“I wish I could be as easy-going as you are, Rosita, but I can’t: I suppose it’s because I’m not Spanish. Guess I’ve got some Yankee in me, if I am a Californian.” The little girl leaned over the dash-board of the rickety buggy, thumping with her whip-stump the back of the aged nag. Billy was blind, uncertain in the knees, and as languid as any _caballero_ that once had sighed at _doña’s_ feet in these dim pine woods. As far back as Patience could remember he had never broken his record, and his record was two miles an hour. In a few moments she set the whip in the socket with an irritable thump, wound the reins about it, and sat down on the floor beside her companion. For some reason best known to themselves, the girls preferred this method of disposition when Billy led the way,—perhaps because he had an errant fondness for the roughest spots of the rough road, making the high seat as uneasy and precarious as thrones are still; perhaps because Patience rebelled at habit, and in all her divagations was blindly followed by her Spanish friend. Billy ambled up and down the steep roads of the fragrant pine woods on the hills behind Monterey, and the girls gave him no further heed. Patience’s long plait having been shaken loose in her wild lurches over the dash-board, she swung about, dangled her legs out of the buggy, and commanded Rosita to braid her hair. The legs she kicked recklessly against the wheel were not pretty. They were long and thin, clothed with woollen stockings darned and wrinkled, and angled off with copper-toed boots. She wore a frock of faded gingham, and chewed the strings of a sunbonnet. “Don’t pull so, and do hurry,” she exclaimed as the Spanish girl’s deft slow fingers moved in and out of the scanty wisps. “I’m not pulling, Patita, dear, and you know I can’t hurry. And I’m just thinking that your hair is the colour of ashes.” “I know it,” said Patience, gloomily, “but maybe it’ll be yellow when I grow up. Do you remember Polly Collins? When she graduated she had hair the colour of a wharf rat, and when she came back from San Francisco the next year it was as yellow as the hills in summer.” “I don’t care for yellow hair,” and Rosita moved her dark head with the slow rotary motion which was hers by divine right. “Oh, you’re pretty,” said Patience, sarcastically. “You want to be told so, I suppose—There! you pulled my hair on purpose, you know you did, Rosita Thrailkill.” “I didn’t, Patita. Don’t fire up so.” And Rosita, who was the most amiable of children, tied the end of the braid with a piece of tape, rubbed her blooming cheek against the pale one, and was forgiven.