Even if they did, her instinct told her it would be less to be feared than the hopeless uncertainty of another day.

As she left the house the wind seemed to seize her as in her dream, and hurry her along with it, until in a few moments the walls of the low _casa_ sank into the earth again and she was alone, but for the breeze on the solitary plain.

The level distance glittered in the sharp light, a few crows with slant wings dipped and ran down the wind before her, and a passing gleam on the marsh was explained by the far-off cry of a curlew.
She had walked for an hour, upheld by the stimulus of light and morning air, when the cluster of scrub oaks, which was her destination, opened enough to show two rambling sheds, before one of which was a wooden platform containing a few barrels and bones.

As she approached nearer, she could see that one or two horses were tethered under the trees, that their riders were lounging by a horse-trough, and that over an open door the word _Tienda_ was rudely painted on a board, and as rudely illustrated by the wares displayed at door and window.
Accustomed as she was to the poverty of frontier architecture, even the crumbling walls of the old _hacienda_ she had just left seemed picturesque to the rigid angles of the thin, blank, unpainted shell before her.

One of the loungers, who was reading a newspaper aloud as she advanced, put it aside and stared at her; there was an evident commotion in the shop as she stepped upon the platform, and when she entered, with breathless lips and beating heart, she found herself the object of a dozen curious eyes.