“As to that, I penetrate many places where there is no welcome. I am not supersensitive, Señor Rocha, and my feelings cannot be injured easily, I assure you. It will not be necessary for me to ride beside the carreta I see you have ready. I can ride ahead, behind, to one side.”
“This is almost past endurance.”
“You are a wounded man, and of course cannot endure much,” the sergeant observed, whirling on his heel and walking toward the other end of the plaza. Behind him he left a young man with angry face, who gurgled imprecations.
Señorita Anita came from the guest house now, dressed for the journey, and Señora Vallejo walked behind her, still muttering protests against the trip to the rancho at this time. They got in the carreta, and it started out along the road up the valley. Two soldiers rode ahead and two behind.
On one side of the carreta Señor Lopez guided his horse and tried not to show his displeasure; on the other side trotted a young man who talked to the ladies half the time, and spent the other half glowering at the mounted sergeant, who galloped about the country far to one side, now disappearing behind a ledge of rock, now coming into view at the crest of a hill, but always near.
Just behind the carreta rode the neophyte, a bundle of clothing across the mule in front of him. There was frank fear in his face whenever one of the troopers approached him, and always he glanced toward his master as if expecting a signal or command.
The road followed an arroyo for a mile, and then emerged on a broad, open space where cattle grazed, thousands of them dotting the pasturage. Sheep were on the hillsides, and to the left were fields of grain.
“Is it not a splendid inheritance, Señor Rocha?” Señora Vallejo murmured.
“It is, indeed,” he replied, and he showed no great amount of enthusiasm.
Señorita Anita frowned. On this rancho she had been born and reared; here she had played as a child, and here the frailes from the mission had come to teach her. In an enclosed space near the ranch-house her mother was buried, and her father.