“There! See how you blush because I want to learn an honest trade, and yet see how your people, the Americans, deride us, the Spanish, for being indolent, unwilling to work. For my part, I am willing to prove that I will work at anything that is not absolutely repulsive, to earn a living.”
“But how did you come to select that trade?”
“Because to go down town I had to pass by the houses of the railroad millionaires which have been in process of construction. There are two Californians from Santa Barbara, whom I know, working there, and to see them earning their two dollars per day, while I have been losing months in search of more gentlemanly work to do, suggested to me the idea of also earning my two dollars a day while the gentlemanly occupation is being found. Then I thought, too, that I might learn to be an architect, perhaps.”
“That is why you have been reading those books on architecture?”
“Yes, and I think I understand a good deal about it already, but I'll combine practice with theory. The thing now is, as Tano is sick, I must go home.”
“Yes, let us go. I don't like the idea of your being a mason. Give it up. I think I'd rather see you plowing.”
“Yes; in my own land, you mean. Don't be proud. Let me work a little while longer at my trade, and we'll go home.”
But Lizzie was not willing he should, though she said nothing more about it to him. She wrote to Doña Josefa, saying that if she could spare fifty dollars, to, please, send that sum to her to enable them to come home.
There would be ten days, however, before she could get Doña Josefa's reply. This was not so agreeable, but Lizzie thought she would get ready to start as soon as the money came.
The cause of Victoriano's second severe attack of lameness, of which he spoke in his letter, was again exposure—exposure to cold and dampness. About the same time that Gabriel was trying to be a mason, and working as a common day laborer at two dollars per day, Victoriano had been pruning trees, fixing fences, repairing irrigating ditches and plowing. He had only two men to help him, so he worked very hard, in fact, entirely too hard for one so unused to labor. Work broke him down.