the
balsam of the mountain air soothed her neuralgia and her temper. As for
Carmen, she rioted in the unlimited license of her absolute freedom from
conventional restraint and the indulgence of her child-like impulses.
She scoured the ledges far and wide alone; she dipped into dark copses,
and scrambled over sterile patches of chemisal, and came back laden with
the spoil of buckeye blossoms, manzanita berries and laurel. But
she would not make a sketch of the "Blue Mass Company's" mills on a
Mercator's projection--something that could be afterwards lithographed
or chromoed, with the mills turning out tons of quicksilver through the
energies of a happy and picturesque assemblage of miners--even to please
her padrone, Don Royal Thatcher. On the contrary, she made a study of
the ruins of the crumbled and decayed red-rock furnace, with the black
mountain above it, and the light of a dying camp fire shining upon it,
and the dull-red excavations in the ledge. But even this did not satisfy
her until she had made some alterations; and when she finally brought
her finished study to Don Royal, she looked at him a little defiantly.
Thatcher admired honestly, and then criticised a little humorously and
dishonestly. "But couldn't you, for a consideration, put up a sign-board
on that rock with the inscription, 'Road to the Blue Mass Company's new
mills to the right,' and combine business with art? That's the fault of
you geniuses. But what's this blanketed figure doing here, lying before
the furnace? You never saw one of my miners there,--and a Mexican, too,
by his serape." "That," quoth Mistress Carmen, coolly, "was put in
to fill up the foreground,--I wanted something there to balance
the picture." "But," continued Thatcher, dropping into unconscious
admiration again, "it's drawn to the life. Tell me, Miss De Haro, before
I ask the aid and counsel of Mrs. Plodgitt, who is my hated rival, and
your lay figure and model?" "Oh," said Carmen, with a little sigh, "It's
only poor Coucho." "And where is Concho?" (a little impatiently.) "He's
dead, Don Royal." "Dead?" "Of a verity,--very dead,--murdered by your
countrymen." "I see,--and you know him?" "He was my friend."

"Oh!"

"Truly."

"But" (wickedly), "isn't this a rather ghastly advertisement--outside of
an illustrated newspaper--of my property?"

"Ghastly, Don Royal. Look you, he sleeps."

"Ay" (in Spanish), "as the dead."

Carmen (crossing herself hastily), "After the fashio