the foot of the hill they passed an old adobe hut, with a crowd of pretty, swarthy, frowzy Mexican children playing in the sunshine, while their mother, black-haired and ample of figure, occupied herself in hanging great quantities of jerked beef on a sort of clothes-line running between the eucalyptus-trees.
The father, a wild-looking individual in a red shirt and enormous hat, came from behind the hut, unhitched the stout little broncho tied to the fence, gave the poor animal a desperately tight ‘cinch,’ threw himself into the saddle without touching his foot to the lumbering wooden stirrups, and, digging his spurs well into the horse’s sides, was out of sight in an instant, leaving only a huge cloud of dust to cover his disappearance.
‘How those fellows do ride!’ exclaimed Dr. Winship, savagely. ‘I wish they were all obliged to walk until they knew how to treat a horse.’
‘Then they’d walk straight into the millennium,’ said Jack, sagely, ‘for their cruelty seems to be an instinct.’
‘But how beautifully they ride, too!’ said Polly. ‘Mamma and I were sitting on the hotel piazza the other day, watching two young Spaniards who were performing feats of horsemanship. They dropped four-bit pieces on the dusty road, and riding up to them at full speed clutched them from the ground in some mysterious way that was perfectly wonderful. Then Nick Gutierrez mounted a bucking horse, and actually rolled and lighted a cigarette while the animal bucked with all his might.’
‘See that cunning, cunning muchachita, mamma!’ cried Bell; for, as they stopped at the top of the hill to let the horses breathe, one of the little Mexican children ran after them, holding out a handful of glowing yellow poppies.
She was distractingly pretty, with a beauty that is short-lived with the people of her race. The afternoon sun shone down fiercely on her waving coal-black locks, and brought a rich colour to her nut-brown cheek; she had one little flimsy, ragged garment, neither long, broad, nor thick, which hung about her picturesquely; and, with her soft, dark, sleepy eyes, the rows of little white teeth behind her laughing red mouth, and the vivid yellow blossoms in her tiny outstretched hand, she was a very charming vision.
‘Como te llamas, muchachita?’ (What is your name, little one?) asked Bell, airing her Spanish, which was rather good.
‘Teresita,’ she answered, with a pretty accent, as she scratched a set of five grimy little toes to and fro in the dusty ground.
‘Throw her a bit, papa,’ whispered Bell; and, as he did so, Teresita caught the piece of silver very deftly, and ran excitedly back to the centre of the chattering group in front of the house.
‘How intense everything is in California! Do you know what I mean, mamma?’ said Bell. ‘The fruit is so immense, the cañons so deep, the trees so big, the hills so high, the rain so wet, and the drought so dry.’
‘The fleas so many, the fleas so spry,’ chanted Jack, who had perceived that Bell was talking in rhyme without knowing it. ‘California is just the place for you, Bell; it gives you a chance for innumerable adjectives heaped one on the other.’
‘I don’t always heap up adjectives,’ replied Bell, with dignity. ‘When I wish to describe you, for instance, I simply say “that hateful boy,” and let it go at that.’
Jack retired to private life for a season.
‘I’d like to paint a picture of Teresita,’ said Margery, who had a pretty talent for sketching, ‘and call it The Summer Child, or some such thing. I should think the famous old colour artists might have loved to paint this gorgeous flame-tinted poppy.’
‘Not poppy,—eschscholtzia,’ corrected Jack, coming rapidly to the surface again, after Bell’s rebuke, and delivering himself of the tongue-confusing word with a terrible grimace.
‘I’m not writing a botany,’ retorted Margery; ‘and I can never remember that word, much less spell it. I don’t see how it grows under such an abominable Russian name. It’s worse than ichthyosaurus. Do you remember that funny nonsense verse?—
“I is for ichthyosaurus,
Who lived when the world was all porous;
But he fainted with shame
When he first heard his name,
And departed a long while before us.”’
‘The Spaniards are more poetic,’ said Aunt Truth, ‘for they call it la copa de oro, the golden cup. Oh, see them yonder! It is like the Field of the Cloth of Gold.’
The sight would have driven a royal florist mad with joy: a hillside that was a swaying mass of radiant bloom, a joyous carnival of vivid colour, in which the thousand golden goblets, turned upward to the sun, were dancing, and glowing, and shaming out of countenance the purple and blue and pink masses which surrounded them on every side.
‘You know Professor Pinnie told us that every well-informed young girl should know at least the flora of her own State,’ said Jack, after the excitement had subsided.
‘Well, one thing is certain: Professor Pinnie never knew the state of his own flora, or at least he kept his wife sorting and arranging his specimens all the time; and I think he’s a regular old frump,’ said Polly, irreverently, but meeting Aunt Truth’s reproving glance, which brought a blush and a whispered ‘Excuse me,’ she went on, ‘Well, what I mean is, he doesn’t know any more than other people, after all; for he cares for nothing but bushes and herbs and seeds and shrubs and roots and stamens and pistils; and he can’t tell whether a flower is lovely or not, he is so crazy to find out where it belongs and tie a tag round it.’
‘I must agree with Polly,’ laughed Jack. ‘Why, I went to ride with him one day in the Cathedral Oaks, and he made me get off my horse every five minutes to dig up roots and tie them to the pommel of his old saddle, so that we came into town looking like moving herbariums. The stable-man lifted him on to his horse when he started, I suppose, and he would have been there yet if he hadn’t been helped off. Bah!’ For Jack had a supreme contempt for any man who was less than a centaur.
By this time they had turned off the main thoroughfare, and were travelling over a bit of old stage road which was anything but easy riding. There they met some men who were driving an enormous band of sheep to a distant ranch for pasture, which gave saucy Polly the chance to ask Dr. Winship, innocently, why white sheep ate so much more than black ones.
He fell into the trap at once, and answered unsuspectingly, in a surprised tone, ‘Why, do they?’ giving her the longed-for opportunity to respond, ‘Yes, of course, because there are so many more of ’em; don’t you see?’
‘You are behind the times, Dr. Paul,’ said Jack. ‘That’s an ancient joke. Just look at those sheep, sir. How many are there? Eight hundred, say?’
‘Even more, I should think,—a thousand, certainly; and rather thin they look, too.’
‘I should imagine they might,’ said Bell, sympathetically. ‘When I first came to California I never could see how the poor creatures found anything to eat on these bare, brown hillsides, until the farmers showed me the prickly little burr clover balls that cover the ground. But see, mamma! there are some tiny lambs, poor, tired, weak-legged little things; I wonder if they will live through the journey.’
‘Which reminds me,’
