Thus the three reached the orchard, where Jack selected two pear trees that happened to stand a few feet more than the riata length apart; and Diego, slipping a hair rope through the hondo of the riata, made fast the rope to a pear tree.  The other end he tied to the second hair rope, drew the riata taut and tied the rope securely to the second tree.  He picked up the oaken stick, examined it critically for the last time, although he knew well that it was polished smooth as glass from its work on other riatas, twisted the riata once around it and signed to the other peon.

Each grasping an end of the stick and throwing all their weight against it, they pushed it before them along the stretched riata.  As they strained toward the distant pear tree the rawhide smoked with the friction of the stick in the twist.  It was killing work, that first trip from tree to tree, but Diego joyed in thus serving his blue-eyed god.  As for the other, Roberto, he strained stolidly along the line, using the strength that belonged to his master the patron just as matter-of-factly as he had used it since he was old enough to be called a man.

Jack, leaning against a convenient tree in the next row, smoked a cigarette and watched their slow, toilsome progress.  Killing work it was, but the next trip would be easier after that rendering of the stiff tissue.  When the stick touched the hondo, the two stopped and panted for a minute; then Diego grasped his end of the stick and signaled the return trip.  Again it took practically every ounce of strength they had in their muscular bodies, but they could move steadily now, instead of in straining, spasmodic jerks.  The rawhide sizzled where it curled around the stick.  They reached the end and stopped, and Jack commanded them to sit down and have a smoke before they did more.

“It is nothing, Senor.  We can continue, since the senor has need of haste,” panted Diego, brushing from his eyes the sweat that dripped from his eyebrows.

“Not such haste that you need to kill yourselves at it,” grinned Jack, and went to examine the riata.  Those two trips had accomplished much towards making it a pliable, live thing in the hands of one skilled to direct its snaky dartings here and there, wherever one willed it to go.  Many trips it would require before the riata was perfect, and then—­

“The senor is early at his prayers,” observed a soft, mocking voice behind him.

Jack dropped the riata and turned, his whole face smiling a welcome.  But Teresita was in one of her perverse moods and the mockery was not all in her voice; her eyes were maddeningly full of it as she looked from him to the stretched riata.

“The senor is wise to tell the twists in his riata as I tell my beads—­a prayer for each,” she cooed.  “For truly he will need the prayers, and a riata that will perform miracles of its own accord, if he would fight Jose with rawhide.”  There was the little twist of her lips afterward which Jack had come to know well and to recognize as a bull recognizes the red serape of the matador.