to wear sackcloth
for six months if her dear patron saint, Maria de la Luz, would but hear
her petition. Out of compassion, Jacqueline said no more.

Next morning Driscoll was astir early. He wandered through a
thick-walled labyrinth of corridors and patios, and came at last into a
rankly luxuriant tropical garden, where the soft perfume of china-tree
blossoms filled his nostrils. Keeping on he passed many of the hacienda
buildings, a sugar mill, a cotton factory, warehouses, stables with
corrals, and entered a tortuous street between adobes, where he found
the hacienda store. Here the administrador was watching the clerks who
sold and the peons who bought. The latter were mostly women, barefooted
and scantily clothed. Their main want was corn, weevil-eaten corn, which
they carried away in their aprons. They made tortillas of it for their
men laboring in the hacienda fields, or on the hacienda coffee hills.
The store was a curious epitome of thrift and improvidence. One wench
grumbled boldly of short measure. She dared, because she was comely and
buxom, and her chemise fell low on her full, olive breast. She counted
her purchase of frijoles to the last grain, using her fingers, and
glaring at the clerk half coaxingly, half resentfully. But an intensely
scarlet percale caught her barbarian eye, and she took enough of it for
a skirt. A dozen cigarettes followed, and by so much she increased her
man's debt to the hacienda.

A shrunken and ancient laborer was expostulating earnestly with much
gesturing of skeleton arms, while the administrador listened as one
habituated and bored. The feeble peon protested that he could not work
that day. He parted the yellow rags over one leg and revealed decaying
flesh, sloughing away in the ravages of bone leprosy. He showed it
without emotion, as some argument in the abstract. And he was arguing
for a little corn, just a little, and he made his palm into a tiny cup
to demonstrate. The administrador opened a limp account book, held his
pudgy forefinger against a page for a second, then shut it decisively.
"No, no, Pedro, not while you owe these twelve reales. Think, man, if
you should die. You have no sons; we would lose."

"But, mi patron, there's my nephew."

"True, and he has his own father's debt waiting for him."

"Just a wee little," begged the man.

The overseer shook his head. "When you've worked to-day, yes. Then you
may have six cents' worth, and the other six cents of th