Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/33

 and that is not a little after twelve years in this country, vultures are nice creatures, abstemious animals, compared to these neophytes that our padres conserve with such solicitous hands."

"That is true, there is no filling them. Here at San Fernando we have nine hundred of them, old and young, who gobble up between them twenty beeves a day. This is on top of the corn, and the wheat bread they are beginning to relish with fearful appetite. I tell you, Sergeant Olivera, I have known a group of Indians to devour twenty-five pounds of beef to the head in one day. Here at a fiesta not long ago, sixty of them put three beeves into their paunches in a single night."

"There is a pleasure in life when a man can eat like that!" Borromeo sighed.

Sergeant Olivera shook his head, expressive of depreciation of such inhuman voracity, but his thought appeared to be on something else. He sat in abstraction beside the table, his half-empty goblet at his hand, his eyes on the open door in the manner of a man whose thoughts had drawn him away. Magdalena watched him with growing approval in her eyes. He appeared to be an abstemious man.

"So, he would have joined Alvitre?" said the sergeant presently, nodding his head gravely, speaking in a manner to himself as if his thought had slipped its leash and gone wandering.

Geronimo started, lifting his head. One would have thought somebody had called him unseason-