Don Filipe,
the vaqueros thinking that! But she tells no one, and she is unhappy.
Also there is reason. That poor little one has the ranchos, but have
you hear how the debts are so high all the herds can never pay? That
is how they are saying now about Granados and La Partida, and at the
last our senorita will have no herds, and no ranchos, and no people
but me. _Madre de Dios!_ I try to think of her in a little adobe by
the river with only _frijoles_ in the dinner pot, and I no see it that
way. And I not seeing it other way. How you think?"

"I don't, it's too new," confessed Pike. "Who says this?"

"The Senor Henderson. I hear him talk with Senor Conrad, who has much
sorrow because the Don Filipe made bad contracts and losing the money
little and little, and then the counting comes, and it is big, very
big!"

"Ah! the Senor Conrad has much sorrow, has he?" queried Pike, "and
Billie is getting her face to the wall and crying? That's queer.
Billie always unloaded her troubles on me, and you say there was none
of this weeping till I came back?"

"That is so, senor."

"Cause why?"

"_Quien sabe?_ She was making a long letter to Senor Rhodes in
Sonora,--that I know. He sends no word, so--I leave it to you, senor,
it takes faith and more faith when a man is silent, and the word of a
killing is against him."

"Great Godfrey, woman! He never got a letter, he knows nothing of a
killing. How in hell--" Then the captain checked himself as he saw the
uselessness of protesting to Dona Luz. "Where's Billie?"

Billie was perched on a window seat in the _sala_, her eyes were more
than a trifle red, and she appeared deeply engrossed in the pages of a
week-old country paper.

"I see here that Don Jose Perez of Hermosillo is to marry Dona Dolores
Terain, the daughter of the general," she observed impersonally. "He
owns Rancho Soledad, and promises the Sonora people he will drive the
rebel Rotil into the sea, and it was but yesterday Tia Luz was telling
me of his beautiful wife, Jocasta, who was only a little mountain girl
when he rode through her village and saw her first. She is still
alive, and it looks to me as if all men are alike!"

"More or less," agreed Pike amicably, "some of us more, some of us
less. Dona Dolores probably spells politics, but Dona Jocasta is a
wildcat of the sierras, and I can't figure out any harmonious days for
a man who picks two like that."

"He doesn't deserve harmony; no man does who isn't