Around the fires, after a cup of hot coffee, amid the odors of a plentiful supper, recounting the evening's adventure to Mrs. Stanley, Coronado was at his best. How he rolled out the English language! Our mother tongue hardly knew itself, it ran so fluently and sounded so magniloquently and lied so naturally. He praised everybody but himself; he praised Clara, Thurstane, and the two soldiers and the horses; he even said a flattering word or two for Divine Providence. Clara especially, and the whole of her heroic, more than human sex, demanded his enthusiastic admiration. How she had borne the terrors of the night and the desert! "Ah, Mrs. Stanley! only you women are capable of such efforts."
Aunt Maria's Olympian head nodded, and her cheerful face, glowing with tea and the camp fires, confessed "Certainly!"
"What nonsense, Coronado!" said Clara. "I was horribly frightened, and you know it."
Aunt Maria frowned with surprise and denial. "Absurd, child! You were not frightened at all. Of course you were not. Why, even if you had been slightly timorous, you had your cousin to protect you."
"Ah, Mrs. Stanley, I am a poor knight-errant," said Coronado. "We Mexicans are no longer formidable. One man of your Anglo-Saxon blood is supposed to be a better defence than a dozen of us. We have been subdued; we must submit to depreciation. I must confess, in fact, that I had my fears. I was greatly relieved on my cousin's account when I heard the voice of our military chieftain here."
Then came more flattery for Ralph, with proper rations for the two privates. Those faithful soldiers—he must show his gratitude to them; he had forgotten them in the basest manner. "Here, Pedronillo, take these cigaritos to privates Kelly and Shubert, with my compliments. Begging your permission, Lieutenant. Thank you."
"Pooty tonguey man, that Seenor," observed Captain Phineas Glover to Mrs. Stanley, when the Mexican went off to his blankets.
"Yes; a very agreeable and eloquent gentleman," replied the lady, wishing to correct the skipper's statement while seeming to assent to it.
"Jess so," admitted Glover. "Ruther airy. Big talkin' man. Don't raise no sech our way."
Captain Glover was not fully aware that he himself had the fame of possessing an imagination which was almost too much for the facts of this world.