Part 8

Dios de mi vida! but it was terrible to grow old! Not since the death of her husband, Don Carlos, had she endured so bitter a pang. The fact that she had never had any children accounted perhaps for a certain harshness in her nature.

It was a busy day for the Señora. Besides the care of her guests, the preparing of freshly killed fowl and baking of cakes and tortillas, there was the garden which must be hung with lanterns where there would be the usual dancing and merrymaking during the evening. All this and much more the Señora must superintend, but she was equal to the task.

As she issued her orders to the retinue of servants that came and went, she carried on a lively, though interrupted, conversation with her sister, Señora Rosario Sanchez, and her niece, Dolores, who had come to assist her in the preparations.

"It has come at last--I always said it would--I never trusted that double nature of hers!" she exclaimed triumphantly, pausing for an instant in her work of assorting the linen. The expression and gesture of Señora Sanchez plainly bespoke the shock she also had experienced.

"To think of it," she gasped. "How Padre Antonio can overlook such a breach of confidence and offense to the Church is more than I can understand!"

"Ah! that shows the extent of her influence over him," answered Señora. "She has bewitched him with her wild ways--he simply dotes on her!"

"It's scandalous!" broke in her sister.

"To my mind, it shows signs of the Padre's failing," rejoined the Señora sharply.

"It does indeed--poor man!" sighed her sister. "And what's more--it never did seem proper that so handsome a woman should live with a priest even though she be his ward and he an old man."

"Handsome?" sneered the Señora, drawing herself together as though she had received an electric shock; the pleased and animated expression of her face changing suddenly to one of utmost frigidity. "I never could understand why people considered that Indian good looking," and her black eyes snapped as she turned to resume her work, plainly betraying the jealousy aroused. Señora Sanchez, knowing her sister's temper only too well, hastened to change the subject.

Strange to say, Padre Antonio did not share the public's sentiment, or rather that of his own particular flock, concerning Chiquita's latest escapade. Instead of being overwhelmed, broken in spirit and utterly cast down by grief and shame as had been confidently predicted, he, much to the disgust of his congregation, went calmly about his duties as though nothing unusual had occurred, referring jocosely to this lark of his madcap ward as he was pleased to term it.

Lark? Heavens! had the Padre lost his senses? Excommunication might be a little too severe, but a year's solitary confinement in a convent as a penance for her sin was the least penalty she could expect.

But Padre Antonio knew what the rest of the world did not. That his charming, irrepressible protegée would have snapped her fingers lightly at the mere suggestion of either. The days of mediæval suppression of females had come to an end even in Mexico. Moreover, there existed a perfect understanding between the two.

During his long years of missionary work he had learned that the heathen often stood higher in the sight of Heaven than many a zealous devotee of the Church. Besides, dancing was not only a national pastime of the Spaniard, but among Indians, a part of their religion as well.

That Chiquita had some very good reason for dancing in public, he knew well enough. They understood one another perfectly, and he did not ask her her reason for dancing, knowing full well that some day she would tell him of her own accord.

Although Chiquita had accommodated herself marvelously well to the new conditions, imbibing the best civilization had to offer, she nevertheless remained the freeborn woman--the descendant of a freeborn race of men. The wild, free nomad whom experience and direct contact with nature had early taught to recognize the simple underlying truths and realities of life and their relations to one another, was not to be measured by the conventions or limited standards of a tamer race of men hedged about by superficial traditions and born and reared remote from the heart of nature beneath the roofs of houses. It was the cold, hard earth and equally cold and unrelenting stars that had nurtured Chiquita from earliest childhood, and to apply the petty restraints and conventions of modern society to her was like clipping the wings of an eagle and then expecting it to fly.

Ordinarily, life is dull enough without civilized man's efforts to reduce it to positive boredom, and although Chiquita's escapades had acted like a slap in the face, they had nevertheless done much to arouse the spirit of the otherwise sleepy old town. Her presence was fresh and invigorating as the north wind. Moreover, the very ones who criticised her most in secret, were usually the first to come to her for advice when in trouble. For who was so wise as the strange, beautiful woman?

True, it cost something to be hated as cordially as one was admired, nevertheless, Padre Antonio rightly conjectured that there was not a woman in Santa Fé who would not willingly exchange places with his ward were she able to. So, like the sensible man that he was, he only smiled at idle gossip and continued to watch with increasing interest the transformation of his protegée.

Captain Forest had taken quarters at the Posada for an indefinite period; at least until he learned the whereabouts of his friend, Dick Yankton, who had accompanied him on his former expeditions.

He had been aroused at an early hour by the cackling of affrighted fowl and the voices and footsteps of peons as they came and went in the patio, their jests and laughter mingling with snatches of song. Not being able to sleep, he arose, and after a hasty toilet, stepped out upon the veranda, bright with the morning sunlight. Save for his presence, the place was deserted; the empty chairs standing about just as their occupants of the previous evening had left them, a proof that he was the first of the guests to be abroad.

"I wonder where Dick is?" he soliloquized, leisurely descending the veranda steps and turning into the pathway that led to the garden at the rear of the house and thence to the corrals, whither he directed his steps for a look at his horse to see whether he had been properly cared for during the night. As he disappeared around the corner of the house, a woman turned in from the highroad and paused before the Inn beneath the great cottonwood encircled by the bench.

She was tall and slender and on one arm carried a basket of eggs concealed beneath a layer of freshly cut roses; Padre Antonio's annual birthday tribute to the Señora. Her heavy blue-black hair, loosely caught up at the back of the neck and adorned with a bunch of pink passion flowers nestled about her neck and shoulders, on one of which was perched a small white dove that fluttered and cooed. From out the midst of the passion flowers shone a faint glint of silver.

Her dull white shirt waist, low at the neck and with sleeves rolled back to the elbows, exposed her long, slender neck and well rounded forearms which, like her face, were a rich red bronze. A faded orange kerchief, loosely knotted, encircled her neck; the ends thrust carelessly into her breast. Her soft mauve saya, worn and patched and looped up at one side, disclosing a faded blue petticoat underneath, fell to her ankles, displaying a pair of small feet encased in dull blue stockings and low black shoes.

Depositing the basket on the bench, she extended her right hand upon the back of which the dove immediately hopped, cooing and fluttering as before.

"Cara mia!" she murmured fondly, raising it to her lips, kissing it and caressing it gently against her cheek.

"What wouldst thou--thou greedy little Jaquino? Knowest not thou hast had one more berry than thy sweet little Jaquina?" But the dove only continued to flutter and coo on her hand.

"Hearest thou not," she continued, "she already calls thee!" And extending her lips, between which she had inserted a fresh berry, the dove eagerly seized and devoured it.

"Ah, querida mia!" she murmured softly, kissing it again. "Now fly away quickly like a good little Jaquino before some wicked señor comes to catch thee for his breakfast!" And tossing the dove lightly into the air with an "á Dios," it hovered over her head for an instant, then flew straight away over the old Posada back to Padre Antonio's garden where its mate awaited it.