Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction; Western stories
Lolita and Genesmere stood as they had stood, not very near each other,
looking after him and his gayety that the sun shone bright upon. The
minstrel truly sparkled. His clothes were more elegant than the
American's shirt and overalls, and his face luxuriant with
thoughtlessness. Like most of his basking Southern breed, he had no
visible means of support, and nothing could worry him for longer than
three minutes. Frijoles do not come high, out-of-doors is good enough to
sleep in if you or your friend have no roof, and it is not a hard thing
to sell some other man's horses over the border and get a fine coat and
hat.
"'Cinco dragones y un cabo,
Oh, no no no no no!
Y un gato de sacristan.'"
Coat and hat were getting up the canon's side among the cactus, the
little horse climbing the trail shrewdly with his light-weight rider;
and dusty, unmusical Genesmere and sullen Lolita watched them till they
went behind a bend, and nothing remained but the tin-pan song singing in
Genesmere's brain. The gadfly had stung more poisonously than he knew,
and still Lolita and Genesmere stood watching nothing, while the
sun--the sun of Arizona at the day's transfigured immortal
passing--became a crimson coal in a lake of saffron, burning and beating
like a heart, till the desert seemed no longer dead, but only asleep,
and breathing out wide rays of rainbow color that rose expanded over
earth and sky.
Then Genesmere spoke his first volunteered word to Lolita. "I didn't
shoot because I was afraid of hitting you," he said.
So now she too realized clearly. He had got off his horse above the
Tinaja to kill Luis during that kiss. Complete innocence had made her
stupid and slow.
"Are you going to eat?" she inquired.
"Oh yes. I guess I'll eat."
She set about the routine of fire-lighting and supper as if it had been
Uncle Ramon, and this evening like all evenings. He, not so easily, and
with small blunderings that he cursed, attended to his horse and mules,
coming in at length to sit against the wall where she was cooking.
"It is getting dark," said Lolita. So he found the lamp and lighted it,
and sat down again.
"I've never hurt a woman," he said, presently, the vision of his rifle's
white front sight held steady on the two below the ledge once more
flooding his brain. He spoke slowly.
"Then you have a good chance now," said Lolita, quickly, busy over her
cooking. In her Southern ears such words sounded a threat. It was not in
her blood to comprehend this Northern way of speaking and walking and
sitting, and being one thing outside and another inside.
"And I wouldn't hurt a woman"--he was hardly talking to her--"not if I
could think in time."
"Men do it," she said, with the same defiance. "But it makes talk."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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