Carlota Read Online Free PDF Page B

where I couldn't watch Father Barones. The beef was tender and sweet on the tongue.
    In the afternoon, after a long siesta, everyone gathered on the mesa for horse racing and sports. I rode to the mesa on my gelding, Sixto, following my grandmother in her silk-lined
carreta.
Tiburón was too much for me to manage. My swollen hand still would not grip the reins. I could manage the gelding with spurs alone, but not the stallion, who required a heavy Spanish bit as well.
    My grandmother said, "The way you are dressed you must plan to ride in the races."
    I had on a deerskin shirt dyed blue and deerskin trousers and blue-stitched boots. I wanted to wear a pretty dress with ruffles, which Doña Dolores had bought for me from a Yankee trading ship, but my father said I looked better in trousers than I did in a dress. I didn't like this remark very much.
    Doña Dolores gave up, saying, "The harm is already done. By now everyone knows Carlota de Zubarán. A little more cannot hurt." She dabbed at her eyes and gave a little sniff.
    I did promise her that I would not go in the rooster race, which made her feel better, but not much. I failed to tell her that I didn't like the race, anyway.
    This was a race between four men. Six roosters were buried in the ground up to their necks, just their heads showing. Then the men set off at a gallop. The winner was the one who could reach the finish line first, with the most chicken heads in his hand. Sometimes there was a second race if it was a tie; even a third. It took a great deal of skill to reach down when the horse was at a gallop and at the right instant snatch off the rooster's head. My father was famous, I had heard, as a rooster racer when he was in his youth. I didn't like the race and never tried it. But it was very popular.
    I took part in only one of the events. This one was for speed and endurance. The course started from the hitching rack. It ran for a league across the mesa and through a grassy marsh and up a rise and across a deep ditch and through some heavy chaparral and then back in a last straight run for the hitching rack.
    I had an advantage because I knew the country, having traveled it many times. I was willing to give the rest of the riders a head start, but all of them, including the bridegroom, scoffed at the idea.
    "I should give
you
a head start," Don Roberto said, casting a look at me, I am sure comparing me in my leather clothes with his beautiful white and pink bride. And I could hear him congratulating himself that it was a piece of good fortune that he had not married me. "Perhaps a hundred
varas,
halfway across the mesa," he went on. "I will advise the others."
    "Don't bother, Brother-in-law," I said. "I'll race you even or not at all."
    This did not please Don Roberto. Nor my father, who had bet heavily on the race and wanted any advantage for me that he could get. He said nothing, however, because he didn't want the men to feel that they were racing someone who needed a head start.

7
    There were eleven riders in the race. The men were all young. I knew some of them by their first names. I was familiar with what their horses could do. If I had been able to ride the stallion I would have won easily. About the gelding, Sixto, I knew little, other than that he was easy to ride as long as he wasn't trailing the other horses.
    My father bet all the coins he hadn't spent on the wedding, which were equal in value to three hundred cows and twelve riding horses.
    "No mustangs," my father said to Don César, his dear friend with whom he was betting. "Horses of good breeding, not decrepit with old age. And the cows the same; no crow bait."
    "But these coins," said Don César. "What are they?"
    "Gold," Don Saturnino said.
    "I know, but whence do they come?"
    "From Spain," my father said, telling a lie.
    "
Verdad?
"
    "
Es verdad.
Grandfather Don Sebastián was a minister of the King's treasury."
    "Your grandfather stole them from the