“Sad to relate.”
“And you haven’t even been to see her again?”
“No time.”
She took her answer from his unconcern rather than the words. And yet, as they rode along, she gave him little brooding looks that expressed—perhaps not altogether disbelief so much as that rooted and reasonable doubt which her sex invariably entertains when another woman is in question. As they rode around the end of the spur and proceeded up the cañon her glances grew in frequency; finally settled in a stealthy watch as they approached the fonda.
“There’s your beauty—attired like a bride for her groom.”
Lee nodded at Felicia, who was coming up from the stream with an olla of water gracefully poised on her head. For a cushion she had twisted a handful of scarlet runners into a thick chaplet, and, escaping from under the olla, half a dozen vivid tendrils streaked the black wavy mass of her hair. With her velvet pools of eyes, satiny arms and shoulders, pliant, shapely figure, she might have been a golden Hebe bearing wine to Aztec gods. Small wonder if Gordon stared at the pretty picture overmuch for his companion’s taste.
His interest undoubtedly instigated her addition, “Perhaps she hasn’t lost hope?”
She did not, either, like his laugh, for it seemed just a bit conscious. While drinking a glass of native concoction, barley water flavored with seeds, she kept a stealthy watch that was none the less efficient because masked by gay chatter with the old man and woman who came hobbling out of the house. She saw not only the dark glance that followed and enfolded Gordon in a lingering embrace, but as the girl reached up, handing the glass, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s fob dangling within the golden bosom at the end of a chain of beads.
At first she recognized it only for an American-made trinket. But under pretense of admiring the hand-made lace edging on the girl’s chemisette, she managed another peep and saw the leather worked with Gordon’s monogram in gold.
“Ah, ha! señor!”