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"It pays, it pays!" smiled The Author. "I draw from life." "Nature-fakir!" Alicia mocked. "My dear fellow, I draw. You draw and quarter," said Morenas. The Author flung out his arms, grandiloquently. You may as well try to change the course Of yonder sun To north, and south, As to try to subdue by criticism This heart of verse, Or close this mouth! he cried, thumping his chest.
The big man muttered something and moved aside. Arrived at the hut of the Moreñas, for that it seemed was the name of our host and hostess, Dr. Rankin laid aside his furry beaver hat, walked directly to the side of the bunk on which Yank lay, and began his examination, without vouchsafing anything or anybody else the slightest glance.
Just before he went back North, Luis Morenas good-naturedly agreed to exhibit his new sketches for the delectation of such folk as we cared to ask to view them this to please Alicia, whom he called Flower o' the Peach. Now an exhibit of Morenas sketches would have been an art event in the Biggest City itself.
All that The Author could find only deepened his uncertainty, and this made him abominably cross, an ill temper increased by the presence of Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, who came and went, unruffled, aloof, with inscrutable eyes and a gently mocking smile. The Harrison-Gores came shortly after Morenas left.
That's why, when I met her a morning or two before the Morenas exhibit, I asked her if she wouldn't like to see it. I knew that, once asked, she could be kept away by nothing short of an earthquake or a deluge. Yet "Thank you, Miss Smith, I shall be glad to look over the sketches." And she added blandly: "Four o'clock, did you say? Very well, I will come.
And she'd let loose one of her rollicking laughs that set the doctor's teeth on edge and made The Author shudder. The Author snarled to me that she laughed like a rolling-mill and reasoned like a head-on collision. He put her in his new book, clothes and all. Just as Luis Morenas, with an edged smile on his thin lips, made rapid-fire sketches of her. He called her "The Future-Maker."
Nobody objecting, we commandeered the two horses that had belonged to the Moreñas. One of them we packed with our few effects, and turned the other over to Yank. Thus, trudging afoot, Johnny and I saw our last of Italian Bar. Thirty years later I rode up there out of sheer curiosity. Most of the old cabins had fallen in. The Bella Union was a drear and draughty wreck.
"There's no evading the brute. I turn like a weathercock; and there he is, with corrugated brow and slitted eyes, studying me! And the baleful eye of The Author also pursues me. Between them, I feel skinned." "Mr. Morenas says you are a rare but quite perfect type," I told him, mischievously. The young man shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. "Am I a type, Woman-in-the-Woods?" he asked.
Chetwynd Harrison-Gore and his daughter, English folk "doing" America and delighted to include a Carolina colonial house in their trip; a suffrage leader, whose throat needed a rest; and Morenas, the illustrator. It seemed that Hynds House offered to each one something that had been craved for.
"Oh, bromidic Miss Smith! Drink your wine, please. And do not look doubtfully upon that sandwich. My man knows how to build them." His man did. The sandwich was manna. The wine evidently came from heaven. "Now you have a color. I say, is Morenas going to do you, too?" "Good gracious, no! But he has sketched Alicia a dozen times at least." "And me," said Mr. Jelnik, gloomily.
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