When all the bargaining was over, Quesada and his dorados discovered they had not got off second best. They had acquired five new horses, unfatigued and glossy coated after a fortnight in the barranca. Their own jaded animals had come into the possession of Flammenca and his bucks.
"It would please the young lady who rides with us," said Quesada to the Gypsy chieftain, "if she could change her attire for something more suited to the saddle."
"My Paquita will attend to the matter," returned Flammenca. "Let them go together into one of the tents and find out whether their clothing be fit to barter and whether their two pretty shapes are mates."
The girl, Paquita, had been hovering about Jacinto Quesada all the morning. At breakfast, she had anticipated his every desire, waiting on him with silent devotion. Continually she kept her great dusky eyes upon him, following him everywhere he went with a gaze abject and doglike in its utterness of adoration.
Now, Quesada drew forth a packet of tissue papers and a pouch of tobacco, of a sudden and altogether unexpectedly, she stooped above him and seized the papers and tobacco from his hands. Looking fixedly into his astonished eyes, she rolled a cigarette, wetting the edges with her lips. Then she handed the papelito to him, made a long obeisance, and turned away.
Her father chuckled and gave her the word to take Felicidad apart and find her fit riding clothes. She withdrew, looking over her shoulder at Quesada with passionate Gypsy eyes.
Sometime later, she and Felicidad came out of the tent into which they had vanished, and Felicidad wore a brown jacket and a brown bisected riding skirt, both rather the worse for wear, and Paquita was completely attired in Felicidad's green traveling dress. The Gypsy girl looked very charming in the more conventional attire, what of her nut-brown skin and dye-black hair against the contrasting green.
She walked about the clearing with the grace of a she-leopard, continually smoothing the tight, revealing skirt over her hips, and rearranging and patting her hair which she had put up in imitation of Felicidad. Preening herself thus, she smiled often in a frank and childlike pleasure in herself. But there were no men about to admire her.
Quesada's dorados had gone behind the wagons to currycomb and further polish their new horses. The Roms, every last dishevel-headed and swarthy-faced lad, had left the camp immediately after the conclusion of the horse trading. Led by Pepe Flammenca, they had stalked silently up the barranca, their Mausers and Mannlichers couched tenderly in their arms.
They were bound for the heights above the barranca. There, in the tag-end mountains of the Sierra Morena, a great monteria, or mountain drive, was under way that day. Senor D. Pablo Lario de Quinones was the host. He was a rich Catalan who had made his millions in the cork industry. He had purchased two or three of the mountains for a sporting estate, and in one of the higher passes he had erected a shooting box. It was the only habitation within miles, for he had ousted the few native mountaineers from their landholds.