“She is an abominable woman!” Leoncia broke forth irrelevantly. “I hated her from the first.”
“My! What a spitfire! I hate to think how much you would have hated her had I married her instead of Francis.”
“We’d better follow them,” she put an end to the discussion.
And Henry, very much be-puzzled, clasped her tightly and leaped off into the white turmoil of water.
On the bank of the Gualaca River sat two Indian girls fishing. Just up-stream from them arose the precipitous cliff of one of the buttresses of the lofty mountains. The main stream flowed past in chocolate-colored spate; but, directly beneath them, where they fished, was a quiet eddy. No less quiet was the fishing. No bites jerked their rods in token that the bait was enticing. One of them, Nicoya, yawned, ate a banana, yawned again, and held the skin she was about to cast aside suspended in her hand.
“We have been very quiet, Concordia,” she observed to her companion, “and it has won us no fish. Now shall I make a noise and a splash. Since they say ‘what goes up must come down,’ why should not something come up after something has gone down? I am going to try. There!”
She threw the banana peel into the water and lazily watched the point where it had struck.
“If anything comes up I hope it will be big,” Concordia murmured with equal laziness.
And upon their astonished gaze, even as they looked, arose up out of the brown depths a great white hound. They jerked their poles up and behind them on the bank, threw their arms about each other, and watched the hound gain the shore at the lower end of the eddy, climb the sloping bank, pause to shake himself, and then disappear among the trees.