He did love race-horses and
horse-races, and for a quarter of a century he had been trying to
forget them in the peace and quiet of the garden of the Mission de la
Madre Dolorosa.
"Our Don Mike has made this possible?" he quavered. Father Dominic
nodded.
"God will pay him," murmured Brother Anthony, and hastened away to the
chapel to remind the Almighty of the debt.
Against the journey to Baja California, Carolina had baked a tremendous
pot of brown beans and fried a hundred tortillas. Pablo had added some
twenty pounds of jerked meat and chilli peppers, a tarpaulin Don Mike
had formerly used when camping, and a roll of bedding; and when Brother
Anthony called for them at daylight the following morning, both were up
and arrayed in their Sunday clothes and gayest colors. In an empty
tobacco sack, worn like an amulet around her fat neck and resting on
her bosom, Carolina carried some twenty-eight dollars earned as a
laundress to Kay and her mother; while in the pocket of Pablo's new
corduroy breeches reposed the two hundred-dollar bills; given him by
the altogether inexplicable Senor Parker. Knowing Brother Anthony to
be absolutely penniless (for he had taken the vow of poverty) Pablo
suffered keenly in the realization that Panchito, the pride of El
Palomar, was to run in the greatest horse race known to man, with not a
centavo of Brother Anthony's money bet on the result.
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