The doctor sighed. “I knew you would be a Yankee,” he said, and turned and walked into the house, while Vickers rode away, resuming his song about his indifference as to the fit of his boots. Vickers’s house was on the slopes of the hills, and a steep little white adobe stairway led up to it. The house itself was a blue-green color, and though from the outside it presented an appearance of size, it was literally a hollow mockery, for the interior was taken up with a square garden, with tiled walks, and innumerable sweet-smelling flowers. Round the inner piazza or corridor there were arches, and in these Vickers had hung orchids, of which he was something of a fancier. In the central arch was a huge gilded birdcage in which dangled a large bright-colored macaw. “You beauty,” said Vickers, stopping for an instant as he crossed the hallway. The macaw hunched his shoulders, shifted his feet on the perch, and said stridently, “_Dame la pata._” “You betcher life!” said Vickers, thrusting his finger between the bars. The two shook hands solemnly, and Vickers went on his way to the dining-room, shouting at the top of a loud voice, “Ascencion, _almuerzo_.” An instant later he was being served with coffee, eggs, and a broiled chicken by an old woman, small, bent, wrinkled, but plainly possessed of the fullest vitality. “And what are you going to give us for supper to-night?” Vickers asked, with his mouth full. With some sniffing, and a good deal of subterranean grunting, Ascencion replied that she did not know what to give _los Americanos_ unless it were half an ox. “Ah, but the lovely señoritas,” said Vickers. A fresh outburst of grunting was the reply. “Ah, the Señorita Rosita. I have already had a visit from her this morning. She comes straight into my kitchen,” said the old woman. “She expects to live there some day.” “In the kitchen, Ascencion!” said her employer. “You talk as if she were a rat.” “Oh, you will see. The Señor Don Papa,--he goes about saying that he will marry his daughter to none but foreigners,--that they make the best husbands.” “So they do.” “Oh, very well, very well, if you are satisfied. It makes no difference to me. It is all the same to me that every one says this is a betrothal party, and the _niña_ does not deny it.” “Ah, you know very well, proud beauty,” said Vickers, waving a fork at her, “that there is only one woman in all Spanish-America for me--the only woman who knows how to cook, this side of the San Pedro. If you choose to call this our betrothal party, yours and mine, Ascencion----” It was a perfectly safe joke, for Ascencion was a wife, the mother of fourteen, and the grandmother of a whole village. She did not even notice the last part of his sentence. “And who is there can cook like me on the other side of the San Pedro?” she asked. “I don’t know her;” and she hobbled away.