Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/36

 meat and wine. Now he raised his face, startled from his sleep by the mayordomo's sharp words, making a foolish grimace with long-drawn lip to stretch his sleepy eyes open.

"Woman?" he repeated, turning his head as if seeking to lay a challenge. "If there is one woman, she is for the blacksmith of San Fernando, by the sacred wood!"

Sergeant Olivera laughed, but with such a sound of good nature in it that no man could take offense.

"You have had a dream, friend Borromeo," he said.

"Dream? No, it is no dream, soldier. Don Geronimo, is it a dream, I ask you, that a ship is coming with a hundred good women on it for wives to the men of this cursed, lonely country?"

"I have not heard of any such thing," the mayordomo returned.

"Then the soldier was having his joke with me," Borromeo sighed, turning to his goblet for solace.

"What is it you have been telling him?" Don Geronimo demanded, with ill favor in his handsome, unsympathetic face.

"Surely you have heard of the governor's request to the viceroy, Don Geronimo?"

"This seems to be a matter on which I lack information," Don Geronimo replied crabbedly.

Sergeant Olivera went over his tale again, Borromeo wide awake now, such pleasure in his forge-burned face as if the simple repetition of the story