Pepeta, between weariness and emotion, was scarcely able to utter two consecutive words.
The lands of Barret, ... an entire family, ... were going to work; they were going to live in the ruined barraca,—she had seen it herself!
Pimentó, a hunter with bird-lime, an enemy of labour, and the terror of the entire community, was no longer able to preserve his composure, the impressive gravity of a great lord, before such unexpected news.
Cordons!
And with one bound, he raised his heavy, muscular frame from the ground, and set out on a run without awaiting further explanations.
His wife watched him as he hurried across the fields until he reached a cane-brake adjoining the accursed land. Here he knelt down, threw himself face forward, crawling upon his belly as he spied through the cane-brake like a Bedouin in ambush. After a few minutes, he began to run again, and was soon lost to sight amid the labyrinth of paths, each of which led off to a different barraca, to a field where bending figures wielded large steel hoes, which glittered as the light struck upon them.
The huerta lay smiling and rustling, filled with whisperings and with light, drowsy under the cascade of gold reflected from the morning sun.
But soon there came, from the distance, the mingled sound of cries and halloes. The news passed on from field to field. With loud shouts, with a trembling of alarm, of surprise, of indignation, it ran on through all the plain as though centuries had not elapsed, and the report were being spread that an Algerian galley was about to land upon the beach, seeking a cargo of white flesh.
II
AT harvest time, when old Barret gazed at the various plots into which his fields were divided, he was unable to restrain a feeling of pride. As he gazed upon the tall wheat, the cabbage-heads with their hearts of fleecy lace, the melons showing their green backs on a level with the earth, the pimentoes and tomatoes, half-hidden by their foliage, he praised the goodness of the earth as well as the efforts of all his ancestors for working these fields better than the rest of the huerta.