"I don't know anything myself," Nan admitted after some hesitation.

"I've tried and tried to get cousin Adair to tell me something about the place, but he just won't say anything. I'm not sure whether he knows and won't tell or whether he doesn't know himself. At any rate, he's being extremely mysterious about the whole thing. Says that we didn't see anything when we saw Emberon, that this place that we are going has that beat all hollow. Now what do you people make of that?"

"Dungeons, secret pa.s.sage, weird wailing of bagpipes, that's what Emberon had," Laura summarized. "If this Mexican hacienda has anything better to offer, I'd like to see it."

"And so would I," Nan agreed. She almost resented the idea that anything could possibly be any nicer than the old Blake estate in Scotland. "And listen, he says this further, that if we think we had adventures in Scotland and England, we just haven't seen anything yet. What in the world do you suppose he means?"

"If Doctor Prescott said that, or Mrs. Cupp, or your father or mine,"

Rhoda answered, "I might possibly hazard a guess as to what was meant, but there's no telling about this cousin of yours, Nan."

"No, he's as unpredictable as the seasons, Alice says, and the only thing we can do is wait." Nan sounded as though waiting was the hardest thing in the world to do.

CHAPTER VI

SOMETHING ABOUT MEXICO

"What's this?" Laura questioned the next morning when she came upon Amelia in her hotel room reading diligently from a book.

"Oh, nothing." Amelia barely looked up.

"Come on, tell aunty," Laura teased. "n.o.body else is up yet and I've simply got to talk to someone."

"You mean there's no one else about, so you'll talk to me. Well, I like that!" Amelia returned to her book as though she were really indignant.

"You know I didn't," Laura sounded very conciliatory--for her. "It's just this; I've got the whim-whams something terrible. Did you ever have the whim-whams, Amelia?"

"Can't say I did," Amelia answered. "At least I didn't call them any such name as that."

"Then you know what I mean?" Laura looked very serious.

"You mean," Amelia turned the open book over on her lap and answered Laura's question, "that you have awakened early in a hotel in a strange city, that you want like anything to go off exploring, that you know you can't, and that the next best thing you can find to do is to annoy someone else who can't go either."

"My dear professor," Laura a.s.sumed as serious a mien as possible, "you have hit the well-known nail squarely on the head. It must be that you have the whim-whams too. Now what is that you are reading?"

"Well, if you must know," Amelia gave in, "It's a guidebook to Mexico."

"Ah, what could be better." Laura herself reached for the book. "Let's see what this country across the street from this hotel is like."

"It does seem funny, doesn't it," Amelia said, "that when we look out our hotel windows we are looking into a foreign country. It doesn't look any different. It doesn't sound any different. And it doesn't--"

"Smell any different," Laura finished, "and that's the most surprising thing of all, because according to Mr. MacKenzie, Mexico is just the smelliest place on G.o.d's green earth."

"Did he tell you that too?" Amelia asked. "Really, when he finished the tirade against the country that he delivered to me after dinner, I began to wonder why in the world he ever brought along five such nice girls as we."

"Five? What's the matter, 'Mealy, can't you count before breakfast?

There are six of us."

"I said five _nice_ girls," Amelia insisted. "He might have had one of several reasons for bringing you along."

"Such as--" Nan had come into the room just in time to hear this last.

"Oh, he might have wanted to make the world a better place for the rest of us to live in by losing Laura, making her a target for the revolutionists, feeding her to the bulls, or just leaving her here as food for the fleas," Amelia responded airily, and then she put her arm around Laura's shoulder as though to show her that she didn't mean a word of what she was saying.

"They do say," Grace added as she joined the group, "that the fleas here are man-sized. That reporter told me last night that the reason they give us mosquito netting to put over us at night is that the fleas and the mosquitos wage a nightly battle as to who is going to carry off the Americans."

"And you believed him?" Laura laughed.

"Well, not exactly," Grace answered, "but I did carefully tuck my netting all round me last night."

"He told me lots of things about Mexico, too," Nan added, "and I don't know which of them to believe. This is a queer country we are going into, full of so many strange legends, so many different kinds of people that any wild tale at all might be true."

"That's what I was thinking," Amelia agreed, "when Laura came into the room this morning. This guidebook here is full of all sorts of queer tales."

"Such as--?" Nan queried.

"Oh, you people in there," Bess called from another room, "wait until Rhoda and I come before you talk any more about Mexico. We want to hear too."

"All right, slow-pokes," Nan called back, "but you'll have to hurry.

We're supposed to be downstairs for breakfast with Cousin Adair in exactly one-half hour."

At this, Bess and Rhoda came into Amelia's room and the girls, all dressed in sports clothes, settled themselves to learn something about the country they were going to visit.

"It says here," Nan began, for she had long ago lifted the guidebook from Amelia's lap, "that Mexico is a Latin-American country south of the United States of America. The Gulf of Mexico is to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west."

"Oh, we know that," Bess interrupted impatiently, "tell us something that is different."

"Well, how's this?" Nan queried, "Mexico is a land of great contrasts.

About sixty percent of its population are Indians who live in a backward civilization that weaves its own clothes, grinds its own corn, does everything for itself by hand. The other forty percent is advanced and modern. The first can neither read nor write. The latter attends modern schools and universities.

"Nothing in Mexico, in its history, its climate, its people, or its landscape is dull or monotonous."

"That's better," Bess approved. She was not one to care much for facts or figures.

"Oh, there are more interesting things than that in the book," Amelia reached for it. "Here let me read you something that I found this morning."

"Just a second," Nan held on to it, "How in the world do you p.r.o.nounce these words with all their z's and x's. No wonder there are so many people that can't read or write. I wouldn't be able to write myself if I lived here. Imagine living in a place called I x m i q u i l p a n or X o c h i m i l c o." She spelled them all out because she couldn't possibly p.r.o.nounce them. "They must all be Indian words dating from the time of the Aztecs," Nan went on. "Look, they all have beautiful meanings.

"Chalchihuites is translated into 'Emeralds in the Rough', Tehuacan, 'Stone of the G.o.ds', Chiapas, 'River of the Lime-leaved Sage', and Tzintzuntzan, 'Humming Bird'. And here's a place I want to go, Yecapixtla or 'Place Where People Have Sharp Noses'."

"What a funny place that must be," Laura laughed with Nan, "I'll bet they all spend their time minding one another's business."

"They probably have a factory there," Nan went on, "for turning out people like Mrs. Cupp and they have catalogues showing the sharp, sharper, and sharpest noses."

"And when a school princ.i.p.al wants to hire an a.s.sistant that will see everything and hear everything he pays top price and gets the sharpest,"

Laura liked the idea. "We ought to go there," she ended, "if it's only to get a postcard so that we can send it back to Mrs. Cupp with the words 'Wish you were here'."