Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/36

 it might be said. Would you be going to the north?"

"To the pueblo Los Angeles. Is it far?"

"A matter of six miles. Would you have friends there?"

"Neither there nor in all of California. But it seems a land of kind strangers."

Again the smile, frank, winsome, flashed like a sudden light, Don Abrahan thought, and passed on as quickly, leaving the dark face with a fixed sadness that seemed a settled melancholy.

"Perhaps we are a kinder people, we Mexicans, than we are given credit for in your country," Don Abrahan said.

Even as he spoke he was weighing the sailor, marking his light bone structure, his small feet and hands, the evident hardness of his muscles, the promise of endurance in his deep chest. Not a common man, Don Abrahan, who had been among the Yankees even in their own Boston, recognized at a glance.

"Still it was not misfortune that made a sailor of you," he ventured, speaking what had come into his thought.

"Misfortune enough to be cursed by a romantic hunger for adventure that drove me to ship with that beast, Welliver," the sailor answered in bitter contempt for his own weakness.

"It is to be regretted that you lose your pay, as Captain Welliver assures me you will, by leaving the ship this way," Don Abrahan said, his voice