“Go! go!” she cried, pushing him. “Take your olla.”
Upon the lightest passing puff of sentiment the Southern breast can heave with every genuine symptom of storm, except wreck. Of course she stirred his gregarious heart. Was she not lovely and he twenty-two? He went down the natural stairs and came slowly up with the water, stopping a step below her. “Lolita,” he said, “don’t you love me at all? not a very little?”
“You are my dearest, oldest friend, Luis,” she said, looking at him with such full sweetness that his eyes fell. “But why do you pretend five beans make ten?”
“Of course they only make ten with gringos.”
She held up a warning finger.
“Oh yes, oh yes! Strangers make fine lovers!” With this he swelled to a fond, dangerous appearance, and muttered, “It is not difficult to kill a man, Lolita.”
“Fighting! after what I told you!” Lolita stooped and kissed her cousin Luis, and he instantly made the most of that chance.
“As often as you please,” he said, as she released herself angrily, and then a stroke of sound struck their two hearts still. They jumped apart, trembling. Some of the rock slide had rattled down and plunged into the Tinaja with a gulping resonance. Loitering strings of sand strewed after it, and the boy’s and girl’s superstitious eyes looked up from the ringed, waving water to the ledge. Lolita’s single shriek of terror turned to joy as she uttered it.
“I thought—I thought you would not come!” she cried out.
The dismounted horseman above made no sign of understanding her words. He stepped carefully away from the ledge his foot had crumbled, and they saw him using his rifle like a staff, steadying its stock in successive niches, and so working back to his horse. There he slid the rifle into its leather sling along the left side of his saddle.