Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/116

 horses coming from the south. When she felt a flood of drowsiness coming over her, threatening to smother her like a clam on the beach, she fumbled beneath the half-finished mantilla for her rosary, moving her lips in a Hail Mary. In that manner of fending off sleep Doña Carlota felt that she had built a solid wall of Hail Marys around that house which harm could not surmount even with a dragon's wings. Yet she had quakings and doubts; she suffered tremors of cold fears.

At ten minutes before midnight, Doña Carlota believed she had expected too much of Don Abrahan; he would not come that night. At five minutes past the hour, as she stood with hand on the drawn drapery to let it fall and shut the candlelight from the road, a dog barked before an Indian shepherd's hut. His alarm was taken up, as a cock's crow goes onward over the land from straining throat to throat, from the edge of the world in the west to the very shores of dawn. Men came riding into the patio. Don Abrahan was at the door.

Doña Carlota hastened to open to the magistrate's command, even to the command of his presence, before his hand was lifted to the panel.

"So you have come," she said. "May Jesus protect us all! Enter, Don Abrahan."

"There is no cause for your perturbation, my good cousin,' Don Abrahan said, laughing at her magnification of a thing that he considered only commonplace, troublesome, small. "A runaway peon is not a thing to disturb your tranquillity."