“You have killed her,” said the old woman, as she drew the mantilla about the baby’s face.

Dona Eustaquia dropped the body and moved backward from the bed.  She put out her hands and went gropingly from the room to her own, and from thence to the sala.  Brotherton came forward to meet her.

“Eustaquia!” he cried.  “My friend! My dear!  What has happened?  What—­”

She raised her hand and pointed to the cross.  The mark of the dagger was still there.

“Benicia!” she uttered.  “The curse!” and then she fell at his feet.

THE WASH-TUB MAIL

PART I

“Mariquita!  Thou good-for-nothing, thou art wringing that smock in pieces!  Thy senora will beat thee!  Holy heaven, but it is hot!”

“For that reason I hurry, old Faquita.  Were I as slow as thou, I should cook in my own tallow.”

“Aha, thou art very clever!  But I have no wish to go back to the rancho and wash for the cooks.  Ay, yi!  I wonder will La Tulita ever give me her bridal clothes to wash.  I have no faith that little flirt will marry the Senor Don Ramon Garcia.  He did not well to leave Monterey until after the wedding.  And to think—­Ay! yi!”

“Thou hast a big letter for the wash-tub mail, Faquita.”

“Aha, my Francesca, thou hast interest!  I thought thou wast thinking only of the bandits.”

Francesca, who was holding a plunging child between her knees, actively inspecting its head, grunted but did not look up, and the oracle of the wash-tubs, provokingly, with slow movements of her knotted coffee-coloured arms, flapped a dainty skirt, half-covered with drawn work, before she condescended to speak further.

Twenty women or more, young and old, dark as pine cones, stooped or sat, knelt or stood, about deep stone tubs sunken in the ground at the foot of a hill on the outskirts of Monterey.  The pines cast heavy shadows on the long slope above them, but the sun was overhead.  The little white town looked lifeless under its baking red tiles, at this hour of siesta.  On the blue bay rode a warship flying the American colours.  The atmosphere was so clear, the view so uninterrupted, that the younger women fancied they could read the name on the prow:  the town was on the right; between the bay and the tubs lay only the meadow, the road, the lake, and the marsh.  A few yards farther down the road rose a hill where white slabs and crosses gleamed beneath the trees.  The roar of the surf came refreshingly to their hot ears.  It leaped angrily, they fancied, to the old fort on the hill where men in the uniform of the United States moved about with unsleeping vigilance.  It was the year 1847.  The Americans had come and conquered.  War was over, but the invaders guarded their new possessions.