Jessica Trent: Her Life on a Ranch

At which Pedro smiled, well content.

“Good. He that uses his own legs spares his neighbors. Yes.”

“Meaning that he would have to be exercised by somebody?”

The shepherd did not answer. He had lived alone so long amid the great solitudes of nature that speech had grown irksome to him. He regarded it a sin to waste words, and his young mistress understood this, if Mr. Hale did not. To this gentleman the situation presented itself as a very serious one. There was no habitation visible save the small hut, a place barely sufficient to its owner’s simple needs and utterly inadequate to those of a lately recovered invalid. He was not strong enough to make his way to the valley on foot, and even if Prince were now able to carry him, he felt it would be brutal to impose so hard a task.

But Jessica came to his aid with the suggestion:

“If you’ll come and rest behind the cabin I’ll make you a cup of coffee on Pedro’s little stove. He often lets me when I come up to see him, and then, when you’ve rested, we’ll go home. I am so angry I can hardly breathe.”

“Indeed; I should never have guessed it,” he answered, laughing, and allowing the girl to lead him to the shelter proposed.

“Ah! but I am. And a gentlewoman never gets angry. Least of all with such a darling as Pedro. You see, he ought to have been about dying, and he hasn’t even a single ache!”

“What an odd child you are!”

“Am I?” regarding him gravely. “I’m sure I don’t want to be that. I want to be just–perfect.”

Mr. Hale sighed as he dropped upon the bench to which Jess had guided him. “We are none of us that–ever.”

“I suppose that’s because ‘none of us’ ever try quite hard enough. But I will be, if trying will fetch it.”

Then she whisked inside the hut and presently there came to the gentleman’s nostrils the aroma of freshly steaming coffee. He had not realized that he was hungry, but now could scarcely wait until the little maid came out to him again with a tin cup of the liquid in one hand and a can of condensed milk in the other.

“My mother always lets her guests ‘trim’ their drink for themselves, but I’ll drop in the cream if you’ll say how much. Enough? Now sugar. One? How queer. And it’s sugar of our own making, too; beet sugar, you know.”

The tin cup was decidedly rusty, the cheap spoon dingy, and “canned” milk the aversion of Mr. Hale’s dyspeptic stomach; yet despite these facts he had never tasted a more delicious draught than this, nor one served with a gentler grace. For Jessica was quite unconscious that there was anything amiss with Pedro’s dishes, and now offered the stranger a tin of time-hardened biscuits, with the air of one proffering the rarest of dainties.

“You would better eat one of these; they’re quite fine, with the coffee.”

“I’ll–I’ll try, thank you, if you’ll fetch your own cup and sit beside me.”

“All right. Only I’ll have to wait till Pedro’s finished. There’s only this and the egg, you know. He’s rather stubborn, dear fellow. My mother has offered him more dishes, but he says ‘more care’ and won’t take them. Excuse me.”

With a dip and swirl of her short skirts, the little hostess ran into the hut, to reappear, a moment later, bearing in both hands a drinking-cup which made the guest exclaim in delight:

“What an exquisite thing!”

“Isn’t it? But just wait until you see those which Pedro made for mother! This is fine, but they’re like cobwebs.”

She did not offer to show him the cup more closely, for she had seen the shepherd lay down his rushes and sit waiting, and Jessica would not disappoint the old friend for the new. Still the less, because she had so lately been vexed with him, and wholly without cause.

But when the silent fellow had emptied the cup she proudly gave it for Mr. Hale’s inspection.

“An ostrich egg, you see, cut off at the top. Pedro wove all this lacelike outside, of just the common tule rushes. He splits them till they are like threads, and see that handle! Nothing could break it, nor can one tell just where it begins or ends–the joinings, I mean. There are many wonderful weavers among the Indians, but none so deft as our Pedro, my mother says.

“Now, will you not fill this again and drink it with me? For I see that our speechless friend, yonder, has gone to work again as if his life depended on his industry.”

“He’s always at work, like that. Yet he never neglects his flock. He has been herding ever since he was a little boy. That must have been years ago. He’s so very old.”

“He doesn’t look it. I should guess he might be fifty.”

“Fifty! Why, there’s nobody anywhere around who remembers when our Pedro was born. Not even Fra Mateo at the mission, yet even he is more than a hundred,” she answered, proudly.

“Possible? Well, this is all wonderful to me who have lived always in a crowded city. This big West is like a romance, a fairy tale; not the least of its marvels to find a little girl like you riding alone on such a steed up such a desolate canyon, yet not in the least afraid.”

“Why, why should I be afraid? Except, of course, I was, for a bit, when I saw that Zulu made your horse rear. A step nearer and you’d have both gone over.”

Mr. Hale shuddered, and Jessica hastened to add:

“But the step wasn’t taken and you’re quite safe up here. Is the dizziness all gone? Many are like that before they get used to the glare. Some of the ‘tourists’ wear blue glasses, and veils, and things. They look so funny.”

Into her laughter burst Pedro’s speech.

“’Ware Antonio. Is it plucking day, no? His third hand is Ferd, who lies and steals. I know. The mistress’ chest has many openings. Nina, go home, and bid Antonio come himself when next he’d have me die. Yes.”

Jessica sprang to her feet. These were many words for the shepherd to utter, and was not to be disobeyed. Though the old man’s age was doubtless far less than was accredited him, he was commonly considered a sage whose intelligence increased, rather than diminished, with the passing years.

“I’ll go at once, Pedro. Please forget that I was angry and–good-by.”

Mr. Hale was unprepared for this sudden departure, which bereft the scene of its fairest feature; for even while he listened to the brief speech between this odd pair there was a flash of twinkling feet and a scarlet Tam, and Jessica was gone.

“Why–why–what? Eh, what?” he demanded, rising.

His answer came with a crash and clatter which could never have been made by one small, fleeing figure, and with the startling force with which everything happened on that eventful day.

Over the bluff scrambled a shaggy piebald burro, from whose back there tumbled at the stranger’s very feet a brace of little lads, securely lashed together; even their wrists and ankles bound beyond possibility of their own undoing.

“Horrors! Indian captives!” cried the gentleman, aghast.

CHAPTER II

A BAD BUSINESS

Captives? Far from it–save to their own reckless disregard of life and limb, and all for a bit of hitherto untested fun.

Shrieking with laughter at the success of their experiment, they rolled and floundered on the ground, till the laughter changed to cries of pain as their restless writhings to and fro drove their self-inflicted bonds deeper into the flesh.

By some dexterity they got upon their feet, at last, and one implored:

“Oh! you Pedro! or you, man! Cut us loose, can’t you? Don’t you see we can’t do it ourselves?”

Mr. Hale adjusted his eyeglasses and looked rather helplessly toward the shepherd; but that phlegmatic person was working away on his wonderful basket as stolidly as if there was none beside himself upon the mesa.

“Oh! you hateful old Pedro! Cut us free, I tell you! Ain’t I your master? You’d do it mighty quick for ‘Lady Jess.’”

The frightened little fellow, whose fun had now ebbed into a terrible fear of an indefinite bondage, began to whimper, and Mr. Hale to act. A few sharp slashings of the horsehair thongs and the captives were free to express their delight in a series of somersaults, which were only arrested by sight of Prince in the distance, holding up his injured foot and seeking for some pasture amid the dry herbage.