With an angry little cry, which made more than one muleteer turn to look at her with, “What has happened to thee?” on his lips, Chinita sped across the court, and caught the arm of Pedro, who was standing dejectedly outside the great gate. He crossed himself as she appeared, and his face lighted up, then clouded again as she cried, “Where are the soldiers? When did they go? Why did no one awaken me?”
The man pointed with a disdainful gesture across the plain. Florencia was standing at the door of her hut, calling in a rage to a neighbor that those worthless vagabonds had robbed her of her last handful of toasted corn; and Pedro began to explain to Chinita in his slow way that the good friends of the night before had naturally enough demanded something from the housewives upon which to breakfast, and that instead of giving it to them quietly, and thanking the Virgin that after drinking the soup they had not taken the pot, the foolish women must needs scold and bewail, as though soldiers should be saints and live on air, and as if this was the first raid that ever had been heard of, instead of a mere frolic, very different from that of the month before, when the forces of the clergy had carried off a thousand bushels of maize, without as much as a “God repay you.”
Chinita gazed eagerly toward the east, and presently burst into passionate tears. The sun, which a moment before had shown a tiny red disk above the hills, flooded the plain with light, and dazzled her vision. Through it she saw some rapidly moving figures. The man she sought was already miles away. Silently but bitterly she reproached herself. She had slept like an insensate lump, and suffered to escape her the man who could have told her so much, whom she would have forced to speak. She could, as her eyes became accustomed to the light, distinguish his very figure in the clear atmosphere; and yet he and all she would have learned were so far away.
“What wouldst thou?” demanded Pedro, gruffly; “the soldiers have carried off nothing of thine! Heaven forefend! Go to the hut and drink the atolé if there is any left, and give God the thanks!”
The broad daylight had cleared the mind of Pedro of all the sentimental fears of the night. The glamour had passed away; there stood Chinita with the old familiar ragged clothing upon her, to be talked with, caressed it might be, certainly scolded with the mock severity of old. Yes, it was the same fiery, uncertain, irascible Chinita, who, clearing her eyes of their unusual tears with a backward sweep of her small brown hand, ran down the hill,—not to the hut where Florencia stood with the water-jar, beckoning her, but in quite another direction, to join the little crowd of sympathizing friends who were gathered at the door of the silversmith.
Pepé was standing there with a gayly caparisoned donkey, destined to bear the novia to the village some eight miles distant, where the lazy priest who divided his time between the sinners of that point and Tres Hermanos, had consented to earn a royal fee by uniting two poor peasants in holy matrimony. “It is but for once,” Gabriel had hopefully remarked; “and though one runs in debt for the wedding, one can hold one’s head above one’s neighbors, to say nothing of dying in peace, if a bull’s horn finds its way some unlucky day between one’s ribs.”
Gabriel was a man who honored the proprieties, and Juana was well pleased with the good fortune that had awarded her to him; though he was twice her age, and had a squint which made ludicrous his most amorous glances.
“What has happened?” cried Pepé in a disappointed tone, as Chinita darted past him. “Didst thou not say thou wouldst ride with Juana? She has been waiting for thee this half hour. The novio will be on his way before her if we tarry longer, and thou knowest what that portends. The impatient lover becomes the husband never appeased! the wife shall wait many a day for him.”
“Bah!” returned Chinita, “if Juana were of my mind the novio would wait so long that her turn to play at paciencia would never arrive.”
“Go to!” cried a woman who stood near, “who would have imagined thou wouldst be so envious, Chinita; and thou but a child yet? But thou art one that hast been brought up between cotton, and expectest the soft places all thy life.”