A few lounging peons in the
shadow of an archway took off their broad-brimmed hats and made way
for the padre, and a half dozen equally listless vaqueros helped
him to alight. Accustomed as he was to the indolence and
superfluity of his host's retainers, to-day it nevertheless seemed
to strike some note of irritation in his breast.
A stout, middle-aged woman of ungirt waist and beshawled head and
shoulders appeared at the gateway as if awaiting him. After a
formal salutation she drew him aside into an inner passage.
"He is away again, your Reverence," she said.
"Ah--always the same?"
"Yes, your Reverence--and this time to 'a meeting' of the heretics
at their pueblo, at Jonesville--where they will ask him of his land
for a road."
"At a MEETING?" echoed the priest uneasily.
"Ah yes! a meeting--where Tiburcio says they shout and spit on the
ground, your Reverence, and only one has a chair and him they call
a 'chairman' because of it, and yet he sits not but shouts and
spits even as the others and keeps up a tapping with a hammer like
a very pico. And there it is they are ever 'resolving' that which
is not, and consider it even as done."
"Then he is still the same," said the priest gloomily, as the woman
paused for breath.
"Only more so, your Reverence, for he reads nought but the
newspaper of the Americanos that is brought in the ship, the 'New
York 'errald'--and recites to himself the orations of their
legislators.
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