“Wall, stranger, I allow yer inter trouble,” were as intelligible to Alessandro as if they had been spoken in the purest San Luiseno dialect.
Not so, to the stranger, Alessandro's grateful reply in Spanish.
“Another o' these no-'count Mexicans, by thunder!” thought Jeff Hyer to himself. “Blamed ef I'd lived in a country all my life, ef I wouldn't know better'n to git caught out in such weather's this!” And as he put the crying babe into his wife's arms, he said half impatiently, “Ef I'd knowed 't wuz Mexicans, Ri, I wouldn't ev' gone out ter 'um. They're more ter hum 'n I am, 'n these yer tropicks.”
“Naow, Jeff, yer know yer wouldn't let ennythin' in shape ev a human creetur go perishin' past aour fire sech weather's this,” replied the woman, as she took the baby, which recognized the motherly hand at its first touch, and ceased crying.
“Why, yer pooty, blue-eyed little thing!” she exclaimed, as she looked into the baby's face. “I declar, Jos, think o' sech a mite's this bein' aout'n this weather. I'll jest warm up some milk for it this minnit.”
“Better see't th' mother fust, Ri,” said Jeff, leading, half carrying, Ramona into the hut. “She's nigh abaout froze stiff!”
But the sight of her baby safe and smiling was a better restorative for Ramona than anything else, and in a few moments she had fully recovered. It was in a strange group she found herself. On a mattress, in the corner of the hut, lay a young man apparently about twenty-five, whose bright eyes and flushed cheeks told but too plainly the story of his disease. The woman, tall, ungainly, her face gaunt, her hands hardened and wrinkled, gown ragged, shoes ragged, her dry and broken light hair wound in a careless, straggling knot in her neck, wisps of it
