! Heavens! You mean to say this whole house was a chicken coop?”
“Not exactly. It was just that Mexican foreman’s idea of the luxurious life. He loved music and cock fighting, so he wanted the pianos and roosters handy.”
“Heavens!” gasped Miss Prudence again. “Why, I must fumigate this whole house, clean it with Old Dutch Cleanser, Lysol——”
“Oh, Maria cleaned it long ago—thoroughly,” broke in Jo Ann quickly, seeing that the anxious-eyed Maria was watching Miss Prudence’s frown of evident disapproval and was worried. She turned now to Maria and said in Spanish, “The house is very clean. You have worked hard.”