Colonel's seeing eye, that economies had been undertaken; though the casual observer would have discerned nothing wrong. But the whitewash on the outbuildings and corral fences, and the trunks of the fruit trees, to take one small example, was not scrupulously renewed twice a year, as formerly. They looked well enough, but had lost their old, dazzling, prideful freshness. The borders of the long avenue grew a jolly crop of weeds and vine tangle—as indeed did the borders of every other road in the county; but in prosperous times even such remote corners had been clean and ship-shape. In short, all the little fancy touches, the refinements of neatness, the exuberances that not only groomed the horse but polished the hooves, were all gone. For to accomplish these fancy touches a superabundance of labour is necessary, so that for each small task is a man to polish that task off with trimmings. Allie had drawn up another disconcerting list of the inhabitants of Corona del Monte. It represented a small village.
"But you can't count in old Pedro, for instance, nor Carla, and certainly not the children. We don't hire them: we only hire Pablo," protested the Colonel.
"Well, they all live on Pablo," Allie pointed out, "and Pablo gets everything he owns in life from the ranch. So the ranch is supporting them just the same, whether it is direct or indirect."
The Colonel sighed and gave it up. But when it came to cutting down that surplus population, there was more difficulty. The ones the Colonel was most willing to let go were those who had been with him the shortest time. And naturally the latter were, nine cases in ten, the most efficient.
"If you keep on this way you'll have nobody on the place but a lot of guitar playing loafers," cried Allie, with some point.
The result was a compromise, which satisfied wholly neither the demands of sentiment nor those of efficiency; but which, nevertheless, did work out better on economic lines than the old system.
Allie also stopped the old easy fashion that had always obtained of the retainers helping themselves from a community supply of vegetables and fruit.
"Just because they've always done it is no particular reason
