“I hate Marcos, he’s so cruel, and”—­her voice softened and the defiant eyes grew mischievous—­“you aren’t a bob-cat.  You’re a—­Look out!”

She shouted the last words and disappeared up the narrow, crooked street, just as a fragment of rock whizzed over my shoulder.  I jumped on my pony to dash away, when another rock just missed my head, and I saw the boy, Marcos, beside the church, ready for a third hurl.  His black eyes flashed fire, and the grin of malice on his face showed all his fine white teeth.

I was as mad as a boy can be.  Instead of fleeing, I spurred my pony straight at him.

“You little beast, I dare you to throw that rock at me!  I dare you!” I cried.

The boy dropped the missile and sped away after the girl.  I followed in time to see them enter a doorway, six or seven houses up the way.  Then I turned back, and in a minute I had overtaken our wagons trailing down to the ford of the Santa Fe River.

“I thought mebby you’d gone back after Jondo and that holy podder,” Rex Krane greeted me.  “Better begin to wink naturally and look a little pleasanter now.  We’ll be in the Plazzer in two or three minutes.”

The drivers flourished their whips, the mules caught their spirit, and with bump and lurch and rattle we swung down the narrow crack between adobe walls that ended before the old Exchange Hotel at the corner of the Plaza.

This open square in the center of the city was shaded by trees and littered with refuse.  The Palace of the Governors fronted it along the entire north side, a long, low, one-story structure whose massive adobe walls defy the wearing years.  Compared to the kingly palaces of my imagination, this royal dwelling seemed a very commonplace thing, and the wide portal, or veranda, that ran along its front looked like one of the sheds about the barracks at the fort rather than an entranceway for rulers.  Yet this was the house of a ruler hostile to that flag to which I had thrown a good-by kiss, up at Fort Leavenworth.

On the other three sides of the Plaza were other low adobe buildings, for the business of the city faced this central square.

A crowd was gathered there when we reached it.  Somebody standing before the Palace of the Governors was haranguing in fiery Spanish, if gesture and oral vehemence are true tokens.

As our wagons rumbled up to the corner of the square the crowd broke up with a shout.

“Los Americanos!  Los Carros!”

The cry went up everywhere as the rabble left the speaker to flock about us—­men, women, children, Mexican, Spanish, Indian, with now and then a Saxon face among them.  Our outfit was as well appointed as such a journey’s end permitted.  We were in our best clothes—­clean-shaven gentlemen, well-dressed boys, and one girl, neat and comely in a dark-blue gown of thin stuff with white lace at throat and wrist; and last, and biggest of all, Aunty Boone, in a bright-green lawn with little white dots all over it.