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See, I make you my confidant because you will not dare to anger me or Well, my little friend, you must understand what fate would befall you in that case. I can reach across the Rio Grande." Amazement and then fear were depicted in José's face as he listened; he asserted his loyalty vehemently. "Yes, yes, I know you love me," the general agreed, carelessly.
He was pulling Surry in, now, and he held his riata in one hand as though he were ready to use it at a moment's notice, and blank astonishment was on his face. That, perhaps, was because of José and José's hostile attitude, standing crosswise of the trail like that, and scowling while he waited, with the fingers of his right hand fumbling inside his sash for his dagger, perchance!
Even his love for Antonia, whence he drew his strength and his inspiration, had reached the point of tragic tension during their hurried interview by Don Jose's bedside. And now, suddenly, he was thrown out of all this into a dark gulf, whose very gloom, silence, and breathless peace added a torment to the necessity for physical exertion.
"I would like to see it, Alessandro," she said gently. "Oh, no, no, Majella!" he cried; "you would not. It is terrible; the houses all unroofed, all but my father's and Jose's. They were shingled roofs; they will be just the same; all the rest are only walls. Antonio's mother threw hers down; I don't know how the old woman ever had the strength; they said she was like a fury.
The vagrant toiled two weeks at his heavy task and when the man Jose was about again the volunteer slipped away without farewell. He left on the table of his under-the-eaves bedroom in the Jose house all the pay he received for his work, to the last penny. "He wasn't what he seemed to be," ran the burden of Mrs. Jose's various disquisitions on this strange guest.
The long-awaited spring had sped up from the valleys of mist, and at the wave of her white wand the mountains had bloomed with a delicate iridescence the luster on young leaves and shining blades of grass. It was then that she also began to apprehend something of the nature of José's difficulties.
She took up a big piece of sweet potato on the end of a pointed stick. It was almost safely landed in José's dish, when suddenly there was a great flapping of wings and a loud "Cock-a-doodle-doo," right behind José! The red rooster had opened his eyes, and when he saw the glow of the fire, he thought it must be morning.
But José's bright eyes remained hostile and his expression baffling. It was plain to Alaire that her explanation of his cousin's death had carried not the slightest conviction, and she even began to fear that her part in the affair had caused him to look upon her as an accessory.
He might gaze his fill through the peep-hole there, but under no circumstances was he to be seen in the body of the hall. But these conditions, as Gallito pointed out, were entirely dependent on Pearl. It was a question whether she would tolerate José for a whole evening in her dressing room. At first she flatly refused to do so and turned a persistently deaf ear to José's pleading.
She somewhat puzzled me by the questions she put about England; but, as I found she had not been there, I gave her the best account I could of such places as I had heard my father and Uncle Richard describe. Don Jose's countenance wore a puzzled expression as he heard me talking, but I believe he from the first suspected who I was.
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