agon trains were
not yet stilled, and fandangoes nightly gave hilarity a safety valve.
Great lumbering _carretas_, their wheels cut from solid sections of tree
trunks and the whole vehicle devoid of even a single scrap of precious
iron, shrieked and rattled through the dark streets, filled with shoddy
cavaliers and dazzling women, whose dresses seemed planned to tempt the
resolutions of a saint. _Rebosa_ or lace _mantilla_ over full, rounded,
dark and satiny breasts; fans wielded with an inherited art, to coax
and repel the victims of great and smouldering eyes of jet, which melted
one moment to blaze the next--this was the magic segment of the clock's
round. Now the eyesores of the squalid town were hidden from critical
sight, and the alluring softness and mystery of an ancient Spanish city
made one forget the almost unforgetable. Life and Death danced hand in
hand; Love and Hate bowed and curtsied, and the mad green fires of
Jealousy flickered or flared; while the poverty and the sordid tragedies
of the day gave place to tingling Romance in the feathery night. Violins
and guitars caressed the darkness with throbbing strains, catching the
breath, tingling the nerves and turning dull flesh to pulsing ecstasy.

To the fandango came a flower of a far-off French-American metropolis,
strangely listless; and here felt her blood slowly transmute to wine and
every nerve become a harp-string to make sad music for her soul.

Small wonder that Armijo stood speechless in the sight of such a one as
she, and forgot to press his questioning as to four who had somewhere
left that wagon train; small wonder that he gave no heed to men in the
presence of this exotic flower not yet unfolded, in whose veins the
French blood of the mother coursed with the Saxon of the father, and
played strange and wondrous pranks in delicate features, vivacious eyes,
and hidden whimsicalities now beginning to peek forth.

The coarse sensuality of the governor's face revealed his thoughts to
all the room; his eyes never had known the need to mask the sheerness of
their greedy passion, and in such a moment could not dissemble. What
man like him, in his place and power, with his nature, would glance
twice at a lazy, dirty Indian looking in through the open door, or know
that the murder beast was tearing at its moral fetters in the Delaware's
seething soul? Without again taking his burning eyes from the woman
before him the governor tossed, by force of habit,