y are quite
comfortable at your mother's house? You have heard from her?"

"Ah, yes!" The woman replied with the slightest trace of a Latin
accent. "The young lad has been suffering a little with his back,
pobrecito! It is the climate here, no doubt, but my mother rubs him
with a remedy of her own making and he is soothed."

"And the Senora?"

The woman hesitated visibly.

"She--she sits all day by her fire and talks but seldom, yet she seems
well."

"They understand why I have not been to see them?" Willa eyed her
narrowly, for the woman's agitation boded ill.

"Yes. They ask when you will come, but they know it must not be for a
time." The Senora Lopez paused, and then added in a swift rush: "My
mother bakes for them tortillas and they are pleased together. Jose
begs my mother to tell him of Spain, but the old Senora, she has not
the interest. It is always as if she waited, but she is content."

Willa nodded. The description was such as she had anticipated, yet
despite the volubility of the other's assurance, the suggestion of
something odd and furtive remained.

"Have there been any inquiries for them here?"

The woman smiled in obvious relief, and spread out her hands.

"But yes! You spoke truly, Senorita, when you warned me of those who
would seek them. In the evening just after you were here last a
gentleman--an Americano--came asking for the Senora Reyes. I knew
nothing of her." She drew down her eyelids, significantly. "Next
morning, there came a young man of our country. He said that he was
from Mexico, but he lied; the speech of the Basque was on his tongue.
The Senora Reyes was his aunt, and he came to tell her that he had
found her lost son, his cousin. He, too, departed. Yesterday it was a
boy. He was an amigo, a companero of Jose; he desired to know where he
might be found, but he, also, was unsatisfied. We are the Lopez--what
have we to do with the Senora Reyes or Jose?"

Her tone of bland candor was inimitable, but it did not eradicate the
consciousness of anxiety and unrest in her bearing at first. Nothing
more was to be learned from further parley, and Willa presently
departed, leaving behind her a substantial roll of banknotes.

Her mind was far from easy, and as she descended the dark steep stairs
she came to an abrupt decision. Something was wrong and despite the
hirelings of Starr Wiley she must know.

"Dan," she began when he sprang down to assist her into the