By and by she married Bruno. What would you? Her father and mother wished it; Bruno loved her; he had money now to provide well for a wife; and there was the little farm that his parents would give him the day when he should bring home his bride. So, after the manner of her kind, she finally yielded to his wooing; and one day they were wed in the little church on the hill where they had both been christened when babies.
She bore him children, and was a good mother—a good wife. She lived to be an old woman, and her hair grew streaked with gray; yet to the last day of her life she had a way of falling asleep with the fingers of her left hand slipped under her cheek, and her lips touching the upturned palm.
It was her one disloyalty to Bruno.
And so it was they found her lying on that morning that she did not waken.
THE VENGEANCE OF LUCAS
THE little adobe house stood flush with the street, halfway between the business houses and the residence portion of the town which turned its back on the sand and sage-covered hills that—breaking into gray waves—far off cast themselves on the beach of blue skyland in great breakers of snow-crested mountains.
At the side of the house was a dooryard—so small!—beaten hard and smooth as a floor, and without a tree or a bush. There was no grass even at the edge of the sturdy little stream that ran across the square enclosure, talking all day to the old-faced baby in its high chair under the shake-covered kitchen porch. All day the stream laughed and chattered noisily to the owl-eyed baby, and chuckled and gurgled as it hurried across the yard and burrowed under the weather-bleached boards of the high fence, to find its way along the edge of the street, and so on to the river a quarter of a mile below. But the wee woman-child, owl-eyed and never complaining, sat through the long sunshine hours without one smile on its little old face, and never heeding the stream.
As the days grew hotter, its little thin hands became thinner, and it ate less and less of the boiled arroz and papas the young mother sometimes brought when she came to dip water.