Stories of the Foot-hills Part 13

"I want you to go upstairs, Mary Frances, and get your other cloak and my blanket shawl. Wattie's gone to fetch the horses. You and him and me's goin' over to grandfather Hazlitt's."

"To grandfather Hazlitt's this time o' night! Is anybody sick?"

"No, there's n.o.body sick. I don't want you should ask any questions, Mary Frances. Just get on your things, and do as mother says; and don't make any more noise than you can help."

The young girl went into the house, and came out presently with her mother's shawl and bonnet. They could hear the wagon driving around to the gate.

Matilda went into the kitchen and blew out the candle. Then she closed the door quietly, and went down the walk with her daughter.

Matilda Randall was not at communion on the next Sabbath. She was "down sick at her father's," the women said, and they thought it hard that she should be absent when Alex joined the church.

"I don't doubt it's been quite a cross to her, the way he's held out,"

one of them remarked; "and it seems a pity she couldn't have been there to partake with him the first time."

But the weary woman, lying so still in her old room in her father's house, had a heavier cross.

Her mother tiptoed into the room, the morning after her arrival, and stood beside her until she opened her eyes.

"Elick is outside, Matildy. Shall I tell him to come in?"

She shook her head, and closed her eyes again wearily.

The old woman went out, and confronted her gray-haired husband helplessly.

"It beats me, Josiah, what he could 'a' said or done that she's took to heart so, after what she's put up with all these years."

Mr. Anderson preached the funeral sermon very touchingly, when it was all over. The tears came into his young eyes, and there were treacherous breaks in his rhetoric as he talked.

"This sister in Israel, whose lovely and self-sacrificing life has just ended so peacefully, lived to see the dearest wish of her heart gratified,--the conversion of the husband of her youth to the faith of her fathers. We are told that some have died of grief, but if this frail heart ceased to beat from any excess of emotion, it must have been, my friends, from the fullness of joy,--the joy 'that cometh in the morning.'"

But Alex Randall knew better.

IDY.

I.

Senora Gonzales was leaning upon the corral gate in the shade of the pomegranates, looking out over the lake. The lake itself was not more placid than the senora's face under her black rebozo. Perhaps a long life of leaning and gazing had given her those calm, slow-moving eyes, full of the wisdom of unfathomable ignorance. The landscape on the opposite sh.o.r.e was repeated in the water below, as if to save her the trouble of raising her heavily fringed lids. To the southward a line of wild geese gleamed snow-white, like the crest of a wave. Half a dozen dogs were asleep in the smoothly swept dooryard behind her, and a young Mexican, whose face was pitted by smallpox, like the marks of raindrops in dry sand, leaned against the gnarled trunk of a trellised grapevine, clasping his knees, and sending slow wreaths of smoke from his cigarette. The barley in the field behind the house was beginning to head, and every breath of wind stirred it in glistening waves. Beyond the field shone a yellow mist of wild mustard. The California spring, more languorous, even with its hint of moisture, than the cloudless summer, sent a thousand odors adrift upon the air. Even the smell of garlic hanging about the senora could not drown the scent of the orange-blooms, and as for Ricardo's cigarette, surely no reasonable mortal could object to that. Ricardo himself would have questioned the sanity of any one who might have preferred the faint, musky fragrance of the alfilaria to the soothing odor of tobacco. He closed his eyes in placid unconsciousness of such vagaries of taste, and rocked himself rhythmically, as if he were a part of the earth, and felt its motion.

A wagon was creaking along the road behind the house, but it did not disturb him. There were always wagons now; Ricardo had grown used to them, and so had the senora, who did not even turn her head. These restless Americanos, who bought pieces of land that were not large enough to pasture a goat, and called them ranchos--caramba! what fools they were, always a-hurrying about!

The wagon had stopped. Well, it would be time enough to move when some one called. A dust-colored hound that slept at the corner of the house, stretched flat, as if moulded in relief from the soil upon which he lay, raised his head and p.r.i.c.ked up one ear; then arose, as if reluctantly compelled to do the honors, and went slowly around the house.

"Of course they've got a dawg; forty of 'em, like enough!" It was a girl's voice, pitched in a high, didactic key. "I guess I c'n make 'em understand, pappy; I'll try, anyway."

She came around the house, and confronted Ricardo, who took his cigarette from his mouth, and looked at her gravely without moving. The senora turned her head slowly, and glanced over her shoulder.

The girl smiled, displaying two rows of sound teeth shut tightly together.

"How do you do?" she said, raising her voice still higher, and advancing toward the senora with outstretched hand. "I suppose you're Mrs.

Gonsallies."

The senora disentangled one arm slowly from her rebozo, and gave the newcomer a large, brown, cushiony hand.

"This is my fawther," continued the girl, waving her left hand toward her companion; "sabby?"

The man stepped forward, and confronted the senora. She looked at him gravely, and shook her head. He was a small, heavily bearded man, with soft, bashful brown eyes, which fell shyly under the senora's placid gaze.

"She don't understand you, Idy," he said helplessly.

The girl caught his hand, and squeezed it rea.s.suringly. "Never mind, pappy," she said, lowering her voice; "I'll fetch her. Now, listen," she went on, fixing her wide gray eyes on the senora, and speaking in a loud, measured voice. "I--am--Idy Starkweather. This--is--my--fawther.

There! Now! Sabby?"

Evidently she considered failure to understand English a species of physical disability which might be overcome by strong concentration of the will.

The senora turned a bland, unmoved face upon her son. The eyes of the newcomers followed her gaze. Ricardo held his cigarette between his fingers, and blew a cloud of smoke above his head.

"She don' spik no Englis'," he said, looking at them mildly.

The girl flushed to the roots of her hay-colored frizz of hair. "You're a nice one!" she said. "Why didn't you speak up?"

Ricardo gave her another gentle, undisturbed glance. "Ah on'stan' a leetle Englis'; Ah c'n talk a leetle," he said calmly.

The girl hesitated an instant, letting her desire for information struggle with her resentment. "Well, then," she said, lowering her voice half sullenly, "my fawther here wants to ask you something. We live a mile or so down the road. We've come out from Ioway this summer--me and mother, that is; pappy here come in the spring, didn't you, pappy? An'

he bought the Slater place, an' there's ten acres of vineyard, an'

Barden,--he's the real 'state agent over t' Elsmore, you know 'im,--he told my fawther they wuz all raisin-grapes, white muscat,--didn't he, pappy?--an' my fawther here paid cash down fer the place, an' the vineyard's comin' into bearin' next fall, an' Parker Lowe,--he has a gov'ment claim on section eighteen, back of our ranch,---maybe you know 'im,--he says they're every one mission grapes--fer makin' wine. He helped set 'em out, an' he says they got the cuttin's from your folks; but I thought he wuz sayin' it just to plague me, so my fawther here thought he'd come an' ask. If they are wine-grapes, that felluh Barden lied--didn't he, pappy?"

The Mexican gazed at her pensively through the smoke of his cigarette.

"Ya.s.s, 'm," he said slowly and softly--"ya.s.s, 'm; Ah ga.s.s he tell good deal lies. Ah ga.s.s he don' tell var' much trut'."

"Then they _are_ mission grapes?"

"Ya.s.s, 'm; dey all meession grapes; dey mek var' good wahn."

The girl's face flamed an angry red under her crimpled thatch of hair.

She put out her hand with a swift, protecting gesture, and caught her father's sleeve.

The little man's cheeks were pale gray above his s.h.a.ggy beard. He took off his hat, and nervously wiped the damp hair from his forehead. His daughter did not look at him. Ricardo could see the frayed plume on her jaunty turban quiver.

"My fawther here's a temperance man, a prohibitionist: he don't believe in wine; he hates it; he wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. That felluh Barden knowed it--didn't he, pappy? He lied!" She spoke fiercely, catching her breath between her sentences.

The Mexican threw away the end of his cigarette, and gazed after it with pensive regret.