STUBBORN FOOLS

"Oh, Bess, you should see yourself now," Nan laughed the next morning.

It was early and the girls were all mounted on mules as they pa.s.sed through the archway of the patio and out into the gardens with their huge palms and brilliant flowers and birds.

"Feel like a fool myself," Adair grumbled as he tried to adjust his position on the beast he was riding. And truly, he was a ridiculous figure.

"Well, dad," Alice pretended that she was trying to mollify him, "you just weren't made to ride a mule. Nor were you," she looked at Walker Jamieson's long dangling legs as she spoke.

"Nor you either," Walker retorted laughing. "You're too little. Hey, you," he broke off his conversation with Alice quickly and called to Nan, "don't do that."

"What?" Nan asked innocently.

"You know. Don't look so innocent."

"Nan Sherwood!" Bess guessed at what Walker was driving at. "You're not taking pictures of us in _these_ outfits are you?"

"She not only is, but she has," Walker answered before Nan could say anything. "I saw her sliding that little camera back into its case."

"Nan, please," Alice joined in the protest, "have mercy on us and think how our children and grandchildren will laugh if they ever see pictures of us riding mule-back. We're all perfect sights."

But Nan had already taken the pictures, so the protests came too late.

Now it was Adair MacKenzie who diverted their attention. "Get along there. Get a move on, you slow poke." Adair was kicking the sides of his mule with real force. But the mule was accustomed to such treatment and he only raised his ears lazily, turned his head slowly and looked at his rider sleepily. Then he stopped, dead in his tracks.

"Get along there, get along, I say," Adair kicked the mule again. "Can't you understand plain English?"

"Understands only Spanish, I guess, Mr. MacKenzie," Walker said. "Try that on him."

"If he can't understand English, the best language in the world, he can't understand anything," Adair was as stubborn as the mule he was on, but for once all his railing, all his sputtering, all the ordering that he could do, didn't accomplish a thing. The mule just wouldn't move.

"Here you," Adair called ahead to their guide who had philosophically shrugged his shoulders at the outburst of the new master, and sat now, on his mule on the trail above waiting for the party to move on. At the call, he ambled back to see what was wrong.

"Hey, you," Adair was impatient with everyone and everything now. "Get a hustle on. It's today we want to see this blasted estate, today. Not manana."

The guide understood one word, 'manana.' His face broke into a broad grin. "Si, si, senor. Si, Senoritas." He was more than glad that these strangers could speak his language. Now, he broke out into a voluble explanation, all in Spanish of course, as to how to treat a mule.

Walker stood off laughing heartily at the whole situation. Adair MacKenzie did not understand one single word of what was being said to him, but it was coming forth so fast that he could neither interrupt nor stop the flow. For once in his life he looked utterly helpless.

Alice was as amused as Walker. "Poor dear," she said, "to think that he should come all of this way to be baffled by a mule and a man whose philosophy says 'tomorrow', we will do it 'tomorrow'."

Adair saw their smiles. It was more than he could stand, more than any man could stand. Awkwardly, he dismounted from his beast, walked around in front and shook his ever present cane at him. The beast did nothing but blink.

"Why, wh-wh-why, you good-for-nothing, senseless, no-count, beast you,"

he burst forth in a torrent, "if you think you can stop me, you're mistaken. You'll go up there if I have to carry you and you'll not take a picture of that either," Adair turned to Nan with this last. It was somehow much more satisfying to explode to Nan than to either the beast or the Mexican.

"No, cousin," Nan answered as seriously as she could.

"And don't be meek either." He brandished his cane again. "Never get anyplace like that." There was no satisfying the man now. Neither agreement nor disagreement could placate him. Nan kept still.

It was Alice finally, who smoothed his ruffled feelings and got him back on the mule. "Now, daddy," she said quietly, "if you'll just sit quietly and wait, the mule will go, but you can't beat him into action the way you do me." Saying this she laughed up at him. He stooped over and kissed her.

It was nice to see this father and daughter together. They seemed to understand one another perfectly. Adair, explode as he might, could never frighten Alice. She knew how soft-hearted and kind he was underneath all his crust. She had known from babyhood that he wouldn't intentionally, for all his angry outbursts, hurt anyone.

Now, having smoothed his ruffled feelings some, she let Walker a.s.sist her back on her mule. The party moved slowly along the narrow stony trail while huge limbs of great palm trees waved slightly above them.

Reaching the top of a high hill on the estate they looked out over the countryside.

"What's that?" Laura, ever curious, indicated a point in the distance, something that showed black against the sky and that clearly had been built by man.

Walker drew forth his field gla.s.ses and directed his glance toward the object. "Can't be sure," he rendered his verdict after some thought, "but think it might be a pyramid. There are several in the district you know. Perhaps the most famous of them all is the one that a hunter down from New York discovered three or four years ago. It's rather inaccessible, but such an old one that some old codger in the East with a lot of money on his hands donated a considerable sum to have it opened."

"What did they find?" Nan asked.

"Oh, lots of dried up bones."

"That all?" Nan sounded disappointed.

"Well, not exactly," Walker admitted and then stopped. He enjoyed teasing these youngsters.

"Well, what did they find then," Nan persisted.

"Some jewels. Some gold. Some exceptionally fine pottery."

"And--" Nan saw that he was still holding out.

"Some poison spiders that killed three members of the excavation party.

Now you satisfied?" Walker grinned down at her.

"Well, yes," Nan agreed. "But I still want to visit a pyramid sometime."

"Visit those in Egypt," Walker advised. "There's nothing more impressive."

"You been there?" Nan questioned. The path was wide enough so that they could ride now with their mules side by side.

"Yes, years ago, with my father," Walker answered. "He had a bad case of the wanderl.u.s.t, so whenever he could sc.r.a.pe a few dollars together, off he would go to some outlandish place."

"Taking your mother with him?"

"Oh, sometimes. She went up into Alaska when he went to pan gold from the streams. She went down into South America when he went as an engineer on a big industrial project. And she went when he set out for Russia after the revolution, but after that she gave up."

"You must be like your father," Nan commented.

"Oh, a little," Walker admitted. "But I haven't quite got the wanderl.u.s.t as much as he has. He could go into raptures over anything that was far away from him. I've been thinking of him a lot today, riding over this estate. He spent some time down here in Mexico, and never grew tired of extolling the country. This was after my mother died.

"Though we are not entering the country at all that he was fondest of, I've been thinking of his descriptions of it, especially after seeing that pyramid in the distance.

"It was down in Oaxaca and was called, I believe, Tehuantepec. It took days to get there by horseback, according to his account, and the route was through tropical jungles more dense than any others in the world.

You see my father never saw mediocre things," he explained by the way.