By WHO

2 cups seedless watermelon chunks
3 tablespooons sugar
3/4 cup cold water
juice of one lime

Puree all ingredients in blender until smooth. Serve over ice on a hot day.

Pauline and her older sister, Maybel, were renegades. Not the kind of renegades that you see on television who wear black leather jackets and ride motorcycles and terrorize small towns, but they did their share of breaking the mold.

They were young, but at 11 and 12, they were certainly old enough to know better. It was a warm August day and their parents were away for the afternoon. The older children were already busy in the fields, tending to what was growing there that season, while Pauline and Maybel were playing with a stick and ball in the road in front of the house. The girls were resourceful when it came to entertaining themselves. They had no ball, in fact, and what they were playing with was really a small sack stuffed with old cloth rags.

That afternoon while everyone was getting their chores done for the day, and while Pauline and Maybel were playing their own version of baseball, a white man rode down the main street in his horse-drawn wagon. Nobody had ever seen him before, but his cargo distracted the locals from worrying too much about where he came from and what business he had in El Valle. He was a professional, and the suit and fedora he wore said so. He came selling watermelons, a delicious commodity that hardly anybody in El Valle ever saw, or had the opportunity to taste, for that matter. Pauline and Maybel wanted one badly, but they had no money. They spoke with the man for a few minutes, and he struck a deal with them.

"Tell you what. You girls go fetch me one of those little lambs I can see over there behind your house, and I'll give you two watermelons for it." The girls were ecstatic with the idea of getting two watermelons, so they wouldn't have to share with each other. They agreed to the stranger's proposition and went to collect their payment.

Lucia, Oralia, and Amavil were lost in the rows of tall corn and didn't see their sisters enter the barn. Had they seen Pauline and Maybel, they would have recognized the mischief on their faces and intervened. The girls surveyed the lot and selected the smallest and weakest-looking lamb - they weren't complete fools - and tied a rope around its neck. It obeyed as they led it into the road to its new owner. The man lifted the bleating lamb onto the bed of his wagon and then loaded each girl's arms with a heavy, ripe watermelon. He tipped his hat and continued on his way. Pauline looked at Maybel and grinned widely.

All they had to do now was to find a place where they could eat the watermelons in secret. They went back into the barn, placed the watermelons on the floor in the corner, and covered them with fistfuls of loose hay. Their next task was to sneak a large knife from the kitchen so that they could split open their melons. Luckily nobody was in the kitchen preparing the evening's dinner, or else their motives would have been questioned. The girls weren't prepared for that kind of an interaction, for they were much too eager to eat their watermelons. Maybel carried the knife from the kitchen to the barn because Pauline was too excited to handle it cautiously. They opened the door to the barn and scurried to the corner where they had left their prize, but the watermelons were gone.

Maybel was confused and Pauline was nearly in tears. They looked around the barn and kicked the loose hay to the side to see if the melons had rolled underneath a bale of hay, but they hadn't. After they had determined that the watermelons were not anywhere near where they had left them, they lifted their eyes from the floor. One of the brown cows was staring blankly at them, its jaw moving from side to side. It had eaten both watermelons, probably in two easy gulps. The girls were devastated. Not only had they lost their precious watermelons, they now had 11 sheep instead of the 12 they had earlier that afternoon. Their father was going to be furious.

An hour later, the girls heard the Model A pull into the driveway, and two car doors slammed shut. When Reyes and José arrived home, they were pleased to see that the children had completed their chores. José went out into the barn to see that all the animals had been watered, fed, and accounted for. When he counted only 11 sheep, he went to the girls and asked them if they knew what had happened to the 12th.

"No sabemos, Papá. Quizás era el coyote." José couldn't get mad at his daughters, since coyotes were often the source of trouble on the farm, and everybody knows that there was nothing anybody could do to stop a coyote from creating mischief.

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