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Updated: June 29, 2025
Pete thought that was the end of the show, but as Brevoort made no move to go, he fixed his attention on the screen again. Immediately another scene jumped into the flickering square. Pete stiffened. Before him spread a wide cañon. A tiny rider was coming down the trail from the rim. At the bottom was a Mexican 'dobe, a ramshackle stable and corral. And there hung the Olla beneath an acacia.
The prisoners were all quaking with terror, as they came up to the ugly red jug to take their chance for life. As much as these miserable men suffered in this terrible place, existence was still dear to them. One soldier shook the beans in the olla; the other stood back against the wall with leveled gun to prevent any outbreak. Then the lottery began.
"Sus manos!" roared the old man; and dropping his hat the muchacho touched his hands before him in an attitude of prayer. "Give the gentlemen a drink!" commanded Don Pablo severely, and after Hardy had accepted the gourd of cold water which the boy dipped from a porous olla, resting in the three-pronged fork of a trimmed mesquite, the old gentleman called for his tobacco.
"Finding that argument and expostulation had not the slightest effect upon him, I changed my tactics, and suddenly demanded whether he would be willing to have Olla buried, when she began to get old and infirm? This seemed at first to startle him. He glanced uneasily at his little wife, as if it had never before occurred to him that she could grow old.
He saw many brands, and few of them were alike, and among them none that were familiar. Evidently the cattle were from the south line. The saddle-stock was branded "J.E." and "The Olla." These brands appeared on none of the cattle that Pete had seen.
An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on week-days he made a brave figure in his best homespun.
Only a few fragments of pottery were found in the main room, but outside in the northern passageway were the fragments of two large pieces, one an olla, the other a bowl, both buried in 3 or 4 inches of debris under a large slab fallen from the roof. Owing to its situation this room was one of the most desirable in the whole group.
"The queen must come back from Aranjuez, or that king must be disposed of," Rafael exclaimed, as a yellow-faced amabassador from Spain, General the Duke of Olla Podrida, left him. "Which shall it be, my Codlingsby?"
The cowboys who worked there were picked men, each of whom received a straight salary, asked no questions, and rode with a high-power rifle under his knee and a keen eye toward the southern ranches. Pete, riding south, bore an unsigned letter from The Spider, with instructions to hand it to the foreman of "The Olla" and receive further instructions from that gentleman.
The perfect decorum of these places, and their immunity from offence in any, emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants, where red pepper and beans insisted in every dinner, and where once they chanced upon a night of 'olla podrida', with such appeals to March's memory of a boyish ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and then pensive over its cabbage and carrots, peas and bacon.
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