Eva Brodhead - A Prairie Infanta

"She does not know," whispered the señora. "Her papa did not say good-by. He said it was better for him to 'slip away.' And me – I could not tell her! I am only a woman."

"You think – she will not want – to live with me?"

The other's face grew very bland. "She said to-day 'how ugly' was your house," confessed Señora Vigil. "And when you was feeding your chickens she cried out, ' Hola , what a queer woman is yonder!' Children have funny things in their heads. But it is for you to tell her you come to fetch her away!" And the señora called out, " Lolita, ven aca! "

The girl looked up startled. " Que hay? " she asked, coming toward them apprehensively.

"Lola," began Jane, "your papa wants you should stay with me for a while. He – he saw how lonesome I was," she continued, unwisely, "and – and so he decided to leave you here. Lola, I hope – I – " She could not go on for the strangeness in Lola's gaze.

"Is he gone – my father? But no! he would not leave me behind! No! no! Dejeme! dejeme! you do not say the truth! You shall not touch me! I will not – will not go with you!" She turned wildly, dizzily, as if about to run she knew not where; and then flung herself down before Señora Vigil, clasping the Mexican woman's knees in a frantic, fainting grasp.

Jane helplessly regarded the child's despair, while Señora Vigil maintained an attitude curiously significant of deep compassion and a profound intention of neutrality. With the sound of Lola's distraught refusals in her ear, Jane felt upon her merely the instinct of flight. She rallied her powers of speech and set her hand on the gate, saying simply, "I'm going. She better stay here."But at this the señora's face, which had exhibited a kind of woful pleasure in the excitement of the occasion, took on an anxious frown."And the board-money?" she exclaimed, with instant eagerness.

Jane helplessly regarded the child's despair, while Señora Vigil maintained an attitude curiously significant of deep compassion and a profound intention of neutrality. With the sound of Lola's distraught refusals in her ear, Jane felt upon her merely the instinct of flight. She rallied her powers of speech and set her hand on the gate, saying simply, "I'm going. She better stay here."

But at this the señora's face, which had exhibited a kind of woful pleasure in the excitement of the occasion, took on an anxious frown.

"And the board-money?" she exclaimed, with instant eagerness.

"I guess it'll be all right. Mr. Keene said he'd send it every month."

The señora's eyes narrowed. "He said so! Ay, but who can say he shall remember? There are eight chickens to eat of our meal already. No, Mees Combs! The muchacha was left to you. It is a charge very sacred. Ave Maria! yes!"

Jane had closed the gate. "I can't force her," she repeated.

Señora Vigil, watching her go, fell a prey to lively dissatisfaction. " Santo cielo! " she thought. "What will my Pablo say to this? I must run to the mine for a word with him. It is most serious, this business!" And casting her apron over the whip-cord braids of her coarse hair, she started hastily down toward the bridge.

Lola, crouching on the ground, watched her go. It was very quiet in the grassless yard. The Vigil children were playing in the arroyo bed. Their voices came with a stifled sound. There was nothing else to hear save the far-off moaning of a wild dove somewhere up Gonzales cañon. The echo was like a soft, sad voice. It sounded like the mournful cry of one who, looking out of heaven, saw her hapless little daughter bereaved and abandoned, and was moved, even among the blessed, to a sobbing utterance.

Lola sat up to listen. Her father had spoken of going through that cañon from which the low call came. Even now he was traveling through the green hills, regretting that he had left his child behind him at the instance of a strange woman! Even now he was doubtless deploring that he should have been moved to consider another's loneliness before his own.

"Wicked woman," thought the girl, angrily, "to ask him to leave me here – my poor papa!" She sprang to her feet, filled with an impetuous idea. She might follow her father!

There was the road, and no one by to hinder her. Even the hideous wooden house of the short-haired woman looked deserted. Lola, with an Indian's stealth of tread, crossed the bridge, and walked without suspicious haste up the empty street.

At the mouth of the cañon, taking heart of the utter wilderness all about, she began to run. Before her the great Spanish Peaks heaved their blue pyramids against the desert sky. Shadows were falling over the rough, winding road, and as she rushed on and on, many a gully and stone and tree-root took her foot unaware in the growing gray of twilight. Presently a star came out, a strange-faced star. Others followed in an unfamiliar throng, which watched her curiously when, breathless and exhausted, she dropped down beside a little spring to drink. The water refreshed her. She lay back on the cattle-tramped hill to rest.

Dawn was rosy in the east when she awoke, dazed to find herself alone in a deep gorge. Her mission recurred to her, and again she took the climbing road. Now, however, the way was hard, for it rose ever before her, and her feet were swollen.

As the day advanced it grew sultry, with a menace of clouds to the west. After a time the great peaks were lost in dark clouds, and distant thunder boomed. A lance of lightning rent the nearer sky, and flashed its vivid whiteness into the gorge. This had narrowed so that between the steep hills there was only room for the arroyo and the little roadway beside it. Before the rain began to fall on Lola's bare head, as it did shortly in sheets, the stream-bed had become a raging torrent, down which froth and spume and uprooted saplings were spinning.

In an instant the cañon was a wild tumult of thunder and roaring water, and Lola, barely keeping her feet, had laid hold of a piñon on the lower slope and was burying her head in the spiked branches. Wind and rain buffeted the child. The ground began to slip and slide with the furious downpour, but she held fast, possessed of a great fear of the torrent sweeping down below her.

As she listened to the crashing of the swollen tide, another noise seemed to mingle with the sound of the mountain waters – a sound of bellowing and trampling, as of a stampeded herd. A sudden horror of great rolling eyes and rending horns and crazy hoofs hurtled through the girl's dizzy brain. Her hands loosened. She began to slip down.

The rain had slackened when Bev Gribble, looking from his herder's hut up on the mesa , saw that his "bunch" of cattle had disappeared. Certain tracks on the left of the upland pasture exhibited traces of a hasty departure. That there had been a cloudburst over toward the Peaks he was as yet ignorant; nor did he discover this until he had caught his cow-pony and descended into the ravine.

The sun was shining now, and the arroyo was nothing more than a placid, though muddy stream. Its gleaming sides, however, spoke lucidly to Bev's intelligence, and he set the pony at a smarter pace in the marshy road.

" Sus! Sus! " said Bev to his pony, who knew Spanish best, being a bronco from the south. But Coco did not respond. Instead, he came back suddenly on his haunches, as if the rope on the cow-puncher's saddle had lurched to the leap of a steer.

Coco knew well the precise instant when it is advisable for a cow-pony to forestall the wrench of the lasso. But now the loop of hemp hung limp on the saddle-horn, and Gribble, surprised at being nearly thrown, rose in the stirrups to see what was underfoot.

A drenched thing it was which huddled at the roadside; very limp, indeed, and laxly lending itself to the motions of Gribble's hands as he lifted and shook it.