Urging them to be seated, clapping his hands for servants, giving orders, ever apologizing, the overseer finally got the travelers convinced that it was their house and that supper would be ready now directly. With a glance at his two companions, Driscoll inquired for the señoras of the family, whereupon a sudden embarrassment darkened the administrador's fat amiable features.
"Doña Luz, Your Mercy means? Ai, caballero, you are most kind. And you tell me that her father will come to-morrow, that he will--surely come?"
"Might we," Jacqueline interposed, "pay our respects to Señor Murguía's daughter?"
The poor fellow begged Their Mercies' indulgence, but Doña Matilde, the señora aunt of Doña Luz, lay sick in the house. As for Doña Luz, yes, Doña Luz had gone to the chapel, as she often did of an evening lately, to pray for her aunt's recovery. Doña Luz had vowed to wear sackcloth for six months if her dear patron saint, María de la Luz, would but hear her petition. Out of compassion, Jacqueline said no more.
Next morning Driscoll was astir early. He wandered through a thick-walled labyrinth of corridors and patios, and came at last into a rankly luxuriant tropical garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree blossoms filled his nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda buildings, a sugar mill, a cotton factory, warehouses, stables with corrals, and entered a tortuous street between adobes, where he found the hacienda store. Here the administrador was watching the clerks who sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly women, barefooted and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, which they carried away in their aprons. They made tortillas of it for their men laboring in the hacienda fields, or on the hacienda coffee hills. The store was a curious epitome of thrift and improvidence. One wench grumbled boldly of short measure. She dared, because she was comely and buxom, and her chemise fell low on her full, olive breast. She counted her purchase of frijoles to the last grain, using her fingers, and glaring at the clerk half coaxingly, half resentfully. But an intensely scarlet percale caught her barbarian eye, and she took enough of it for a skirt. A dozen cigarettes followed, and by so much she increased her man's debt to the hacienda.