the riata fly true!

What if the old don, seeing also that trouble hung like a vulture over
the feast, paced uneasily up and down the vine-hidden veranda, while he
meditated upon the follies of youth? The young steers that had been
driven in for the roasting-pits were trampling uneasily about the little
corral where they had been put to fatten; and Gustavo walked with his
head thrown back upon his shoulders that he might read that open page
which was the sky, and to any anxious ones who asked, he had but one
answer and that a comforting one:

"The day will be a day of sunshine, with linnets singing in the trees
and the smallest breeze to cool the cheek." The anxious ones, hearing so
good an augury, would pass on, their thoughts upon the day-of-days and
on their lips a little smile.

CHAPTER XX

LOST! TWO HASTY TEMPERS

"One more throw, and then no more until the contest," Jack announced
placatingly, when he spied a lone bull standing just before a thicket of
chaparral and staring at them with stupid resentment that his siesta had
been disturbed. "A kiss for luck, little one!"

Riata coiled in his hand, Jack rode closer and leaned to the girl, his
eyes and his voice caressing, his lips quivering for the kiss he craved.
It had come to kisses long before then, and to half promises, when her
mood was tender, that she would marry her blue-eyed one--sometime.

Just now her mood was not tender. Jack was not to blame, nor was the
pretty Senora Simpson, although Mrs. Jerry was quite innocently and
unconsciously the cause. Mrs. Jerry had a headache, that day, and a fit
of the blues; and from the first moment when Teresita had entered the
cabin she had felt a lack of warmth in the pretty senora's manner that
had piqued her, who had lived upon adoration all her life. Mrs. Jerry
had even shown a disposition to shirk keeping her promise anent the new
way of doing Teresita's hair.

She said that she didn't think she'd go to the fiesta, after all--which
was like calmly telling a priest that one does not, after all, feel as
if heaven is worth striving for.

Teresita failed to see how the wistfulness was quite submerging the
twinkle in Mrs. Jerry's eyes, and if she had seen, she would never have
guessed what put it there; nor would she have understood why Mrs. Jerry
might shrink from attending that magnificent festival, perhaps the only
gringo woman in all the crowd, and a pitifully shabby gringo woman at
that. To her