[Illustration: A MEXICAN WOMAN WAS BAKING TORTILLAS] “Could--could we get something to eat from you?” There was a faint catch in Raquel’s voice. The smell of food suddenly made her stomach do queer things. The little old wrinkled woman looked up, and took them in with her glance. Then a veritable chatter of bird talk burst chippering from her. She was for all the world like a little black-and-white woodpecker. But _pobrecitos_! They were not _soldados_ at all! Nor to be treated like _bandidos_! Right out of the cradles they were. As pretty as girls. And starving! “Sit here,” and she dusted the earth that it might be cleaner. She placed a soap box between them and produced miraculously from within the house of twigs a spotless square of drawn linen for a cloth. All the coffee, all the tortillas they wanted, they could have. But beans? Just twelve, or twenty-four for dinner, or thirty-six for _la cena_. Take instead this _pinole_, freshly ground. She stirred some white meal into a pan of boiling water and not long afterward offered them tiny portions of the most delicious cereal they had ever tasted. Before that meal everything else in the world seemed to have drifted far away. But now they sat happy, safe, with rising spirits again, and remembered about everything. First of all Raquel pulled from within her belt a coin that made the little old lady’s eyes widen almost with fear. She shook her head violently. But no! She wished no pay for food. When Raquel had succeeded in making her understand that she must take the money and that there was more of it where that came from she accepted it with a profusion of thanks. Good American gold--it would take care of her and her _esposo_ for years! They sat and chatted, while the old Señora smoked many cigarettes. Her man was beyond in the hills with the goats. He had to keep them moving and out of the way of the bandits that had been hereabouts of late. The abandoned creatures had taken all her garden before it was ripe enough even. The nearest town? It was her birthplace, her home where she lived when this summer home grew too cold. It was eight, ten _leguas_ over there, to the west. But revolutionists occupied Moctezuma now. El Rancho Escondido? She had never heard of it. But then, she had never traveled so far. Only between here and Moctezuma in all her fifty-five years. Follow the canyon and you would come to the silver mine above, where there were rooms to sleep in and food without a doubt, and where they could take shelter until the soldiers had left Moctezuma. So they bid the little old bird woman _adios_. “Go with God,” she called after them. The rainy season had come in the mountains, and the hillsides were covered with _lluvia de oro_, rain-of-gold; the ground beneath their feet with lilies and Indian paintbrush, that little red and yellow broom for which the pinto had been named.