Dunwoodie frowned whimsically. “Don’t say a path. It must be just a trail—a more or less indistinct trail.”
Blanchard looked almost excited. “It’s a path, I tell you!”
And then both men laughed suddenly—though in Dunwoodie’s laughter there was a note of deprecation and regret.
CHAPTER III
And so Harboro and Sylvia went home to the house on the Quemado Road without knowing that the town had washed its hands of them.
Harboro had made certain arrangements which were characteristic of him, perhaps, and which nobody knew anything about. For example, he had employed the most presentable Mexican woman he could find, to make the house homelike. He had taken a little sheaf of corn-husks away from her so that she could not make any cigarettes for a day or two, and he had read her a patient lecture upon ways and means of making a lot of furniture look as if it had some direct relationship with human needs and pleasures. And he had advised and aided her in the preparation of a wedding supper for two. He had ordered grapes from Parras, and figs—black figs, a little withered, and candied tunas. And there was a roast of beef with herbs and chili sauce, and enchalades.
The electric lights were turned on up-stairs and down when they entered the house, and Sylvia had an alarmed moment when she pictured a lot of guests waiting for them. But there proved to be nobody in the house but just they two and the old Mexican woman. Antonia, her name was.
Harboro took her by the hand and led her up-stairs to the door of her room. It didn’t occur to him that Antonia might better have attended to this part of the welcoming. Antonia was busy, and she was not the sort of person to mother a bride, Harboro thought. She wouldn’t have been asked to perform this task in any case. You would have thought that Harboro was dealing with a child rather than a woman—his wife. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to take complete charge of her from the beginning.
She uttered a little cry when she entered the bedroom. There by the bed was her trunk, which she had left at home. She hadn’t known anything about its having been transferred from one house to the other.