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 "Silence, fool!" Magdalena commanded, more a Gipsy now than before as she scowled at the blacksmith with eyes drawn small, her forehead wrinkled in an angry threat.

Take the sergeant to the kitchen, Borromeo, and sit with him at the table,' Geronimo said to me. I leave my olla of beans with the wild onions from the hills, I come to guard the honor of the mayordomo's house, and what does the doña offer me? 'All is yours,' she tells the soldier, leaving the blacksmith with his finger in his mouth."

Borromeo roared again, throwing his head back, his mouth stretched so wide that one of the hams must have gone down his great gullet if it had broken its rawhide thong and dropped. Sergeant Olivera looked at him with dry humor wrinkling about his eyes, his nimble fingers drawing his sword-belt snug around his spare soldierly body.

"Vulcan, your wit is heavier than your hand," he said. "Will you come with me? Doña, I kiss"

"Ha! here is little Geronimo," the blacksmith said.

Geronimo Lozano, mayordomo of the mission estate, overseer of nine hundred neophytes, as the Indian converts to Christianity were called by the priests, stepped into the light of the kitchen door as if the blacksmith's word had commanded him up from the night. He paused a moment in the door, hand lifted in grave and courteous salute to the guests of his fireside.