lead him and Sanchicha again to the buried boat. There he bade her kneel
beside him. "We will do penance here, thou and I, daughter," he said
gravely. When the fog had drawn its curtain gently around the strange
pair, and sea and shore were blotted out, he whispered, "Tell me, it was
even so, was it not, daughter, on the night she came?" When the distant
clatter of blocks and rattle of cordage came from the unseen vessel, now
standing out to sea, he whispered again, "So, this is what thou didst
hear, even then." And so during the night he marked, more or less
audibly to the half-conscious woman at his side, the low whisper of the
waves, the murmur of the far-off breakers, the lightening and thickening
of the fog, the phantoms of moving shapes, and the slow coming of the
dawn. And when the morning sun had rent the veil over land and sea,
Antonio and Jose found him, haggard, but erect, beside the trembling
old woman, with a blessing on his lips, pointing to the horizon where a
single sail still glimmered:--
"Va Usted con Dios."
A BLUE GRASS PENELOPE
CHAPTER I
She was barely twenty-three years old. It is probable that up to that
age, and the beginning of this episode, her life had been uneventful.
Born to the easy mediocrity of such compensating extremes as a small
farmhouse and large lands, a good position and no society, in that vast
grazing district of Kentucky known as the "Blue Grass" region, all the
possibilities of a Western American girl's existence lay before her.
A piano in the bare-walled house, the latest patented mower in the
limitless meadows, and a silk dress sweeping the rough floor of
the unpainted "meeting-house" were already the promise of those
possibilities. Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was
limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. There were
small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted
floors of outlying log-cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright,
clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed
upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the
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