"He will throw you," said Raquel. "I will lean out."
Raquel stretched her young form as far out of the window as possible. She could just reach Agueda's forehead. She kissed her gently.
"I thank you, Señorita," said Agueda. She felt the kiss upon her forehead all the way to the plantation; it seemed like a benediction. She did not reason out the cause of her feeling, but it was true that no one of Raquel's class had ever kissed her before.
Agueda rode along her way with quick gait. The plantation of Palmacristi was some miles farther on, and she wished still to see Aneta. On her way toward Palmacristi, and as she mounted the slope leading to the casa, she met no one. Arrived at that splendid estate by the sea, she spurred her horse over the hill and round to the counting-house. This was the place, she had heard, where the Señor was usually to be found. She had seen the Señor at a distance. She thought that she would know him.
At that same hour the Señor Don Gil Silencio-y-Estrada sat within his counting-house. The counting-house was constructed of the boards of the palm, the inner side plain, the outer side curved, as the tree had curved. The bark had not been removed. The roof of the building was also made of palm boards; it was thickly thatched with yagua.
Since the days of the old Don Gil the finca had enlarged and improved. The counting-house stood within its small enclosure, its back against the side of the casa, and though it communicated with the interior of the imposing mahogany mansion, it remained the same palm-board counting-house—that is, to the outside world—that the estate of Palmacristi had ever known.
Two tall palms stood like sentinels upon either side of the low step before the doorway. The palm trees were dead. They had been topped by no green plume of leaves since before the death of the old Don Gil. Now, as then, the carpenter birds made their homes in the decaying shaft. The round beak-made holes, from root to treetop, disclosed numberless heads, if so much as a tap were given the resounding stem of the palm.
No one wondered why Don Gil still used the ancient structure as a counting-house. No one ever wondered at anything at Palmacristi; everything was accepted with quiescence. "The good God wills it," a shrug of the shoulders accompanying the remark, made alike, if a tornado unroofed a house or a peon died of the wounds received at the last garito.[2]
The changes which had taken place at Palmacristi had nothing to say to the condition of the counting-house, or it to them, except that it acceded, somewhat slowly in some cases, to the payment of bills. Since his father's day Don Gil had added much to the estate. Upon the right he had bought more than twenty caballerias from Don Luis Salas—land which marched with his own to the seashore. This included a tall headland, with a sand spit at its base, which pushed itself a half mile out into the sea. This sand spit curved in a hook to the left, and formed a pleasant and safe harbour for boating.
To the north of his inheritance Don Gil had taken in the old estates of La Flor and Provedencia, and at the back of the casa, which already stood high up on the slope, he had extended his possessions over the crest of the hill. Had the original owner of Palmacristi returned on a visit to earth, he would have found his old plantation the center of a magnificent estate, with, however, the same shiftless, careless ways of master and servant that had obtained in his time. This would probably grow worse as his descendants succeeded each other in ownership.