Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/128

 and if we went out rapidly, the return was more rapid still. Cosme's horse dashed along before us with lightning speed, and soon made his hapless rider but a vanishing speck in the dim distance. The trip home was accomplished in almost half the time required in the morning.

On the outskirts of the city we halted for a few moments, in conversation with a friend, and Cosme, not knowing it, preceded us to the house. On arriving we found he had opened the great door, and there, on the bench in the hall, he was stretched full length, the most utterly exhausted, bruised and aching martyr that ever suffered for a cherished principle. In spite of the irresistibly comic nature of it all, I could not help feeling an acute sympathy for my poor servant, and Cosme, seeing it, was duly grateful. The horse he had ridden was walking about the court at will.

My dear little friend, Pomposita, had watched for our coming, and I had scarcely alighted from the carriage ere she came over and gathered me in her arms, saying that the day had seemed to her like a week, as she watched and waited for my return with feverish impatience. She clapped her hands, and laughed immoderately, when I related to her the amusing incidents of our trip to Palomas.

The next day Cosme appeared before me limping, while his countenance was indeed crestfallen and sorrowful as he said that he would have to leave our service, adding in a conciliatory way that it was not because he did not like us and our mode of life, nor that he would not willingly serve us until the end of his days, but he wished to learn the trade of a blacksmith.

The dreadful suspicion dawned upon me, that as I could not Americanize the mozo I would have to Mexicanize myself and household. Faithful Cosme! How sorry I was to lose him At last I knew enough of the characteristics of the mozo to shrewdly suspect that his excuse was only a polite cover for his deep consciousness of the sufferings he had endured in our service the previous day. He did not intend to serve in a household where such an occurrence might be indefinitely repeated. He would be a mozo for the house; for the highway—never!