In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike.

A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode into the hills Gordon’s thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he “didn’t give a damn”! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air.

The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden impulses to go back, punch Ramon’s head, and lead Lee away by one pretty ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let go with the admonition, “There! that will teach you to behave!”

Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode on—madder than ever. Also—but, as before said, his thoughts and feelings conformed to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, hours later, he saw the fonda lying like a cup of gold in the ravine below he was in a highly reckless state.

Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, plowman and professor alike proceed to “take a hair of the dog that bit them” by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the number shall never be told!

In accordance with this natural law, Felicia’s pretty face now flashed up before Gordon’s eyes. His exclamation, “Aw, take a drink and forget it!” might, metaphorically, be applied to the fonda’s liquors less than to her.

A peona’s life gravitates between her grinding at the metate and laundering on the river boulders, with spells of “drawnwork” between. Having put out her “wash” and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down from above.

From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, led his horse in under the shady ramada, then proceeded calmly with her toilet.

Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape.

The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a girl’s contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and shoulders.

Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled two copas of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him in Spanish.

“Salud y pesitos, seÑor!” (Health and a little money!)

In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a peso note—even after he had filled and drunk again.

A peona refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his years. But being absolutely ignorant of peona nature, and in fine fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs.

When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had a diccionario with “long hair” he laughed, but failed to catch the personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats.

To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the “long-haired diccionario” was in constant use. While her father and mother dozed under the ramada he consulted it about the scenery and natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer objects—fingers, eyes, hair—the lesson passed the boundaries of etymology into the domain of love.

He was well over that border before he realized it—how far he did not guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for “kiss,” the diccionario answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action to illustrate it.