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A few flakes of snow began to fall, which every instant increased in number. "Forward, forward, Senores!" shouted our chief peon, who acted as guide. "If a Cordillera storm catches us before we get under shelter, the days of some of us may be numbered." We did not neglect the warning.
It is but just to say that finer dancing could not have been witnessed in the saloons of Paris. Even the peon, in his leathern spencer and calzoneros, moved as gracefully as a professor of the art; and the poblanas, in their short skirts and gay coloured slippers, swept over the floor like so many coryphees of the ballet.
Now it was my painful duty to go every morning up to his office-room and see that peon had put fresh ink and everything ready and that the hamal had dusted properly.
On the walls, but not crowded, were a number of canvases most ambitious of all, in the setting of honor, all in sad grays, a twilight Mexican scene by Xavier Martinez, of a peon, with a crooked- stick plow and two bullocks, turning a melancholy furrow across the foreground of a sad, illimitable, Mexican plain.
The staircase took a lazy curve and went up; under it, through an open window, the sun glistened upon the shifting white and green leaves of a pipal tree, and a crow sat on the sill and thrust his grey head in with caws of indignant expostulation. A Government peon in scarlet and gold ascended the stair at his own pace, bearing a packet with an official seal.
Twenty years ago a scribe who could turn a bright editorial paragraph or manufacture an interesting falsehood was worth $50 to $75 a week in Chicago, and if lost one situation he'd find two more before he got half- sober but that was before Markhanna and his peon took charge of this country's prosperity.
Their asininity is worth mention only because among those laughing at their antics was a peon who had been gashed across the hand, half-severing his wrist, yet who sat on the back platform without even a rag around the wound, though with a rope tourniquet above.
The other smiled scornfully and drew from his belt a little pouch of gold dust. "What I take I pay for," he remarked, and, still smiling, tendered Felipe a few grains of the gold. Felipe struck the outstretched palm. "Am I a peon?" he vociferated. "Probably," retorted the other. "I will take pay for that word," cried Felipe, his face blazing, "but not in your money, senor."
For God's sake, tell me." "Never." It was a woman's word, instant, inflexible, desperate. With a deep breath Hare realized where the girl had changed. "Still you're promised, pledged to him! How'll you get out of it?" "I don't know how. But I'll cut out my tongue, and be dumb as my poor peon before I'll speak the word that'll make me Snap Naab's wife." There was a long silence.
They have all heard of the many instances of persons of as humble condition as themselves accidentally falling upon a princely fortune, and they know, too, what a miraculous change such a discovery makes in the social condition of a peon, for every miner in Zacatecas knows the homely distich: "Had the metals not been so rich at San Bernabe, Ibarra would not have wed the daughter of Virey."
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