“If you touch me again,” blazed the girl, “you’d better keep awake. I’ll kill you if I ever catch you asleep!”
A rabbit at bay is at least a surprise, and the brute’s jaw dropped, the upraised arm fell back, and cursing and blustering, he strolled forth into the court. With a champion hovering near, there had suddenly come to the girl the power to hate bravely. Heretofore she had feared her stepfather as the savage who dares not hate the evil powers moving in the darkness lest they perceive his hatred and smite him afresh.
“Daughter! daughter!” wailed the frightened mother, “that was not a respectful manner to address a parent. When I was a girl it was the custom—”
“Si, madre,” responded Teodota, patiently, as she indited her answer to her lover with a burnt match on a scrap of wrapping paper. Roughly, but eloquently, she sketched two little imploring hands, and flung the epistle from the window with childlike confidence that whatever powers had brought Pablo’s letter would convey her reply.
It was a transformed Teodota that stood just out of the heavy wooden gates of the court the next morning, apparently loitering in idle contemplation of the street, where Latin infants disported themselves on the sidewalks, and soft Spanish speech was heard in every doorway, but in reality her whole body was charged with excitement and impatience. Personal neatness in a board pen devoted chiefly to the manufacture of tamales could not be expected to attain any high standard, but her appearance this morning bore eloquent testimony to the civilizing power of love. Her abundant black hair, moist and glossy, rippled on her shoulders, with a red geranium glowing in its shadows. The billows of chemise between the distant buttons were snowy white, the worst rents in the tattered pink gown had been roughly mended, and even the blue rebozo lying across her shoulders had taken on a faded purity.
As though to set the seal of heavenly approval on such cleanliness, another communication from Pablo was found pinned to the rebozo when she drew it in from the window where it had swung to dry. That the small boy was not in sight was ample proof that it had come by supernatural agency.
This last letter said more eloquently than mere words could have done: “I await thee at the tunnel.” Yet with seeming nonchalance, Teodota watched the squat, receding figure of her stepfather abroad on the only tasks compatible with his dignity and tastes—the delivery of the tamales to a dealer down the street, and the collection of the revenue therefrom. The very instant, however, that he disappeared into a doorway, she was off in the opposite direction, wrapping her rebozo about her head as she went, and giving the end a final fling over her shoulder.
At the Mexican end of the tunnel, just beyond the Chinese laundry, but before one enters the cavernous chill and shadow, stands an unroofed adobe[8] hovel close to the highway. Teodota, hurrying by this ruin, thrilled from head to foot to hear her name.
“Pablo!” she gasped. Her soul rode the wave of joy to its crest; then dropped back into the trough of despair. “I took you for gente decente! How fine you are! How elegant! A grand señor!”
The tall, handsome Aztec looked down complacently at his black suit and the ends of his red tie, not displeased at the impression he made.