Mariquita Part 3

"Oh, she writes! I'm glad she writes."

"Thank you, Miss Sarella. She writes most Christma.s.ses. And she wrote lately, tho' it's not Christmas."

"Not ill, I hope?"

"Ill! She's an industrious girl with plenty o' sense ... but her aunt's dead, and she thinks o' taking a place in a boarding-house."

"Jack," said Sarella, after a brief but pregnant pause of consideration, "bring her up here."

Jack regarded her with a stare of undisguised amazement.

"Why not?" Sarella persisted. "It would be better for you."

"What's that to do with it?"

"And better for Miss Mariquita. It's too much for Miss Mariquita--all the work she has to do."

"That's true anyway."

"Of course it's true. Anyone can see that." (That Sarella saw it, considerably surprised Jack, and provided matter for some close consideration subsequently.)

"Look here, Jack," she went on, "I'll tell you what. You go to Mr. Xeres and say you'd like your daughter to come and work for you...."

"And he'd tell me to go and be d.a.m.ned."

"But you'd not go. And he wouldn't want you to go. And _I'll_ speak to him."

Jack stared again. He hardly realized yet how much steadily growing confidence in her influence with "the Boss" Sarella felt. He made no promise to speak to him: but said "he'd sleep on it."

With that sleep came a certain ray of comprehension. Miss Sarella was not thinking entirely of him and his loneliness, nor entirely of Miss Mariquita. He believed that she really expected the Boss would marry her (as all the cowboys had believed for some weeks) and he perceived, with some involuntary admiration of her shrewdness, that she had no idea of being left, if Miss Mariquita should marry and go away, to do all the work as she had done. Once arrived at this perception of the situation, Jack went ahead confident of Sarella's quietly persistent help. He had not the least dread of rough language. He had no sensitive dread of displeasing his master. He would like to have Ginger up at the range especially as Ginger's coming would take much of the work off Miss Mariquita's hands. He even made Don Joaquin suspect that if Ginger were not allowed to come he, Jack, would go, and make a home for her down in Maxwell.

It did not suit Don Joaquin to lose Jack, and it suited him very well to listen to Sarella.

So Ginger came, and proved, as all the cowboys agreed, a good sort, though quite as ugly as her father.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Mariquita," said her father one day, "does Sarella ever talk to you about religion?"

Anything like what could be called a conversation was so rare between them that the girl was surprised, and it surprised her still more that he should choose that particular subject.

"She asked me if we were Catholics."

"Of course we are Catholics. You said so?"

"I didn't say 'of course,' but I said we were. She then asked if my mother had become one--on her marriage or afterwards."

Don Joaquin heard this with evident interest, and, as Mariquita thought, with some satisfaction.

"What did you say?" he inquired.

Mariquita glanced at him as if puzzled. "I told her that my mother never became a Catholic," she answered.

"That pleased her?"

"I don't know. She did not seem pleased or displeased."

"She did not seem glad that I had not insisted that my wife should be Catholic?"

"She may have been glad--I did not see that she was."

"You did not think she would have been angry if she had heard I had insisted that my wife should be Catholic?"

"No; that did not appear to me."

So far as Mariquita's information went, it satisfied her father. Only it was a pity Sarella should know that her aunt had not adopted his own religion.

Mariquita had not probed the motive of his questions. Direct enough of _impression_, she was not penetrating nor astute in following the hidden working of other persons' minds.

"It is," he remarked, "a good thing Sarella came here."

"Poor thing! She had no home left--it was natural she should think of coming to her aunt."

"Yes, quite natural. And good for you also."

"I was not lonely before--"

"But if I had died?"

Mariquita had never thought of his dying; he was as strong as a tree, and she could not picture the range without him.

"I never thought of you dying. You are not old, father."

"Old, no! But suppose I had died, all the same--before Sarella came--what would you have done?"

"I never thought of it."

"No. That would have been out of place. But you could not have lived here, one girl all alone among all the men."

"No, of course."

"Now you have Sarella. It would be different."

"Oh, yes; if she wished to go on living here--"