Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/44

 ings, many small adobe huts, straw-covered, squat, unlovely, clustered on the slope below the master's house. Great encinas, or live-oak trees, stretched knotted branches over these poor cottages, lending a certain air of protection and security, even peace.

Children playing about the doors of these mud huts stood in respectful attention as Don Abrahan rode by. If they were curious of the strange man who walked beside his stirrup, they submerged their feelings under a show of respectful deference, a trait of those gentle brown people, old and young, which seems to invest them with a dignity and superiority sadly wanting in so many of our own.

Don Abrahan's dwelling stood on the first bench of the hill, elevated perhaps fifty feet above the vast plain through which the travelers had passed. It was a low, simple house, large in its ground plan, built, like the more humble dwellings which lay in the shadow of its comparative grandeur, of sunbaked bricks bound by chopped straw. It was roofed with dull-red tile, for the tile-makers had brought their art early to California and pursued it with success.

Don Abrahan's father built the house, after the Spanish fashion, a patio between its protecting wing-walls. It was a house with few windows and many doors, the Spaniard being the sort of man who does not desire either to look from his own privacy into the doings of others, or to have others peer through many casements upon his own. But a house with many doors, there again a trait of the