They reached the end and stopped, and Jack commanded them to sit down and have a smoke before they did more.
"It is nothing, Senor.

We can continue, since the senor has need of haste," panted Diego, brushing from his eyes the sweat that dripped from his eyebrows.
"Not such haste that you need to kill yourselves at it," grinned Jack, and went to examine the riata.

Those two trips had accomplished much towards making it a pliable, live thing in the hands of one skilled to direct its snaky dartings here and there, wherever one willed it to go.
Many trips it would require before the riata was perfect, and then-- "The senor is early at his prayers," observed a soft, mocking voice behind him.
Jack dropped the riata and turned, his whole face smiling a welcome.

But Teresita was in one of her perverse moods and the mockery was not all in her voice; her eyes were maddeningly full of it as she looked from him to the stretched riata.
"The senor is wise to tell the twists in his riata as I tell my beads--a prayer for each," she cooed.

"For truly he will need the prayers, and a riata that will perform miracles of its own accord, if he would fight Jose with rawhide." There was the little twist of her lips afterward which Jack had come to know well and to recognize as a bull recognizes the red serape of the matador.
"Senor," she added impressively, holding back her hair from blowing across her face and gazing at him wide-eyed, with a wicked assumption of guileless innocence, "at the Mission San Jose there is a very old and very wise woman.