velling in deep
imaginary passion.

"Go! go!" she cried, pushing him. "Take your olla."

Upon the lightest passing puff of sentiment the Southern breast can
heave with every genuine symptom of storm, except wreck. Of course she
stirred his gregarious heart. Was she not lovely and he twenty-two? He
went down the natural stairs and came slowly up with the water, stopping
a step below her. "Lolita," he said, "don't you love me at all? not a
very little?"

"You are my dearest, oldest friend, Luis," she said, looking at him with
such full sweetness that his eyes fell. "But why do you pretend five
beans make ten?"

"Of course they only make ten with gringos."

She held up a warning finger.

"Oh yes, oh yes! Strangers make fine lovers!" With this he swelled to a
fond, dangerous appearance, and muttered, "It is not difficult to kill a
man, Lolita."

"Fighting! after what I told you!" Lolita stooped and kissed her cousin
Luis, and he instantly made the most of that chance.

"As often as you please," he said, as she released herself angrily, and
then a stroke of sound struck their two hearts still. They jumped apart,
trembling. Some of the rock slide had rattled down and plunged into the
Tinaja with a gulping resonance. Loitering strings of sand strewed after
it, and the boy's and girl's superstitious eyes looked up from the
ringed, waving water to the ledge. Lolita's single shriek of terror
turned to joy as she uttered it.

"I thought--I thought you would not come!" she cried out.

The dismounted horseman above made no sign of understanding her words.
He stepped carefully away from the ledge his foot had crumbled, and they
saw him using his rifle like a staff, steadying its stock in successive
niches, and so working back to his horse. There he slid the rifle into
its leather sling along the left side of his saddle.

"So he is not dead," murmured Luis, "and we need not live alone."

"Come down!" the girl called, and waved her hand. But the new-comer
stood by his horse like an apparition.

"Perhaps he is dead, after all," Luis said. "You might say some of the
Mass, only he was a heretic. But his horse is Mexican, and a believer."

Lolita had no eyes or ears for Luis any more. He prattled away on the
stone stairs of the Tinaja, flippant after a piercing shock of fear. To
him, unstrung by the silence and the Black Cross and the presence of the
sinking pool, the stone had crashed like a clap of sorcery, and he had
s