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looked at him, her eyes filled with curiosity. She saw some resemblance between Peter and the general.
    “Ben, if you will do me the honors.” He flashed a handsome smile at the dark-haired beauty who was arm in arm with Lieutenant McQueen.
    “Señorita Anabel Obregon… I regret to introduce you to Peter Abbot, General Abbot’s son and, by reputation, the scourge of young ladies from Boston to Baltimore.”
    “Pay no attention to my friend,” Peter countered as he glared at the officer with mock hostility. They had been good-natured rivals throughout their friendship of the past three years. Peter was older by five years, but it was Ben who always seemed to be extricating General Abbot’s prodigal son from one predicament after another. “He does me an injustice. A sin for which our heavenly father will no doubt punish him.” And pointedly ignoring Ben’s look of displeasure, Peter fell into step alongside the señorita.
    “I doubt the three of us can fit in the carriage,” Ben said, trying a new tactic.
    Peter caught up the reins to the mare as they walked past. “No problem. We can walk. A few extra minutes will help us all get better acquainted, don’t you agree, señorita?”
    Even Anabel seemed a little flustered. But she smiled graciously. “Of course.” The plaza was nearly devoid of townspeople. It was as if everyone in town was holding back, waiting for the day of fiesta before they would reappear in force. Some farmers had come in with baskets of dried peppers and fresh onions and sacks of dried corn to be ground into meal.
    Still, they kept to the street and rounded Military Plaza. Those merchants decorating their shopfronts nodded in greeting as the attractive young woman walked past with the tall, rawboned young officer on her right and the proud, dapper gentleman on her left. A pair of matronly women intercepted Anabel and her escorts on the north side of the plaza. Anabel stopped and exchanged pleasantries and introduced Ben and Peter to Aurelia Moreno and Hilda Grummond, two of San Antonio’s leading citizens. Come next morning, Anabel had no doubt that the news of her adventures and arrival arm in arm with the norteamericanos would have spread throughout the town, embellished no doubt by the fertile imaginations of the town’s two gossips.
    “I am Father Esteban Obregon, Anabel’s brother,” the priest said as he met them in the courtyard of the house that served as his rectory and home to his sister and her devoted woman servant. The padre was a man of average height, with narrow shoulders and a thickening girth that he kept firmly circled with a braided cord. He wore the coarse brown robes of a Franciscan. His eyes were kindly though deep set in a face burned brown by the sun. His black hair was thinning, but he kept his bald spot covered by a brown cap. His hands were covered with mud, his fingernails caked with dirt. Behind him the courtyard wall had been recently patched with adobe mud. A trowel lay beside a clay jug of water. The padre’s robes were mud-spattered and his knuckles were scraped. Before he could invite Ben and Peter into the house, the front door flew open and Carmelita, a round-figured woman in a black cotton dress and black blouse trimmed with scarlet stitchery, came waddling out into the courtyard and hurried through the cactus garden to embrace Anabel. The woman started to sob and carry on, as if Ben had brought her a corpse instead of a young woman, safe and sound.
    “I heard stories that the Comanches had been sighted back in the hills. A thousand times I blamed myself for letting you go. A thousand times I prayed for your safety,” the woman exclaimed. Her cheeks were smudged with masa meal. The aroma of peppers and beans and corn tortillas clung to her like a cloak.
    Anabel hugged the woman who had all but raised her. In Carmelita’s warm embraces, in the tucking into bed and the lazy afternoon stories, the moments of closeness in the kitchen, in the