course I didn't know--"

"Yes, of course. We're trying to reach the border," Father O'Malley
told him. "Will you hide us here until we can go on?"

Juan courtesied respectfully to the priest. "My house is yours, Father."

"Can you take care of our horses, too, and--give us a place to sleep?"
Dave asked. His eyes were heavy; he had been almost constantly in the
saddle since leaving Jonesville, and now could barely keep himself
awake.

"Trust me," the Mexican assured them, confidently. "If somebody comes
I'll send them away. Oh, I can lie with the best of them."

The Garcias were not ordinary people, and they lived in rather good
circumstances for country folk. There were three rooms to their little
house, all of which were reasonably clean. The food that Inez set
before her guests, too, was excellent if scanty.

Juanito, taking the cue from his parents, flung himself whole-heartedly
into the task of entertainment, and since Alaire met his advances
halfway he began, before long, to look upon her with particular favor.
Once they had thoroughly made friends, he showered her with the most
flattering attentions. His shyness, it seemed, was but a pretense--at
heart he was a bold and enterprising fellow--and so, as a mark of his
admiration, he presented her with all his personal treasures. First he
fetched and laid in her lap a cigar-box wagon with wooden
wheels--evidently the handiwork of his father. Then he gave her, one by
one, a highly prized blue bottle, a rusty Mexican spur, and the ruins
of what had been a splendid clasp knife. There were no blades in the
knife, but he showed her how to peep through a tiny hole in the handle,
where was concealed the picture of a dashing Spanish bullfighter. The
appreciation which these gifts evoked intoxicated the little man and
roused him to a very madness of generosity. He pattered away and
returned shortly, staggering and grunting under the weight of another
and a still greater offering. It was a dog--a patient, hungry dog with
very little hair. The animal was alive with fleas--it scratched
absent-mindedly with one hind paw, even while Juanito strangled it
against his naked breast--but it was the apple of its owner's eye, and
when Inez unfeelingly banished it from the house Juanito began to
squall lustily. Nor could he be conciliated until Alaire took him upon
her knee and told him about another boy, of precisely his own age and
size, who planted a magic bean in his mother's doo