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That night the moon streamed through her grating, and she deciphered the fact that Andreo had loosened eight adobes above her garden, and would await her every midnight. Pilar sat up in bed and glanced about the room with terrified delight. It took her but a moment to decide the question; love had kept her awake too many nights.
These bricks, dried in the sun, were called adobes, and were plastered together and made smooth by a mortar of the same clay. Then the walls were coated outside and inside with a lime stucco and whitewashed. The roof timbers were covered with hollow red tiles, each like the half of a sewer pipe, and these were laid to overlap each other so that they kept the rain out.
Coronado flinched under the word stranger and the stare which accompanied it. "It was a woman's yell," continued Texas. Coronado felt suddenly so weak that he sat down on a mouldering heap of adobes. He thought of Clara; was it Clara? Jealous and terrified, he for an instant, only for an instant, wished she were dead. "See here," he said, when he had restrung his nerves a little.
The clustered adobes of the Loring homestead glimmered in the sun. Corliss glanced across the river toward the Concho. Again the Señora Loring questioned him with a glance. He shook his head. "Away anywhere," he said, gesturing toward the horizon. "You come home with me," she said quietly. "Nellie is not at the home to-day. You rest, and then perhaps you go to the Concho."
For Malapi had been a cowtown before the discovery of oil. It lay on the wide prairie and not in a gulch. The street was broad and dusty, flanked by false-front stores, flat-roofed adobes, and corrugated iron buildings imported hastily since the first boom. At the Stag Horn corral Dave hired a horse and saddled for a night ride.
With the Father's permission for everything needed, he soon had a number of neophytes busily at work making adobes, and building the walls under his supervision. Houses were quickly built in Nueva California in those days. They were but plain, simple structures at best, and, at the missions, an unlimited number of workmen took only a few days to finish one. Diego and Juana had a grand wedding.
'I don't see how I'm going to climb up that wall now. I can't jump high enough with one foot, and the adobes would most likely come down again, anyhow. Confound that imp, Julio! he would have saved all this mess if he had done as I told him. I guess we're trapped, I am, anyway."
These excavations, called by the Spaniards hoyas, or "pits," were made on a great scale, comprehending frequently more than an acre, sunk to the depth of fifteen or twenty feet, and fenced round within by a wall of adobes, or bricks baked in the sun.
She waved her hand and pointed downward to the wall; then, throwing on the long coarse gray smock that was her only garment, crept from the room and down the stair. The door was protected against hostile tribes by a heavy iron bar, but Pilar's small hands were hard and strong, and in a moment she stood over the adobes which had crushed her roses and sweet peas.
Richly japanned pots, containing rare flowers, were placed around, and green boughs and gay blossoms, rising above the top of the wall, produced a fine effect on viewing the building from without. But this was not the only garden belonging to the mansion of the rich miner. Another, of oblong shape, extended from the rear of the house, enclosed by a high wall of adobes on either side.
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