“So he is not dead,” murmured Luis, “and we need not live alone.”
“Come down!” the girl called, and waved her hand. But the new-comer stood by his horse like an apparition.
“Perhaps he is dead, after all,” Luis said. “You might say some of the Mass, only he was a heretic. But his horse is Mexican, and a believer.”
Lolita had no eyes or ears for Luis any more. He prattled away on the stone stairs of the Tinaja, flippant after a piercing shock of fear. To him, unstrung by the silence and the Black Cross and the presence of the sinking pool, the stone had crashed like a clap of sorcery, and he had started and stared to see—not a spirit, but a man, dismounted from his horse, with a rifle. At that his heart clutched him like talons, and in the flashing spasm of his mind came a picture—smoke from the rifle, and himself bleeding in the dust. Costly love-making! For Luis did not believe the rifle to have been brought to the ledge there as a staff, and he thanked the Virgin for the stone that fell and frightened him, and made him move suddenly. He had chattered himself cool now, and ready. Lolita was smiling at the man on the hill, glowing without concealment of her heart’s desire.
“Come down!” she repeated. “Come round the side.” And, lifting the olla, she tapped it, and signed the way to him.
“He has probably brought too much white flour for Uncle Ramon to care to climb more than he must,” said Luis. But the man had stirred at last from his sentinel stillness, and began leading his horse down. Presently he was near enough for Luis to read his face. “Your gringo is a handsome fellow, certainly,” he commented. “But he does not like me to-day.”
“Like you! He doesn’t think about you,” said Lolita.
“Ha! That’s your opinion?”
“It is also his opinion—if you’ll ask him.”
“He is afraid of Cousin Luis,” stated the youth.