"Truly a great army," replied the woman, "for I have seen it myself, riding after thieves. It numbers five hundred men, all armed, and wearing white tunics, and all paid for by this man. He must be richer than a king to support so grand an army."
Hemming smiled toward the white and red roofs and clumps of foliage in the valley, thinking, maybe, of his own old regiment, of Aldershot during a review, of the hill batteries that had supported the infantry advance in India, and of the fifty regiments under canvas in Tampa.
"I crave a drink," he said,—"a finger of your good casash in a bowl of cool water."
The woman brought it, smiling with hospitality, and would not accept the ragged bill which he held out to her.
"It is a pleasure," cried she, "to slake the thirst of so distinguished a señor."
Hemming bowed gravely, a smile lifting his upturned, pale moustache. The baby came close, on all fours, and examined his yellow riding-boots and straight spurs. Hemming patted the small one's limp black hair.
"This is a kindly world," he said in English, then to the woman: "Let thy son wear this ring,—see, it fits his thumb. Should any man ask the name of his friend, say it is Hemming, an Englishman."
He pushed the child gently toward its mother, and, swinging to his saddle, rode down toward the city. His gray eyes took in everything,—the yellowing fruit, the fields of cane, the mud huts of the poor, the thin horses of the charcoal-burners crowding out of the trail to let him pass, and the patches of manioc.
All this he beheld with satisfaction. In a thin book he made a note, thus: "Pernamba, name of town evidently run by a governor of independent spirit. Army of 500, evidently mounted infantry. Welcomed to outskirts of city by kind peasant woman, evening of April 6, 19—. Same climate and crops as rest of Brazil. Eleven pounds in my pockets in Brazilian notes and small coin. What does Pernamba hold for H.H. I wonder? A dinner or two, perhaps, and a couple of chapters for my book."
Presently the twisting path met a highway between royal palms. Good-sized villas, their walls all blue and white with glazed tiles, their roofs dusky red, or else flat and railed about with white stones, each in its separate garden. The gardens were enclosed by high walls of brick, such as he had seen many times in the resident sections of Pernambuco. For months he had lived in just such a house, and lolled in just such a garden.