“Her name is Dolores. I don’t know where she lives,” confessed Patsy. “I asked her but she wouldn’t tell me. She said it was forbidden. I asked her to come to Las Golondrinas to see us, but she said that was forbidden, too. She read your book, Auntie. I told you she wasn’t ignorant.”
“What did she say about the ‘Oriole’?” interposed Bee, before Miss Carroll could frame an adequate reply to Patsy’s astounding announcement.
“I——Why, the idea! I forgot to ask her,” stammered Patsy. “I saw her pick up the book and run away with it. I started after her. Then I fell almost on that horrible snake and——”
“Snake!” went up in shocked unison from four throats.
“Why, yes.” Patsy colored, then grinned boyishly. “I was going to tell you about it in a minute. I caught my foot in some vines and pitched into the bushes. I stirred up a rattler. It began to sing and Dolores ran to me and dragged me away from the place before it had time to bite me. Then she killed it. It was as thick as my wrist and eight feet long. She said it was a diamond——”
“I must say you have very peculiar ideas of safety,” interrupted her aunt.
Despite the dry satire of her tones, Miss Martha was feeling rather sick over Patsy’s near disaster. In consequence, she was inclined toward tardy appreciation of the “young savage.”
“This girl,” she continued in a dignified but decidedly mollified voice. “I feel that we ought to do something for her. You say she insists that it is forbidden her to come to Las Golondrinas. Did she explain why?”
“No. I wanted awfully to ask her, but I felt sure that she wouldn’t tell me a thing. There’s a mystery connected with her. I know there is.”
“Nonsense!” Miss Martha showed instant annoyance at this theory. “I dare say her parents have merely forbidden her to trespass upon the property of strangers. I have been told that these persons known down South as ‘poor whites’ still feel very resentful toward Northerners on account of the Civil War. The old folks have handed down this hatred to the younger generations. This girl’s parents have no doubt learned that we are from the North.”