At other times, when Elena was already mounted, Canterac would come riding down the street. Wouldn’t she let him accompany her? But Elena was protesting, making signs that meant “no” with her riding-whip.
“But I’ve told you several times that I don’t want any escort but Mr. Watson,” she told him quite frankly one morning. “Do go along, my dear captain, and finish up that grand surprise that you are getting ready for me.”
Canterac too was disposed to accept Elena’s choice of the American youth as an escort without too much bitterness. So long as it wasn’t Pirovani!
He watched the two riders move down the road, and although he felt annoyed and disheartened as he always did when Elena opposed his desires, he tried to conceal it, and stopped in at Moreno’s.
The latter was reading a novel in front of the open window; as soon as he caught sight of Canterac he leaned out and began a report on the work in the park.
Canterac, from his horse, leaned forward, listening with grave attention to the explanations that were pouring out of the window opening.
“I got Pirovani’s men away from him by offering them double pay. And I got hold of all the carts he had contracted to get, and all those in Fuerte Sarmiento. This will delay the work at the dam a little. But both you and Pirovani will have to find some way of making up for lost time.”
Thirty miles down the river, in a somewhat swampy bit of ground, where the freshets had provided water enough for a vigorous growth of poplars and other trees, Canterac’s men were hard at work carrying out his plans for the marquesa’s park. The peons were removing the earth from the tree roots which they cut away, bending down the trees until they fell on the ox carts waiting to drag them slowly back up the river bank to the dam. It took a whole day to make the journey to La Presa.
“It’s a tremendous job, and it’s going to be a long one,” Moreno was saying. “I went down there yesterday to see for myself how things are getting on, and there’s no doubt about it, those men are earning their pay.”
Near the Presa, in a level spot barren of all vegetation close to the river, other peons were digging ditches. As soon as the carts arrived, they lifted off the trees, and planted them in the holes prepared for them, heaping up the earth around them to keep the trees upright.