As soon as they saw that the passenger stepping down from the coach was Robledo, men and women rushed forward to greet him, stretching out their hands to him in the confident comradeship of the desert. But everyone promptly forgot him at sight of the other passengers.
First came the Marquis de Torre Bianca, who turned around to help his wife to alight from the clumsy steps.
The Marquise, dressed in a luxurious travelling suit which contrasted oddly with her surroundings, wore the hard expression which disfigured her beauty in her bad moments. In spite of her thick veil, the red dust of the long road she had travelled covered her face and hair. With scarcely restrained astonishment and ill-humor, she looked about her, and her eyes betrayed the despair with which she was saying to herself, “Is this what I have come to?”
“Well, here we are,” said Robledo cheerfully. “Two days and two nights from Buenos Aires, and a couple of hours driving through a dust storm, that isn’t so bad! The ends of the earth are quite a way off from here!”
Several of the workmen who had welcomed Robledo began, of their own accord, to unload the baggage. These were Elena’s things sent on to her at Barcelona by her maid, and she cherished them. They were the chests and boxes saved from her shipwreck!
Meanwhile a group of children and ragged women had gathered around Elena, gazing at her with amazement and admiration, as though she had fallen into their midst from another planet. Some of the little girls timidly felt of the cloth of her dress. Their fingers had never touched anything so wonderful!
By this time the news of Robledo’s arrival had reached Canterac, Pirovani, and Moreno, and the engineer was presenting them to his friends.
Watson, seeing that the multitude of bags and boxes was being carried into the house he occupied with Robledo, said to his partner,
“You don’t expect the lady to share our rough quarters, do you?”
“The lady,” Robledo replied, “is the wife of an old college friend of mine. He is going to take pot luck with us, and so is she. You don’t need to build a palace for her.”