Ramona | Page 6

get in at the door; I doubt not it warms the Senora's heart
to see them all there, as if they belonged to the house, as they used to:
and now I know when it's to be, I have only to make my arrangements
accordingly. It is always in the first week of the month the Father gets
here. Yes; she said, 'Senor Felipe will be well enough in a week or two,
he thinks.' Ha! ha! It will be nearer two; ten days or thereabouts. I'll
begin the booths next week. A plague on that Luigo for not being back
here. He's the best hand I have to cut the willow boughs for the roofs.
He knows the difference between one year's growth and another's; I'll
say that much for him, spite of the silly dreaming head he's got on his
shoulders."
Juan was so pleased with his clearing up in his mind as to Senor
Felipe's purpose about the time of the sheep-shearing, that it put him in
good humor for the day,-- good humor with everybody, and himself
most of all. As he sat on the low bench, his head leaning back against
the whitewashed wall, his long legs stretched out nearly across the
whole width of the veranda, his pipe firm wedged in the extreme left
corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets, he was the picture of
placid content. The troop of youngsters which still swarmed around the
kitchen quarters of Senora Moreno's house, almost as numerous and
inexplicable as in the grand old days of the General's time, ran back and

forth across Juan's legs, fell down between them, and picked
themselves up by help of clutches at his leather trousers, all unreproved
by Juan, though loudly scolded and warned by their respective mothers
from the kitchen.
"What's come to Juan Can to be so good-natured to-day?" saucily asked
Margarita, the youngest and prettiest of the maids, popping her head
out of a window, and twitching Juan's hair. He was so gray and
wrinkled that the maids all felt at ease with him. He seemed to them as
old as Methuselah; but he was not really so old as they thought, nor
they so safe in their tricks. The old man had hot blood in his veins yet,
as the under-shepherds could testify.
"The sight of your pretty face, Senorita Margarita," answered Juan
quickly, cocking his eye at her, rising to his feet, and making a mock
bow towards the window.
"He! he! Senorita, indeed!" chuckled Margarita's mother, old Marda the
cook. "Senor Juan Canito is pleased to be merry at the doors of his
betters;" and she flung a copper saucepan full of not over-clean water
so deftly past Juan's head, that not a drop touched him, and yet he had
the appearance of having been ducked. At which bit of sleight-of-hand
the whole court-yard, young and old, babies, cocks, hens, and turkeys,
all set up a shout and a cackle, and dispersed to the four corners of the
yard as if scattered by a volley of bird-shot. Hearing the racket, the rest
of the maids came running,-- Anita and Maria, the twins, women forty
years old, born on the place the year after General Moreno brought
home his handsome young bride; their two daughters, Rosa and Anita
the Little, as she was still called, though she outweighed her mother;
old Juanita, the oldest woman in the household, of whom even the
Senora was said not to know the exact age or history; and she, poor
thing, could tell nothing, having been silly for ten years or more, good
for nothing except to shell beans: that she did as fast and well as ever,
and was never happy except she was at it. Luckily for her, beans are the
one crop never omitted or stinted on a Mexican estate; and for sake of
old Juanita they stored every year in the Moreno house, rooms full of
beans in the pod (tons of them, one would think), enough to feed an

army. But then, it was like a little army even now, the Senora's
household; nobody ever knew exactly how many women were in the
kitchen, or how many men in the fields. There were always women
cousins, or brother's wives or widows or daughters, who had come to
stay, or men cousins, or sister's husbands or sons, who were stopping
on their way up or down the valley. When it came to the pay-roll, Senor
Felipe knew to whom he paid wages; but who were fed and lodged
under his roof, that was quite another thing. It could not enter into the
head of a Mexican gentleman to make either count or account of that. It
would be a disgraceful niggardly thought.
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