Reining in suddenly, he asked, “D’you ever take a drink?”
Gordon looked surprised. “Why, yes, on occasion. But you don’t mean to say—”
“Come on!” Sliver’s manner was quite that of the “mysterious stranger” of melodrama who demands absolute faith in those he is about to befriend. It is feared, however, that both it and his thought, “It’s a fine chance to try him out,” cloaked certain strong spirituous desires.
Quarter of an hour’s heavy scrambling up and down rutted cattle tracks brought them out in the fonda dooryard. From above Gordon had noted its golden walls nestling beside the stream in a bower of foliage. His eyes now went, first to the two ancianos, a wrinkled old man and woman, who dozed in the shade of the ramada; then to the girl who knelt by the stream pounding her soiled linen on its smooth boulders. Though he knew Spain only through pictures, the tinkling bells of a mule-train going up the cañon added the last touch, vividly raised in his mind the country inns of the Aragonian mountains. But for her darker colors the girl with her shapely poundage might easily have been one of their lusty daughters. She had risen at the sight of Sliver. With unerring instinct she now walked inside, let down the wooden bar window, and set out a bottle of tequila.
Through all, her big dusky eyes never left Gordon. With what would have been brazenness in a white girl she studied him. But her gaze was wide and curious as the stare of a deer, and caused him no offense. When their eyes met, she smiled, but, unskilled in the ways of her kind, he missed both its invitation and question till Sliver put it in words.
“She wants to know who you are an’ all about you,” he translated her rapid Spanish, in which her small hands, satin arms and shoulders played as large a part as her tongue. “She says her father an’ mother are about ready to cash in. If you’ll stay here an’ be her man, you’ll stan’ right in line for the fonda.”
It was sprung so suddenly, Gordon gasped. “Cash in?—the fonda? Say! You’re fooling?”
Sliver raised his right hand. “Take my oath!”
“Then she’s fooling.”
“Nary!” Sliver grinned. “She’s serious as a New England housewife in chase of a bedbug.”