“The saints alone know, and not me!” she returned miserably. “I think she is scared that it was the Señor Rhodes who shooting Don Filipe, the vaqueros thinking that! But she tells no one, and she is unhappy. Also there is reason. That poor little one has the ranchos, but have you hear how the debts are so high all the herds can never pay? That is how they are saying now about Granados and La Partida, and at the last our señorita will have no herds, and no ranchos, and no people but me. Madre de Dios! I try to think of her in a little adobe by the river with only frijoles in the dinner pot, and I no see it that way. And I not seeing it other way. How you think?”
“I don’t, it’s too new,” confessed Pike. “Who says this?”
“The Señor Henderson. I hear him talk with Señor Conrad, who has much sorrow because the Don Filipe made bad contracts and losing the money little and little, and then the counting comes, and it is big, very big!”
“Ah! the Señor Conrad has much sorrow, has he?” queried Pike, “and Billie is getting her face to the wall and crying? That’s queer. Billie always unloaded her troubles on me, and you say there was none of this weeping till I came back?”
“That is so, señor.”
“Cause why?”
“Quien sabe? She was making a long letter to Señor Rhodes in Sonora,––that I know. He sends no word, so––I leave it to you, señor, it takes faith and more faith when a man is silent, and the word of a killing is against him.”
“Great Godfrey, woman! He never got a letter, he knows nothing of a killing. How in hell––” Then the captain checked himself as he saw the uselessness of protesting to Doña Luz. “Where’s Billie?”
Billie was perched on a window seat in the sala, her eyes were more than a trifle red, and she appeared deeply engrossed in the pages of a week-old country paper.
“I see here that Don José Perez of Hermosillo is to marry Doña Dolores Terain, the daughter of the general,” she observed impersonally. “He owns Rancho Soledad, and promises the Sonora people he will drive the rebel Rotil into the sea, and it was but yesterday Tia Luz was telling me of his beautiful wife, Jocasta, who was only a little mountain girl when he rode through her village and saw her first. She is still alive, and it looks to me as if all men are alike!”