“Have you rooms—a parlor—some place where this lady can be alone?”
Without awaiting an answer, he turned and whispered to the veiled woman, who shuddered and shrank; but whether from his touch or with fear of publicity was not apparent. “Take off your things—put back that infernal veil,” he muttered, angrily. “There’s nothing here to hurt you.”
The removal of the wraps showed a round, innocent face, with its own pretensions to beauty. Such prettiness as it held, however, was just now stricken out of it by the blanched terror which dominated every curve and line.
“No, sir,” said the old woman, surveying them both. “This ain’t rightly a hotel. I’ve——”
“Why do you call it one, then?” interrupted the man, angrily. He placed his companion in a chair, and stood between her and the proprietor of the eating house. “Who are you, anyhow?” he asked, as he removed his shining silk hat, and mopped his brow with a snowy handkerchief.
“I’m Huldy Sarvice. Most folks calls me Aunt Huldy,” she returned, looking her guest up and down.
The man did not volunteer any return information; but Huldah, who was given to communing with herself in regard to her patrons and summing them up instantly, supplied the deficiency with the muttered statement: “And you’re a gambler. Everything about you jest hollers ‘Gambler.’” Her eye fell upon the little figure behind the tall, black-clad one. It rested a moment on the crude, pathetically approbative countenance which should have been rosy and smiling, “You’re——” she halted in her unspoken sentence. “I’m blessed if I know what you are. You don’t look like no sport’s wife. You sure don’t look like anything worse. I guess you’re just a fool. Poor little soul! I see mighty deep waters in front of your feet.”
Even while these things were flitting through Aunt Huldah’s mind, she had been automatically answering “yes” and “no” to the somewhat heated inquiries of her would-be guest. Now, with a quick patter of little running feet, a small Mexican boy, with half a pie, burst in from the kitchen, followed closely by the irate cook, who was also his mother. Huldah held her plump sides and shook with mirth as the little rascal doubled and turned among the chairs and table legs, snatching a hasty bite now and again from his stolen pie. Nobody knew better than the proprietor of the Wagon Tire House—kind, motherly soul—that the threats the Mexican woman hurled after her offspring were threats only.
At last, when the final morsel was bolted, Jose permitted himself to be caught, and burst into loud conventional sobs as his mother berated him. The slim, pale little woman crouching in her chair, her great furred cloak—painfully new, as was all the rest of her expensive wear—drawn tight around her, watching this scene with wide, horrified eyes, sprang up and, in spite of the man’s restraining hand, ran to the child.
“Oh! Don’t strike him!” she cried, kneeling before the boy, her face bathed in tears. “You’ll be sorry—sorry—if you do! I had a little boy—a baby—and I used to—to forget sometimes and—and be harsh——”