In a little while Ignacio would return, shuffling, smoking a dangling cigarette, his hat cocked against the sun; he would give her full particulars and then return to his bell. . . .  She had come to San Juan to make a home here, to become a part of it, to make it a portion of her.  To arrive upon a day like this was no pleasant omen; it was too dreadfully like taking a room in a house only to hear the life rattling out of a man beyond a partition.  She was suddenly averse to hearing Ignacio’s details; there came a quick desire to set her back to the town whose silence on the heels of uproar crushed her.  Rising hastily, she hurried down the weed-bordered walk, out at the broken gate, and turned toward the mountains.  One glance down the street as she crossed it showed her what she had expected:  a knot of men at the door of the Casa Blanca, another small group at a window, evidently taking stock of a broken window-pane.

The sun, angry and red, was hanging low over a distant line of hills, the flat lands were already drawing about them a thin, faintly colorful haze.  She had put on her hat and, like Ignacio, had set it a little to the side of her head, feeling her cheeks burning when the direct rays found them.  The fine, loose soil was sifting into her low slippers before she had gone a score of paces.  When she came back she would unpack her trunk and get out a sensible pair of boots.  No doubt she was dressed ridiculously, but then the heat had tempted her. . . .

A curious matter presented itself to her.  In the little groups upon the street she had not seen a single woman.  Were there none in San Juan?  Was this some strange, altogether masculine, community into which she had stumbled?  Then she remembered how the bell-ringer had mentioned Mrs. Engle, the banker’s wife, and his daughter and Mrs. Struve and others.  Besides all this she had a letter to Mrs. Engle which she was going to present this evening. . . .

She was thinking of anything in the world but of a tragedy not yet grown cold, so near her that for a little it had seemed to embrace her.  Now it was almost as though it had not occurred.  The world was all unchanged about her, the town somnolent.  She had shuddered as Ignacio played upon his bell; but the shudder was rather from the bell’s resonant eloquence than from any more vital cause.  A man she had never seen, whose name even she did not know, had been shot by another man unknown to her; she had heard only the shots, she had seen nothing.  True, she had heard also a voice crying out, but she sensed that it had been the voice of an onlooker.  She felt ashamed that the episode did not move her more.

As, earlier in the afternoon, she had been drawn from the heat of her room at Struve’s hotel by the shade to be found in the Mission garden, so now did a long, wavering line of cottonwoods beckon to her.  In files which turned eastward or westward here and there only to come back to the general northerly trend, they indicated where an arroyo writhed down, tortured serpent-wise, from the mountains.  Through their foliage she had glimpsed the Engle home.  She expected to find running water under their shade, that and an attendant coolness.