Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/45

 Spaniard appearing. There are exigencies in every gentleman's life when a door in every room becomes an expedient and convenient thing. This is doubly true when one's house stands all upon the ground, and the mere flinging open of a door introduces the world spread ready to his feet.

Pepper trees lifted their taller, greener branches among the somber encinas which sequestered the house so completely as to show but glimpses of brown wall and red roof to the eyes of those who passed upon the highway that wound on from that point through a pass in the hills, to Buena Ventura and the north. A pepper tree of immense girth, one of the first slips, it was said, brought by the Franciscans from Peru, grew in the patio of Don Abrahan's house, a beautiful and notable tree. But there were no shrubs, no flowers, to fill and brighten the open spaces between the trees of the spacious grounds. Beneath them the brown earth was as bare and smooth as if painstaking hands swept away every fallen leaf.

"So we arrive home," said Don Abrahan.

He looked down at the sailor, who had let go his supporting hold of the stirrup and was surveying with pleasurable surprise the scene of peaceful security. That wakening of something in his eyes which seemed the reflection of an inner smile animated for a moment the magistrate's thin and narrow face.

"You travel well; there is great endurance in your body," he said.