“Didn’t Carlitos’ mother tell you to put this in the mail?” Florence asked.
“No. His mamá speak very little Spanish. She only been in Mexico a little time. When she was dying she give this to me and tell me, ‘No let big mean man get this.’”
“Who was the big mean man?” Florence asked, puzzled at this new turn in her story.
The woman broke into a confused account which Florence later translated to Jo Ann. “I can’t make out exactly what she’s talking about, but she says some big man who had something to do with the mine was mean to Carlitos’ mother after her husband had disappeared. She said they were all afraid of him.”
“But that’s no excuse for her not mailing the letter,” Jo Ann said.
“All she understood was to keep this from that man,” Florence explained. “She’d never seen a letter before in her life. She couldn’t read or write. And the American woman couldn’t explain it to her, you know. The only other people at this mine were Indian peons like themselves, so there was no one she could go to.”
“It’s hard to realize that she didn’t know what a letter was when she saw one,” Jo Ann remarked, then looked down at the envelope with renewed interest. “I wish we dared to open this and read it, but of course we can’t do that.”
“No; the only thing for us to do is to mail it now.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Jo Ann replied quickly. “It might get lost. It has to be carried so far before it even gets to a postoffice. Besides, it’s about seven years since this letter was written. Why not write a letter to this address explaining the situation?”
Florence pondered over this plan a moment, then spoke up briskly: “I have a better idea than that. I’ll write to Daddy and explain it all to him and have him telegraph to this Mr. Eldridge in New York. That’ll save lots of time.”