"I believe you are right again," said Mr. Page. "I should like to talk with you some other time."
"Thank you," said Dionysio. "It will also give me pleasure."
That evening the children took a walk with their father and mother in search of eggs. They were directed to a dilapidated brush-house at some distance from their camping place. It was said the eggs there were particularly large and fresh. They could not find it at first and went considerably out of their way. At length they came to the place, the most forlorn-looking dwelling they had yet seen. It was quite extensive, however, open on three sides, and with a hole in the roof for ascending smoke from a bare fireplace. Two heaps of ragged and dirty bed-clothing lay close to the smouldering coals. A little farther away, almost out of sight, was a cot. An old man lay on one heap of rags, an old woman crouched near the fire. A little girl, very pretty but very dirty, with beautiful large brown eyes and long black hair, sat near the old woman, still as a statue. They all seemed to be asleep.
"Have you any eggs to sell?" asked Mr. Page.
The old woman rose from the ground. She was crippled, and appeared bent nearly double. She called her husband, who with great labor also got up from his heap of rags. The child, seeing the bucket in Walter's hand, cried out in Spanish:
"Huevos, huevos!"[B] The old people screamed at each other in a patois of Spanish and Indian, principally the latter. Then the child, in obedience to some words from the grandmother, asked, "How many?" "A couple of dozen," was the reply. The little one disappeared into the darkness in the rear of the dwelling, faintly illumined by the dying fire.
She presently issued forth, carrying the eggs in her apron. She counted them into the pail, and Mr. Page placed a quarter in her hand. The old woman snatched it eagerly from the child and thrust it into a bag which she took from her bosom. Nothing could have been more squalid or uncomfortable than the hut, nothing more unlovely than the inhabitants with the exception of the child, whose beauty and innocence neither dirt nor squalor could destroy.
The old man began to busy himself with the fire, throwing some brush upon it, while his wife produced a blackened coffee-pot from one corner and put it on the coals. They gave no more attention to their visitors than as if they did not exist.
"One would think they did not know we were here," said Walter.
"Probably they mean that we should go," suggested his father. "Now that we have the eggs there is no excuse for our staying."