And so it was they found her lying on that morning that she did not waken. [Illustration] THE VENGEANCE OF LUCAS The little adobe house stood flush with the street, halfway between the business houses and the residence portion of the town which turned its back on the sand and sage-covered hills that--breaking into gray waves--far off cast themselves on the beach of blue skyland in great breakers of snow-crested mountains. At the side of the house was a dooryard--so small!--beaten hard and smooth as a floor, and without a tree or a bush. There was no grass even at the edge of the sturdy little stream that ran across the square enclosure, talking all day to the old-faced baby in its high chair under the shake-covered kitchen porch. All day the stream laughed and chattered noisily to the owl-eyed baby, and chuckled and gurgled as it hurried across the yard and burrowed under the weather-bleached boards of the high fence, to find its way along the edge of the street, and so on to the river a quarter of a mile below. But the wee woman-child, owl-eyed and never complaining, sat through the long sunshine hours without one smile on its little old face, and never heeding the stream. As the days grew hotter, its little thin hands became thinner, and it ate less and less of the boiled arroz and papas the young mother sometimes brought when she came to dip water. “Of a truth, there is no niña so good as my ’Stacia; she never, never cries! She is no trouble to me at all,” Carmelita would exclaim, and clap her hands at the baby. But the baby only grew rounder eyed as it stared unsmilingly at its mother’s pretty plumpness, and laughing red lips, and big black eyes, whenever she stopped to talk to the little one. Carmelita--pretty, shallow-pated Carmelita--never stayed long with the tiny ’Stacia, for the baby was so good left alone; and there was always Anton or Luciano and Monico to drop in for a laugh with the young wife of stupid old Lucas; or Josefa coming in for a game of “coyote y gallos.” It was Lucas who went out to the porch whenever he could spare the time from earning money that he might buy the needed arroz and papas, or the rose-colored dresses he liked to see her wear.