These Frenchies are a close-fisted lot! But I am looking out for you.
Peoncito! Spend and enjoy yourself--that's what your Granddaddy has
piled up the silver for!"
When the Desnoyers children returned to the Capital, he spent his
lonesome hours in going from ranch to ranch. A young half-breed would
set the water for his shrub-tea to boiling on the hearth, and the old
man would wonder confusedly if she were his daughter. Another, fifteen
years old, would offer him a gourd filled with the bitter liquid and a
silver pipe with which to sip it. . . . A grandchild, perhaps--he wasn't
sure. And so he passed the afternoons, silent and sluggish, drinking
gourd after gourd of shrub tea, surrounded by families who stared at him
with admiration and fear.
Every time he mounted his horse for these excursions, his older daughter
would protest. "At eighty-four years! Would it not be better for him to
remain quietly at home. . . ." Some day something terrible would happen.
. . . And the terrible thing did happen. One evening the Patron's
horse came slowly home without its rider. The old man had fallen on the
sloping highway, and when they found him, he was dead. Thus died the
centaur as he had lived, with the lash hanging from his wrist, with his
legs bowed by the saddle.
A Spanish notary, almost as old as he, produced the will.
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