Don Joaquin had two reasons for surveying with conditional approval the idea of marrying Sarella—when he should have made up his mind, which he had not yet done. One was to please himself: the other was in order that he might have a son. Mariquita's sex had always been against her. Before her arrival he had decided that his child must be a boy, and her being a girl was out of place. He disliked making money for some other man's wife.
CHAPTER VII.
Jack did not like Sarella, and so it was fortunate for that young person that Jack's opinion was of no sort of consequence. He had been longer on the range than anyone there except Don Joaquin, and he did much that would, if he had been a different sort of man, have entitled him to consider himself foreman. But he received smaller wages than anyone and never dreamt of being foreman. He was believed never to have had any other name but Jack, and was known never to have had but one suit of clothes, and his face and hands were much shabbier than his clothes, owing to a calendar of personal accidents. "That happened," he would say, "in the year the red bull horned my eye out," or "I mind—'twas in the Jenoorey that my leg got smashed thro' Black Peter rollin' on me...." He had been struck in the jaw by a splinter from a tree that had itself been struck by lightning, and the scar he called his "June mark." A missing finger of his right hand he called his Xmas mark because it was on Christmas Day that the gun burst which shot it off. These, and many other scars and blemishes, would have marred the beauty of an Antinoüs, and Jack had always been ugly.
But, shabby as he was, he was marvellously clean, and Mariquita was very fond of him. His crooked body held a straight heart, loyal and kind, and a child's mind could not be cleaner. No human being suspected that Jack hated his master, whom he served faithfully and with stingily rewarded toil: and he hated him not because he was stingy to himself, but because Jack adored Mariquita, and accused her father of indifference to her. He was angry with him for leaving her alone to do all the work, and angry because nothing was ever done for her, and no thought taken of her.
When Sarella and Gore came, Jack hoped that the young man would marry Mariquita and take her away—though he would be left desolate. Thus Mariquita would be happy—and her father be punished, for Jack clearly perceived that Don Joaquin did not care for Gore, and he did not perceive that Mariquita's departure might be convenient to her father. But Jack could not see that Gore himself did much to carry out that marriage scheme. That the young man set a far higher value on Mariquita than her father had ever done, Jack did promptly understand; but he could perceive no advances and watched him with impatience.
As for Sarella, Jack was jealous of her importance: jealous that the old man made more of his wife's niece than of his own daughter; jealous that she had much less to do, and specially jealous that she had much smarter clothes. Jack could not see Sarella's beauty; had he possessed a looking-glass it might have been supposed to have dislocated his eye for beauty, but he possessed none—and he thought Mariquita as beautiful as the dawn on the prairie.
To do her justice, Sarella was civil to the battered old fellow, but he didn't want her civility, and was ungrateful for it. Yet her civility was to prove useful. Jack lived in a shed at the end of the stables, where he ate and slept, and mended his clothes sitting up in bed, and wearing (then only) a large pair of spectacles, though half a pair would have been enough. He cooked his own food, though Mariquita would have cooked it for him if he would have let her.
Sarella loved good eating, and on her coming it irritated her to see so much excellent food "made so little of." Presently she gave specimens of her own superior science, and Don Joaquin approved, as did the cowboys.
"Jack," she said to him one day, "do you ever eat anything but stew from year's end to year's end?"