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“Pass in! Pass in! See you not I am in a hurry? God save us! Am I to stand all night waiting on your lordship? Another moment, friend, and the gate would have been shut. By my patron saint,” he added in a lower tone, “it would have been small grief to me to have turned the key upon thee and thy beast. By thy looks, Tia Selsa’s mud hut for thee, and the shade of a mesquite for thy mule, would have suited all needs well enough. But since it is the will of the saints that thou comest here, why get thee in.”

“Eheu!” ejaculated a woman who stood by, “what makes thee so spiteful to-night, Tio Pedro, as if the bit and sup were to be of thy providing? Thou knowest well enough that Doña Isabel herself has given orders that no wayfarer shall be turned from her door!”

“Get thee to the hand-mill, gossip!” cried the gatekeeper, angrily. “This new-comer will add a handful of corn to thy stint for grinding; he has a mouth for a gordo, believe me.”

The woman, thus reminded of her duty, hurried away amid the laughter of the idlers, who, lounging against the outer walls or upon the stone benches in the wide archway, exchanged quips and jests with Pedro, one by one presently sauntering away to the different courtyards within the hacienda walls or to their own homes in the grass-thatched village, above which the great building rose at once overshadowingly and protectingly.