Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

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Rojas shrugged to indicate that she could go wherever she pleased for all of him, and Celinda followed her old servant to the front door.

The afternoon was half gone when Don Carlos, who had been taking his siesta in a huge canvas armchair, and reading several of the Buenos Aires newspapers, which the train brought out to the desert three times a week, left the ranch house.

Hitched to a post of the portico which shaded the door was a horse. The rancher smiled as he noticed that the animal bore a side saddle. In a moment Celinda appeared, wearing a black riding skirt. She tossed her father a kiss from the end of her riding whip, and then, without setting foot in the stirrup or accepting a helping hand, with one leap she landed on the saddle, and the horse started off at full gallop toward the river.

But his rider did not let him go very far. Celinda dismounted in a grove of willows where a second horse, the same one she had ridden that morning with a cross saddle, was waiting for her. Dropping her skirt and the rest of her feminine costume, she stood revealed in knickerbockers, riding boots, and a boyish shirt and necktie. She smiled as she thought of how she was disobeying “the old man,” as, in accordance with local custom, she called her father.