Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/79

 tinted lids, thick, with a velvet softness in their appearance, like the petals of some rank, gross rose. When he talked, especially with women, his eyes were more expressive than his tongue. They dilated and glowed, contracted and glistened; seemed to retreat and to leap, to laugh and draw near, lending a charm of marvelous animation to his face.

The closing day of Don Abrahan's celebration had come in a happy climax of cabeza de toro, as has been said. At midday the ovens had been opened, the savory bulls' heads withdrawn and served on long tables under the oak trees. The custom of this feast was immutable in this observance. All laws of tradition would have been transgressed in offering the cabeza de toro under a roof.

The guests, numbering more than a hundred, counting old and young, gathered at these tables with appetites which seemed to Henderson never satisfied, in spite of the long season of feasting that had gone before, gorging themselves to the very eyes. Large-waisted mamas became dull as sated toads after this last and greatest stuffing event. On the long veranda, supported by flying arches like a cloister of Franciscan friars, they dozed in arm-chairs, their ordinarily sharp vigil over their daughters relaxed.

But their generally tall and lank husbands, vinous of blood, worn down to sinew and hard muscle by continual life in the saddle, were as wide