Chapter I: DO NOT demand," said Mr. Pepper, "I simply suggest a change. If you

wish me to resign"--his self-deprecatory manner bespoke an impossible supposition--"very well. But, if you see fit to find me a new assistant----" He paused, with an interrogatory cough.

It was the senior partner who answered, "We shall consider the matter."

The advertising manager's lean face took on an expression of satisfaction. He bowed and disappeared through the door.

Young Kaufmann, the junior partner, smiled covertly. But the elder man's face bespoke keen disappointment. For it must be explained that Mr. Pepper's simple announcement bore vitally upon the only dissension that had ever visited the firm of Kaufmann & Houghton during the thirty years of its existence.

In 1875, when John Houghton, fresh from college, had come to New York to find his fortune, the elder Kaufmann had been a candy manufacturer with a modest trade on the East Side. Young Houghton had taken the agency of a glucose firm. The disposal of this product had brought the two together, with the result that a partnership had been formed to carry on a wholesale confectionery business. Success in this venture had led to new and more profitable fields--the chewing-gum trade.

The rise to wealth of these two was the result of the careful plodding of the German workman, who kept the "K. & H." products up to an unvarying standard, joined with the other's energy and acumen in marketing the output. And this mutual relation had been disturbed by but one difference. When Houghton was disposed to consider a college man for a vacancy, Kaufmann had always been ready with his "practical man dot has vorked hiss vay." And each time, in respect to his wishes, Houghton had given in, reflecting that perhaps (as Kaufmann said) it had been that he, himself, was a good business man in spite of his college training, not because of it; and, after all, college ideals had sunk since _his_ time. And the college applicant had been sent away.

Young Johann Kaufmann graduated from grammar school. Houghton suggested high school and college.

"Vat? Nein!" said the elder Kaufmann. "I show him how better the gum to make."

And he did. He put on an apron as of yore and started his son under his personal supervision in the washing-room. He took off his apron when Johann knew all about handling chicle products, from importing-bag to tin-foil wrapper. Then he died.

And this year troublesome conditions had come on. The Consolidated Pepsin people were cutting in severely. Orders for the great specialty of K. & H.--"Old Tulu"--had fallen. Something had to be done.

Houghton, now senior partner, had proposed, and young Kaufmann agreed, that an advertising expert be secured. But the agreement ended there. For the first words of the junior partner showed Houghton that the spirit of the father was still sitting at that desk opposite, and smiling the same fat, phlegmatic smile at his supposed weakness for "dose college bitzness."

They had compromised upon Mr. Pepper, secured from Simpkins' Practical Advertising School. But at the end of six months, Pepper's so-called "follow-up campaign" had failed to meet materially the steady inroads of the western men. He had explained that it was the result of his need of an assistant. It was determined to give him one.

Then, one night as he sat in his library, John Houghton had looked into a pair of blue eyes and promised to "give Tom Brainard the chance." In consequence he had had his hair tousled, been given a resounding kiss and a crushing hug from the young lady on his knees. For Dorothy Houghton, despite her nineteen years, still claimed that privilege from her father.

In that way, for the first time, a college man had come into the employ of K. & H., and been made the assistant of Mr. Pepper at the salary he demanded--"any old thing to start the ball rolling."

And now had come the information that the senior partner's long-desired experiment had ended in failure.

Young Kaufmann turned to his work with the air of one who has given a child its own way and seen it come to grief.

"I--I suppose," Houghton said slowly, "we'll have to let Brainard go."

And then a peculiar thing happened. Through the open window, floating in the summer air, he seemed to see a familiar figure. It was dressed in fluffy white, and carried a parasol over its shoulders. It fluttered calmly in, seated itself on the sill, and gazed at him with blue eyes that were serious, reproachful.

"Daddy!" it said, and it brushed away a wisp of hair by its ear--just as another one, long ago, had used to. "Daddy!" it faltered. "Why did I ask you to give him the place, if it wasn't because--because----"

The spell was broken by Kaufmann's voice. "Whatefer you do, I am sooted," he was saying. It might have been his father. "But if w'at Pepper says about Brainard----"

The senior partner straightened up and pushed a button. "Yes. But We haven't heard what Brainard says about Pepper."

Several moments later Tom Brainard entered. Medium-sized and muscular, he was dressed in a loose-fitting suit that by its very cut told his training. He stood between them as Mr. Pepper had done, but there was nothing of the other's ingratiating deference in his level look.

"Sit down, Brainard," said Houghton. The newcomer did so, and the senior partner marked an attitude of laziness and indifference.

Houghton became stern. "Brainard," he began, "I gave you a chance with us because----" He paused.

The other colored. "I had hoped to make good without that."

"But this morning Mr. Pepper----"

"Said we couldn't get along together. That's true."

"Ah! You admit!" It was Kaufmann.

"Yes."

There was a pause. Then Houghton spoke. "I can't tell you how much this disappoints me, Brainard. The fact is, for years I have tried to shut my eyes to the development of college training. In my time there was not the call for practicality that there is today. Yet it seems to me that the training in our colleges has grown less and less practical. Why do the colleges turn out men who spend their time in personal gossip over sport or trivialities?"

"You remember that the King of Spain--or was it Cambodia--puzzled his wise men for a year as to why a fish, when dropped into a full pail of water, didn't make it overflow."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Because I must answer as the king did: It's not so--the pail _does_ overflow. They hadn't thought to try it."

"You mean that I am wrong."

"Yes. Are you sure your gossips were 'college men'?"

"Ah!" Houghton made a gesture to his partner, who was about to speak. "Then let us commence at the root of the matter. Mr. Kaufmann and I have often discussed the subject. In this case you are the one who has 'tried it.' Suppose you explain our mistake."

"I'd be glad to do that," said Brainard, "because I've heard a lot of that talk."

"Well?"

"Well--of course when I say 'college man' I mean college graduate."

"Why?"

"If a kitten crawls into an oven, is it a biscuit?"

There was an earnestness that robbed the question of any flippancy.

Houghton laughed. "No!"

"If a dub goes into college and gets flunked out in a month, is he a college man?"

"Hardly."

"Oh, but he calls himself one. He goes to Podunk all decorated up in geraniums and the rest of his life is a 'college man.' I'm not talking about him or the man who comes to college to learn to mix cocktails--inside. He may last to the junior year. I'm talking about the graduate--they're only about a tenth of the college. But they're the finished product. Mr. Kaufmann, you wouldn't try to sell gum that had only gone as far as the rolling-room, would you?"

"W'at--me?"

"Would you?"

"No." The junior partner was puzzled.

"That's because you want it to go through all the processes. Well, let's talk only about the boy who has gone all the way through the man factory."

Houghton nodded. "That's fair."

"The trouble is, people don't do that. They persist in butting into the college world, jerking out some sophomore celebration, and saying, 'What use is this silly thing in the real world?'"

"Well, aren't they right?"

"No. That's just the point. The college world is a mimic world--and your lifetime is just four years. The sophomore celebration is a practical thing there; perhaps it's teaching loyalty--that generally comes first. That's your college rolling-room. But the graduate--he's learned to do _something_ well. I never knew a college man who wasn't at least responsible."

"But----"

"But here's the trouble: after selecting say two hundred fellows out of an entering bunch of six hundred, and developing the thing each is best fitted for, _father_ steps in and the boy who would have made a first-class professor is put into business and blamed for being impractical. The fellow who has been handling thousands of dollars in college management and running twenty assistants--the man who could have taken the place--has no father to give him the boost necessary, and the other man's failure has queered his chances. He has to go to work as a mere clerk under a man--excuse me, I don't want to do any knocking."

"You think the whole trouble is caused by misdirected nepotism."

"Yes."

"Ah----" It was young Kaufmann again. "But you said that you were trained in advertising on your college paper."

"Yes--and I was going to tell you today, if Mr. Pepper hadn't, that the money you're paying for me is utterly wasted."

"Ah!"

"Yes. I can't look in the face of a hungry designer and beat him down to within a dollar of the cost of materials. And--and--my suggestions upon broader lines don't seem to cause much hooray."

"Well--" the junior partner sat up--"since you admit----" He paused for his partner to speak the words of discharge.

But Houghton was looking quizzically at the college man. "What was your idea as to broader lines?"

Brainard hesitated. "Well, it seemed to me that Pepper is trying to do two things that are antagonistic: be _'élite'_ and sell chewing-gum. The fact is that _élite_ people don't chew gum. I'd like to know how the statement, 'Old Tulu--Best by Test,' will make a kid on the corner with a cent in his fist have an attack of mouth-watering."

Kaufmann roused himself. "It is true. Our gum _is_ the best."

"I'm not disputing that, but still it's _gum_. If you're trying to increase the vulgar habit of gum-chewing--well--you can't do it by advertising the firm's financial standing, its age, or the purity of its output. That would do for an insurance company or a bank--but _gum_! Who cares for purity! All they want to know is if it _schmeckt gut_." This last with a humorous glance at Kaufmann.

The latter was scowling. Brainard was touching a tender spot.

"Well, what would you do?"

Brainard flushed. He felt the tone of sarcasm in the elder man's voice. He tightened his lips. "At least, I'd change the name of the gum!"

"Change the name!" Kaufmann was horrified.

"Well, nobody wants 'Old Tulu.' They want 'New Tulu' or 'Fresh Tasty Tulu.' At least, something to appeal to the imagination of Sadie-at-the-ribbon-counter."

"Oh!" observed Houghton. "And the name you suggest?"

"Well,--say something like 'Lulu Tulu.'"

"Gott!" Kaufmann struck the desk a blow with his fist. It was an insult to his father's memory.

Brainard rose. "I'm sorry," he said, "if I have offended. To save you any further bother, I'll just cut it out after Saturday. I--thank you for the chance"--he smiled a little ruefully--"the chance you have given me. Good day, gentlemen."

He turned on his heel and left the office.

* * * * *

As John Houghton was driven home that night, he became suddenly conscious that he would soon meet the apparition of the afternoon in the flesh. And though, of course, there was no need, he found himself rehearsing the justification of his position. "Lulu Tulu" indeed! Imagine the smile that would have illumined the faces at the club on such an announcement. The impudence of the boy to have suggested it to him--him who had so often held forth upon the value of conservatism in business! And he remembered with pride the speaker who had once said, "It is such solid vertebrae as Mr. Houghton that form the backbone of our business world." That speaker had been Bender, of the New York Dynamo Company. Poor Bender! The Western Electric Construction had got him after all.

This line of thought caused Houghton to reach in his pocket and produce a letter. He went over the significant part again.

"Our Mr. Byrnes reports the clinching of the subway vending-machine contract," it read, "and this, together with our other business, will give us over half of the New York trade. With this statement before us, we feel that we can make a winning fight if you still refuse to consider our terms. In view of recent developments, we cannot repeat our former offer but if you will consider sixty-seven as a figure----"

Sixty-seven! And a year before he would not have taken one hundred and ten! In the bitterness of the moment, he wondered if he, too, would finally go the way that Bender had.

And then, as the butler swung the door back, he was recalled to the matter of Tom Brainard by the sight of a familiar figure that floated toward him as airily as had its astral self that afternoon.

He kissed her and went to his study. Just before dinner was not a time to discuss such things. But later, as he looked across the candelabra at his daughter, all smiles and happiness in that seat that had been her mother's, he regretted that he had not, for----

"Daddy," Dorothy was saying, "I got such a funny note from Tom this afternoon. He says there has been a change at the office and that you will explain."

"Yes."

"Well----?" She paused eagerly. "It's something awfully good--I know."

Her father frowned and caught her eye. "Later," he said significantly.

The girl read the tone, and the gaiety of the moment before was gone. After that they ate in silence.

One cigar--two cigars had been smoked when she stole into the library. Since coffee (whether from design or chance he never knew), she had rearranged her hair. Now it was low on her neck in a fashion of long ago, with a single curl that strayed over a white shoulder to her bosom. She knelt at his side without a word.

He looked down at her. Somehow he had never seen her like this before--that curious womanly expression.

"Tell me," was all she said.

And, as he told Tom Brainard's failure to fit in, he watched her closely. "I'm sorry," he concluded.

"So am I, daddy," she returned steadily; "because I am going to marry him."

"What?"

"Oh, you knew--you must have," she said, "when I asked you to give him the chance."

The father was silent. In fancy he again heard Dolly Warner promising, against her parents' advice, to wait for her John to "get on in the world."

"Well?" he asked.

"Do you think you've given him a fair chance?"

He was restored to his usual poise. "I suppose he complained that I didn't."

Dorothy's eyes went wide. "No, he said that after I had heard the news from you, he would leave everything to me."

"Oh!"

"But, father, I don't think you _have_ been fair. Tom is right. _I_ don't chew gum, do I?"

"Well----" He was indignant. Then he stopped thoughtfully. "No."

"But Mary downstairs does. She wouldn't be offended at 'Lulu Tulu.' I dare say she'd think it 'just grand.'"

He returned no answer.

"Come, daddy," she went on. "New York has grown lots--even since I was little. And--and some people get behind the times. They think they're being dignified when it's only that they're antiquated."

He looked shrewdly at her. "I never heard you talk like that before. Where did you----"

"Tom said that a week ago," she admitted. "And he said, too, that he could double the results if he only had full swing. Instead, you admit he's a mere clerk for that horrid Pepper. Oh, daddy, daddy," she pleaded. "Give him a chance." Then her voice went low again. "I'm going to marry him anyway," she said, "and you don't want this between. If he fails, I'll stand the loss from what mother left me. Give him full swing--a real chance, daddy! He's going to be--_your son_."

John Houghton looked into the earnest girlish face. He wound the curl about his finger. "Kaufmann has always wanted to visit the Fatherland," he said irrelevantly.

She gave a quick, eager look. "And that Pepper could go on a vacation."

* * * * *

Days drag very slowly at a summer resort, especially when one has promised not to write to him. But Dorothy's father had kept his word, so she could but do the same. Behind, in the sweltering city, in full charge for six weeks was Tom Brainard. His authority included permission to invent and use any new labels or trade-marks he saw fit.

The girl at the seashore, however, was also busy--amusing her father that he might not give too much time to thinking. And then, when three of the six weeks had passed, came the accident to the motor car.

She was told that with rest and no worries, her father would recover in a week or two. She cheerfully fitted into the rôle of assistant to the nurse in charge, and, as soon as the doctor allowed, prepared to read his mail to him as he lay, eyes and head bandaged. But as she opened and glanced over the accumulated letters, she suddenly went pale. She read one in particular from end to end, and then, with a scared, furtive look at the bandaged figure, slipped it into a pocket.

Later, when her father had finished dictating to her, she answered the concealed letter herself.

Again the days drifted. The bandages were removed; but still the girl continued to scan the mail. Her vigilance was rewarded. She flushed over a second letter which, with one in a worn envelope, she took to her father.

He saw the careworn expression. "My little girl has been overworking," he said.

She held out the worn letter. "I've had this for some time--but--but I waited for something more, and here it is." She showed the other.

He took the first, and when he had finished, his hand was trembling.

"I regret to report that things are in a chaos," it ran. "All of the regular advertising has been withdrawn. The usual entertainment money for salesmen classed under this head has been stopped. In consequence, our city trade has tumbled fearfully--and you know how bad it was before. The worst news I have to offer is in regard to Mr. Brainard personally. Our detective reports that his time outside is spent in most questionable company. He has been seen drinking at roof-gardens with a certain dissipated pugilist named Little Sullivan, and was traced with this man to the apartment of a song-and-dance woman named Violette. He seems to be spending money extravagantly and visits certain bohemian quarters in the vicinity of Jones Street, where he puts in his time with disreputable-looking men. I beg leave to advise immediate action.--Mowbray."

"My God!" groaned Houghton. This explained that derisive offer of fifty-one from Consolidated Pepsin.

"And you kept this from me?"

"They said not to worry you," she said. "I--I've had enough for two. Besides, I answered it."

"You did! What----?"

"I told them to wait a little longer."

The father groaned again.

"I just _had_ to, daddy; and then today this letter came."

He seized it eagerly. It read: "You were right about waiting. Suspend all action."

"What does it mean?" she asked.

"We'll find out tomorrow," he answered grimly.

The 4:30 train gave John Houghton just time to reach the office before it closed. Dorothy went home. Her father, roused by the evil news of the day before, had impressed her with all that it might mean in a material way. As though that mattered!--as though anything could hurt her more! She would have been willing to go with Tom Brainard in rags before--but now!

She sat by the telephone with clenched fists, her traveling veil still pushed up on her hat, the lines that had come into her face during the past week deepening with the dusk. At last--a long, sharp ring! "Yes--father--not dine at home--meet you at the Yolland--a guest. Yes--but about Tom--what?--7:30--But about Tom, daddy? Good-by?!! But, daddy!!!"

It was no use. He had hung up. She called feverishly for the office, but the reply was, "They do not answer." Mechanically she went up to her room. "The blue mousseline, Susan," she said.

As the maid laid it out, she walked the floor. Through the window the park lay green and inviting. She longed to fly to the cool grass and run--and run----

From below came the loud, rasping notes of a street-piano that, in some incomprehensible fashion, had wandered to the deserted row of houses. The noise, for all that there was a pleasing swing to the air, irritated her. She threw the man a quarter. "Go away," she waved.

At last the maid said her mistress was ready, and Dorothy, without questioning the decision, allowed herself to be put into the brougham.

The drive seemed hours long, and then--her father's face told her nothing. Without a word, he led her to a reception-room. As they entered, a figure sprang to meet them.

For a moment she hesitated. Then, "Tom!" she cried, and caught his hand.

He saw the whiteness of her face, and all the yearnings of their separation matched it upon his.

"Dorothy!" he faltered.

Her father interrupted. "Tom is to explain how he has quadrupled our business in the last week."

A sudden weakness seized her. She followed them unsteadily. Seated at a table, however, she was able to smile again. At that moment, the orchestra, striking up, suddenly caught her attention. "Tum--tum-tum--tum-tum--tum"--that haunting, swinging melody of the street-piano.

"What tune is that?" she asked.

Brainard smiled. "_That_ is a tune that has suddenly become popular. Any night you may see hundreds of East Side children dancing on the asphalt and singing it."

"Yes," she said. "I heard it on a street-piano."

"It's called," he went on, '"My Lulu Tulu Girl.' All the grinders have it. Billy Tompkins, Noughty-three, who lives in the Jones Street social settlement, worked that for me. Those dagoes worship him--saved a kid's life or something."

A light came into John Houghton's eyes.

"That's part of the scheme. Aspwell wrote the song. I found him down in bohemia working on an opera. But, for the sake of old days in the senior extravaganza, he turned off 'My Lulu Tulu Girl.' You know those orders on your desk are for our new brand, 'Lulu Tulu.' The song was introduced two weeks ago at the Metropolitan Roof by Violette, a young lady who married our old football trainer, Little Sullivan. We'll hear her later--I have tickets. Then we'll go to Leith's; there's a turn there by 'Jim Bailey and his Six Lulu Tulu Girls'--rather vulgar (while they dance they chew the gum and perform calisthenics with it) but it seems to go. Then----"

"Tom!"

"After we've dined, I'll show you our regular magazine and newspaper advertising in the reading-room--double space. You see, I couldn't ask you to increase, so I stopped it for a time and saved up. But I hope you'll stand for it regularly. It's mainly pictures of Miss. Lulu Tulu in a large Florodora hat, with verses below apostrophizing the poetry of motion of her jaws. Then there's a line of limericks about the adventures of the 'Lulu Tulu Gummies'--small gum-headed tykes--always in trouble until they find Lulu. I got Phillips to do that as a personal favor."

"Also Noughty-something, I suppose," remarked Houghton.

"Yes. But he graduated before my time. I knew his work in the college annual. He's in the magazines now. Then I got Professor Wheaton--'Jimmy the Grind' we used to call him--his folks wanted him to be a poet--imagine Jimmy a poet!--I got Professor Wheaton to give us some readers on 'Tulu as a Salivary Stimulant,' 'The Healthful Effect of Pure Saliva on Food Products' and 'The Degenerative Effect of Artificially Relieving an Organ of its Proper Functions.' That hits the Pepsin people, you see----"

And so it ran--until he had covered his plan fully, and Dorothy's face with happy smiles.

"Tom," said the father, "if I had opened that letter instead of Dolly!"

Dorothy suddenly became demure under their gaze and sought to change the subject. "Then you admit, daddy, that a college man is of some use?"

"I'll admit that Tom got the business. But that was because he is naturally clever and business-like, not because----"

"Just a moment," said Brainard. "I think I can show that you're mistaken. I found out that Pepper was doing the wrong thing--by the first rule of criticism (freshman English): 'What is the author trying to do? Does he do it? Is it worth doing?' Substitute 'advertising man' for 'author' and you have a business that is worth doing (since you continue it)--and by the other two questions I saw his incongruity of subject-matter and expression.' My economics taught me the 'law of supply and demand.' 'Analytical research of original authorities' taught me where the demand was. There was only the problem of a cause to stimulate it. Through deductive logic' and 'psychology' I got the cause that would appeal, and the effect worked out in an increased demand which we were ready to supply--just like a problem in math."

The elder man smiled. "I don't understand a word you say, but it seems to have _worked_ well. In the future, bring in as many of your Noughty friends as we need. I'll answer for Kaufmann."

The other shook his head. "I'm not sure they would be any too anxious."

Houghton gasped in surprise. "What's that--they wouldn't be anxious to go into _business_! Why not?"

"Why not?" There was equal amazement in the younger man's tone. "Would you be anxious to leave a place where you're surrounded by friends you've tried--friends that won't stab you in the back the next minute and call it a 'business deal'--where you're respected and in control of things, and plunge out to become a freshman in the world-life, to do the sorting and trying all over again?"

"I remember--I remember----"

"And besides, what right has any one to assume that _business_ is above art, charity or even mere learning? Billy Tompkins, in the slums helping dagoes, is a failure to his father--so is Aspwell with his opera--so is Williams with his spectacles in his lab. But--who knows--when the Great Business is finally balanced----" He stopped, conscious that he was growing too rhetorical.

"If you loved college ideals so much more than business," observed Houghton, "then why did you come to us?"

A different light stole into the younger man's eyes. "Because"--he answered, "because I loved something else better than either." And he reached his hand under the cloth to one who understood.

That is all--except that the next offer of Consolidated Pepsin was, "Will you please name your own terms?"

THE TEWANA

BY

HERMAN WHITAKER

Reprinted from _The Blue Mule_ _A Western Magazine of Stories_, of February, 1906 by permission

SHE WAS a Tewana of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman, round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's brink, wringing her tresses after the morning bath, it were justifiable to mistake her for some beautiful bronze. Moreover, it were easy to see her, for, in Tehuantepec, innocence is thoughtless as in old Eden. When Paul Steiner passed her one morning, she gave him the curious open-eyed stare of a deer, bade him a pleasant "_Buenos días, Señor!_" and would have proceeded, undisturbed, with her toilet, but that he spoke. In this he was greatly mistaken. Gringos there are--praise the saints!--who can judge Tehuantepec by the insight of kindred purity, but Paul had to learn by the more uncomfortable method of a stone in the face.

He ought not, however, to be too severely handled for his dulness. Though a mining engineer, nature had endowed him with little beyond the algebraic qualities necessary to the profession; a German-American, a dull birth and heredity had predestined him for that class which clothes its morality in fusty black and finds safety in following its neighbor in the cut of its clothes and conduct. As then, he was not planned for original thinking, it is not at all surprising that he should--when pitchforked by Opportunity into the depths of tropical jungles--lose his moral bearings, fail to recognize a virtue that went in her own golden skin, and so go down before a temptation that, of old, populated the sexless desert.

That his error continued in the face of Andrea's stone is certainly more remarkable, though this also should be charged rather against her mismarksmanship than to the wearing quality of his electro-plate morality. It is doubtful if even the ancient Jews had found "stoning" as efficacious a "cure for souls" had they thrown wide as she. Anyway, Paul stood "unconvicted," as the revivalists have it, and being moved to chagrin instead of shame, he carried the story of Andrea's surprising modesty to Bachelder.

Here was a man of other parts. An artist, he had traced the spinning meridians over desert and sea, following the fluttering wing of the muse till she rewarded his deathless hope by pausing for him in this small Indian town. Expecting to stay a week, he had remained fifteen years, failing to exhaust in that long time a tithe of its form and color. Screened by tropical jungle, a mask of dark palms laced with twining _bejucas_, it sat like a wonderfully blazoned cup in a wide green saucer that was edged with the purple of low environing hills--a brimming cup of inspiration. Save where some oaken grill supplied an ashen note, its adobe streets burned in smoldering rose, purple and gold--the latter always predominant. It glowed in the molten sunlight, shone in the soft satin of a woman's skin; the very dust rose in auriferous clouds from the wooden-wheeled ox-carts. But for its magenta tiling, the pillared market stood, a huge monochrome, its deep yellows splashed here and there with the crimson of the female hucksters' dresses. This was their every-day wear--a sleeveless bodice, cut low over the matchless amplitudes and so short that the smooth waist showed at each uplift of the round, bronze arms; a skirt that was little more than a cloth wound about the limbs; a shawl, all of deep blood color. Small wonder that he had stayed on, and on, and on, while the weeks merged into months, and months into years.

He lived in the town's great house, an old feudal hacienda with walls two yards thick, recessed windows oaken grilled, and a pleasant patio where the hidalgo could take his ease under cocoanut palms and lemon trees while governments went to smash without. Here Bachelder was always to be found in the heat of the day, and here he listened with huge disgust to Paul's story. Because of their faith, strength and purity--according to their standards--he had always sworn by the Tewana women, setting them above all others, and though a frank sinner against accepted moral codes, he would never have confused nudity with vice.

"Man!" he exclaimed--so loudly that Rosa, his housekeeper, imagined that something was going wrong again with the painting--"Man! all the dollars you will ever earn would buy nothing more than her stone! If you want her, you will have to marry her."

"Oh, don't look so chopfallen!" he went on, scornfully, when Paul blinked. "I mean marriage as she counts it. You will have to court her for a couple of months--flowers, little gifts, small courtesies, that sort of thing; then, if she likes you, she will come and keep your house. When, later, you feel like settling down in the bosom of respectability, there won't be a shred of law to hold you."

Now if Paul lacked wit to analyze and apply to his own government a moral law that has evolved from the painful travail of the generations, it does not follow that he was too stupid to feel irony. Reddening, he put forth the usual declaimer of honorable intention with the glib tongue of passion. He meant well by the girl! Would give her a good home, find her better than she had ever been found in her life! As for marrying? He was not of the marrying kind! Never would! and so on, finishing with a vital question--did Bachelder know where she lived?

His color deepened under the artist's sarcastic glance. "So that's what you're after? I wondered why you picked me for a father confessor. Well, I don't, but you won't have any trouble in finding her. All the women sell something; she's sure to be on the market in the morning. You will get her quite easily. The girls seem to take pride in keeping a Gringo's house--I don't know why, unless it be that they are so dazzled by the things we have that they cannot see us for what we are."

* * * * *

A thousand crimson figures were weaving in and out the market's chrome pillars when Paul entered next morning, but though it was hard to single one person from the red confusion, luck led him almost immediately to where Andrea stood, a basket of tortillas at her feet. Lacking customers, just then, she leaned against a pillar, her scarlet flaming against its chrome, thoughtful, pensive, as Bachelder painted her for "The Enganchada," the girl sold for debt. Her shawl lay beside her basket, so her hair, that had flown loose since the morning bath, fell in a cataract over the polished amplitudes of bosom and shoulders. Save when feeling shot them with tawny flashes--as waving branches filter mottled sunlight on brown waters--her eyes were dark as the pools of Lethe, wherein men plunge and forget the past. They brought forgetfulness to Paul of his moral tradition, racial pride, the carefully conned apology which he did not remember until, an hour later, he fed her entire stock in trade to his dog. It was better so. Black, brown or white women are alike sensitive to the language of flowers, and the lilies he left in her basket served him more sweetly than could his stammering tongue. Next morning, curiosity replaced hostility in her glance, and when he left the market, her brown gaze followed him beyond the portals. Needs not, however, to linger over the courtship. Sufficient that color of skin does not affect the feminine trait that forgiveness comes easier when the offense was provoked by one's own beauty; the story goes on from the time that Andrea moved into his house with a stock of household gear that extorted musical exclamations from all her girl friends.

To their housekeeping Andrea contributed only her handsome body with a contained cargo of unsuspected qualities and virtues that simply dazzled Paul as they cropped out upon the surface. In public a Tewana bears herself staidly, carrying a certain dignity of expression that of itself reveals how, of old, her forbears came to place limits to the ambition of the conquering Aztec and made even Spanish dominion little more than an uncomfortable name. Though, through courtship, Andrea's stern composure had shown no trace of a thaw, it yet melted like snow under a south wind when she was once ensconced in their little home. Moreover, she unmasked undreamed of batteries, bewildering Paul with infinite variety of feminine complexities. She would be arch, gay, saucy, and in the next breath fall into one of love's warm silences, watching him with eyes of molten bronze. She taught him the love of the tropics without transcending modesty. Also she astonished him, negatively, by the absence of those wide differences of nature and feeling between her and the cultured women of his own land that reading in the primal school of fiction had led him to expect. He learned from her that woman is always woman under any clime or epoch. The greater strength of her physique lessened, perhaps, the vine-like tendency, yet she clung sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother gives her son.

Yet, under even this mood, her laughter lay close to the surface, and nothing tapped its merry flow quicker than Paul's Spanish. Picking up the language haphazard, he had somehow learned to apply the verb _tumblar_ to describe the pouring out of coffee, and he clung to it after correction with a persistence that surely inhered in his dogged German blood. "_Tumbarlo el café_!" he would say, and she would repeat it, faithfully mimicking his accent.

"Tumble out the coffee!" following it with peals of laughter. Or, turning up a saucy face, she would ask, "Shall I tumble out more coffee?" and again the laughter which came as readily at her own misfit attempts at English.

These, few and simple, were learned of Bachelder's woman, and sprung on Paul as surprises on his return from visiting the mining properties, which required his frequent presence. For instance, slipping to his knee on one such occasion, with the great heart of her pulsing against him, she sighed: "I love thee, lovest thou me?"

A lesson from Bachelder pleased him less. Knowing Paul's pride in his German ancestry, and having been present when, in seasons of swollen pride, he had reflected invidiously in Andrea's presence on Mexico and all things Mexican, the artist, in a wicked moment, taught her to lisp "_Hoch der Kaiser_!" _lèse-majesté_ that almost caused Paul a fainting-fit.

"You shouldn't have taught her that," he said to Bachelder. But the mischief was done. Whenever, thereafter, through torment of insect or obsession of national pride, he animadverted on her country, she silenced him with the treasonable expression.

She learned other than English from Bachelder's woman, sweating out the dog days in Rosa's kitchen, experimenting with the barbaric dishes Gringos love. She slaved for his comfort, keeping his linen, her house and self so spotlessly clean that as Paul's passion waned, affection grew up in its place--the respectful affection that, at home, would have afforded a permanent basis for a happy marriage. When, a year later, their baby came, no northern benedict could have been more proudly happy.

Watching him playing with the child, Bachelder would wonder if his union also would terminate like all the others of his long experience. In her, for it was a girl baby, Paul's fairness worked out, as she grew, in marvelous delicacies of cream and rose, weaving, moreover, a golden woof through the brown of her hair. From her mother she took a lithe perfection of form. At two she was well started for a raving beauty, and as much through his love for her as for Andrea, Paul had come, like Bachelder, to swear by the Tewana women.

He might have been swearing by them yet, but his company's business suddenly called him north, and no man could have bidden a white wife more affectionate farewell or have been more sure of his own return. "It is a comfort to know that your woman won't go gadding while you are away, and that is more than a fellow can make sure of at home." These were his last words to Bachelder.

He was to be absent two months, but after he had reported adversely on a mine in Sonora, he was ordered to expert a group in far Guerrera, where the mountains turn on edge and earth tosses in horrible tumult. Then came a third order to report in New York for personal conference. Thus the months did sums in simple addition while Andrea waited, serenely confident of his return. Not that she lacked experience of deserted wives, or based hope on her own attractions. Her furious mother love simply could not form, much less harbor, the possibility of Paul's deserting their pretty Lola.

And, barring her loneliness, the year was kind to her, feeding her mother love with small social triumphs. For one, Lola was chosen to sit with three other tots, the most beautiful of Tewana's children, at the feet of the Virgin in the Theophany of the "Black Christ" at the eastern fiesta. From morning to mirk midnight, it was a hard vigil. By day the vaulted church reeked incense; by night a thousand candles guttered under the dark arches, sorely afflicting small, weary eyelids; yet Lola sat it out like a small thoroughbred, earning thereby the priest's kindly pat and her mother's devoted worship.

Then, on her third saint day, the small girl donned her first fiesta costume, a miniature of the heirlooms which descend from mother to daughter, each generation striving to increase the magnificence of the costume just as it strove to add to the gold pieces in the chain which did triple duty as hoard, dowry and necklace. Andrea subtracted several English sovereigns from her own to start Lola's, and, with the American gold eagle, the gift of Bachelder, her _padrino_, godfather, they made an affluent beginning for so small a girl. As for the costume? Its silk, plush, velours, were worked by Andrea's clever fingers curiously and wondrously, even when judged by difficult Tewana standards. Bachelder painted the small thing, kneeling by her mother's side before the great gold altar. Her starched skirt, with its band of red velours, stands of itself leveling her head, so that she looks for all the world like a serious cherub peering out from a wonderfully embroidered bath-cabinet. But ah! the serious devotion of the faces! The muse Bachelder had followed so faithfully was hovering closely when his soul flamed out upon that canvas. It ranks with his "Enganchada." Either would bring him fame, yet they rest, face to face, in a dusty locker, awaiting the day when time or death shall cure the ache that a glimpse of either brings him.

Two months after that canvas was put away, eighteen counting from the day of his departure, Bachelder walked, one day, down to the primitive post-office to see if the mail that was due from the little fishing port of Salina Cruz contained aught for him. _Waded_ would better describe his progress, for it was the middle of the rains; water filled the air, dropping in sheets from a livid sky; the streets were rivers running full over the cobble curbs. Such white planters as came in occasionally from the jungle country had been housefast upon their plantations for this month, and, having the town pretty much to himself, the artist's thought turned naturally to Paul, who used to bring doubtful mitigation to his isolation.

He had written the artist twice, but now six months had elapsed since the last letter. "He'll never come back," the artist muttered. "Poor Andrea! But it is better--now."

Warm with the pity the thought inspired, he turned the corner into the street that led to the post-office, and was almost run down by the first mule of a train that came driving through the rain.

"Bachelder!" the rider cried.

It was surely Paul. Pulling up his beast, he thrust a wet hand from under his rain poncha, then, turning in his saddle, he spoke to the woman who rode behind him, "Ethel, this is Mr. Bachelder."

The alternative had happened! As a small hand thrust back the hood of mackintosh, Bachelder found himself staring at a sweet face, while an equally sweet greeting was drowned by echoing questions in his mind. "Good God!" he first thought. "Why did he bring her here?" And upon that immediately followed, "How ever did he get her?"

An evening spent with the pair at the small Mexican hotel increased his wonder. Pleasant, pretty, of a fine sensibility and intellectual without loss of femininity, the girl would have been fitly mated with a man of the finest clay. How could she have married Paul? Bachelder thought, and correctly, that he discerned the reason in a certain warmth of romantic feeling that tinged her speech and manner. Daughter of an Episcopal clergyman in Paul's native town, she had sighed for something different from the humdrum of small teas, dinners, parochial calls, and when Paul came to her with the glamour of tropical travel upon him, she married, mistaking the glamour for him.

"She loved me for the dangers I had passed!" the artist mused, quoting Shakespeare, on his way home. "What a tragedy when she discovers him for a spurious Othello!"

Dropping into the studio next morning, Paul answered the other question. "Why not?" he asked, with a touch of ancestral stolidity. "My work is here. Andrea?" His next words plainly revealed that while his moral plating had cracked and peeled under tropical heat, the iron convention beneath had held without fracture. He began: "It was a beastliness that we committed----"

"That _you_ committed," Bachelder sharply corrected. "And what of the child?"

Blinking in the old fashion, Paul went on, "I was coming to that. She cannot be allowed to grow up a little Mexican. I shall adopt her and have her properly educated." Here he looked at Bachelder as though expecting commendation for his honorable intention, and, receiving none, went on, dilating on his plans for the child as if resolved to earn it. Yet, setting aside this patent motive, it was easy to see as he warmed to his subject that Andrea had not erred in counting on Lola to bring him back. With her beauty she would do any man proud! The whole United States would not be able to produce her rival! She should have the best that money could give her!

Wondering at the curious mixture of class egotism, paternal tenderness and twisted morality, Bachelder listened to the end, then said, "Of course, Mrs. Steiner approves of a ready-made family?"

Paul's proud feathers draggled a little, and he reddened. "Well--you see--she thinks Lola is the daughter of a dead mining friend. Some day, of course, I'll tell her. In fact, the knowledge will grow on her. But not now. It wouldn't do. She couldn't understand."

"No?" But the quiet sarcasm was wasted on Paul, and the artist continued, "Aren't you leaving Andrea out of your calculations?"

Paul ruffled like an angry gobbler. His eyes took on an ugly gleam, his jaw stuck out, his expression incarnated Teutonic obstinacy. "Oh, she'll have to be fixed. Luckily it doesn't take much to buy these savage women; their feelings are all on the surface. I'll give her the house, furniture, and a hundred dollars cash. That should make up for the loss of----"

"----a husband?" Bachelder's face darkened. Throughout the conversation he had worn an air of suppression, as though holding, by an effort, something back. Now he straightened with a movement that was analogous to the flexure of a coiled spring. His lips opened, closed again, and he went on with his quiet questioning. "For a husband, yes. They are easy stock to come by. But not for the child of her labor. Supposing she refuses?"

Paul's eyes glinted under his frown. "Then the Jefe-Politico earns the hundred dollars and the law gives her to me."

The spring uncoiled. "Never! She died a month ago of yellow fever."

Under Teuton phlegm lies an hysteria that rivals that of the Latin races. Paul's flame died to ashes and he burst out sobbing, throwing his hands up and out with ungainly gestures. Looking down upon his awkward grief, Bachelder half regretted the just anger that caused him to slip the news like a lightning bolt; he would have felt sorrier but that he perceived Paul's sorrow rooted in the same colossal egotism that would have sacrificed the mother on the altars of its vast conceit. He knew that Paul was grieving for himself, for lost sensations of pride, love and pleasure that he could never experience again. When the ludicrous travesty had partly spent itself, he stemmed the tide with a question.

"If you don't care to see Andrea, I can make the settlements you hinted at."

Paul glanced up, stupidly resentful, through his tears. "The child is dead. That is all off."

"You will do nothing for her?" As much to prop an opinion of human nature that was already too low for comfort as in Andrea's interest, Bachelder asked the question.

"She has the house furnishings," Paul sullenly answered. "That leaves her a sight better off than she was before she knew me."

Rising, the artist walked over to the window. "The river is rising," he said, when he could trust himself to speak. "Another foot, and away goes the bridge. When do you go to the mine?"

"Tomorrow."

"Mrs. Steiner goes with you?"

"No, too wet."

Bachelder hesitated. "I'd offer you my quarters, but--you see I am neither married nor unmarried."

"No!" Paul agreed with ponderous respectability. "It would never do. Besides, I've hired a house of the Jefe-Politico; the one that crowns the Promontory. When the rain slacks we'll move out to the mine."

"There is one thing I should like," he added as he rose to go. "If you would have a stone put over the child's grave--something nice--you're a better judge than me,--I'll----"

"Too late," the artist interrupted. "Andrea broke up her necklace; put savings of eighteen generations into the finest tomb in the cemetery." He looked curiously at Paul, but his was that small order of mind which persistently fixes responsibility for the most inevitable calamity upon some person. To the day of his death he would go on taxing the child's death against Andrea; he did not even comment on this last proof of her devoted love.

After he was gone, Bachelder returned to his window, just in time to see the bridge go. A thin stream in summer, meandering aimlessly between wide banks, the river now ran a full half-mile wide, splitting the town with its yeasty race. An annual occurrence, this was a matter of small moment to the severed halves. Each would pursue the even tenor of its way till the slack of the rains permitted communication by canoe and the rebuilding of the bridge. But it had special significance now in that Andrea lived on the other bank.

He wondered if the news of Paul's return had crossed, muttering: "Poor girl, poor girl!" Adding, a moment later: "But happier than the other. Poor little Desdemona!"

* * * * *

How melancholy is the voice of a flood! Its resurgent dirge will move a new-born babe to frightened wailing, and stirs in strong men a vague uneasiness that roots in the vast and calamitous experience of the race. Call of hungry waters, patter of driving rain, sough of the weird wind, it requires good company and a red-coal fire to offset their moanings of eternity. Yet though the fireless tropics could not supply one, and she lacked the other, the storm voices were hardly responsible for Ethel Steiner's sadness the third morning after her arrival.

Neither was it due to the fact that Paul had failed to come in the preceding night from the mine. Seeming relieved rather than distressed, she had gone quietly to bed. No, it was neither the storm, his absence, nor any of the small miseries that afflict young wives. Poor Desdemona! The curtain was rising early on the tragedy which Bachelder foresaw. Already the glamour was falling from Paul to the tropics, where it rightfully belonged; this morning she was living her bitter hour, fighting down the premonition of a fatal mistake.

What with her thoughtful pauses, she made but a slow toilet, and when the last rebellious curl had been coaxed to its place behind her small ear, she turned, sighing, to the window. One glance, and she started back, pale, clutching her hands. A rocky snout, thrusting far out into the belly of the river's great bow, the Promontory stood high above the ordinary flood level. Once, in far-away Aztec times, a Tewana tradition had it that a cloudburst in the rains had swept it clear of houses, and now Time's slow cycle had brought the same deadly coincidence. Where, last night, a hundred lights had flickered below her windows, a boil of yellow waters spread, cutting off her house, the last and highest, from the mainland. Black storm had drowned the cries of fleeing householders. The flood's mighty voice, bellowing angrily for more victims as it swallowed house after house, had projected but a faint echo into her dreams. Now, however, she remembered that Carmencita, her new maid, had failed to bring in the morning coffee.

Wringing her hands and loudly lamenting the deadly fear that made her forget her mistress, Carmencita, poor girl, was in the crowd that was helping Paul and Bachelder to launch a freight canoe. When Paul--who had ridden in early from the little village, where he had been storm-stayed--had tried to impress a crew, the peon boatman had sworn volubly that no pole would touch bottom and that one might as well try to paddle the town as a heavy canoe against such a flood. But when Bachelder stepped in and manned the big sweep, a half-dozen followed. Notwithstanding, their river wisdom proved. Paddling desperately, they gained no nearer than fifty yards to the pale face at the window.

"Don't be afraid!" Bachelder shouted, as they swept by. "We'll get you next time!"

If the walls did not melt? Already the flood was licking with hungry tongues the adobe bricks where the plaster had bulged and fallen, and an hour would fly while they made a landing and dragged the canoe back for another cast. The boatmen knew! Their faces expressed, anticipated that which happened as they made the landing half a mile below. Paul saw it first. Through the swift passage he sat, facing astern, helplessly clutching the gunwale, and his cry, raucous as that of a maimed animal, signaled the fall of the house. Sobbing, he collapsed on the bank.

Bachelder looked down upon him. Momentarily stunned, his thought returned along with a feeling of relief that would have framed itself thus in words: "Poor Desdemona! Now she will never know!"

"_Señor! Señor! Mira!_" A boatman touched his shoulder.

Two heads were swirling down the flood, a light and a dark. Bachelder instantly knew Ethel, but, as yet, he could not make out the strong swimmer who was at such infinite pains to hold the fair head above water. Though, time and again, the dark head went under for smotheringly long intervals, Ethel's never once dipped, and, up or down, the swimmer battled fiercely, angling across the flood. She--for long hair stamped her a woman--gained seventy yards shoreward while floating down two hundred. Three hundred gave her another fifty. So, rising and sinking, she drifted with her burden down upon Paul and Bachelder. At fifty yards the artist caught a glimpse of her face, but not till she was almost under their hands did Paul recognize the swimmer.

"Andrea!" he shouted.

* * * * *

Reassured by Bachelder's cheery shout, Ethel had busied herself collecting her watch and other trinkets from the bureau till a smacking of wet feet caused her to turn, startled. A woman stood in the door, a woman of matchless amplitudes, such as of old tempted the gods from heaven. Stark naked, save for the black cloud that dripped below her waist, her bronze beauty was framed by the ponderous arch.

"I don't know who you are," Ethel said, recovering, "but you are very beautiful, and, under the circumstances, welcome. Under ordinary conditions, your advent would have been a trifle embarrassing. I must find you a shawl before the canoes come. Here, take this blanket."

She little imagined how embarrassing the visitation might have proved under very ordinary conditions. Though the news of Paul's return did cross before the bridge was carried away, Andrea did not hear it till that morning, and she would never have had it from a Tewana neighbor. They pitied the bereavement to which widowhood in the most cruel of forms was now added. But among them she unfortunately counted a peon woman of the upper Mexican plateau, one of the class which took from the Conquest only Spanish viciousness to add to Aztec cruelty. Jealous of Andrea's luck--as they had deemed it--in marriage, Pancha had thirsted for the opportunity which came as they drew water together that morning from the brink of the flood.

"'Tis the luck of us all!" she exclaimed, malevolently ornamenting her evil tidings. "They take their pleasure of us, these Gringos, then when the hide wrinkles, ho for a prettier! They say Tewana hath not such another as his new flame, and thy house is a hovel to that he fits up for her on the Promontory."

Here the hag paused, for two good reasons. That the barbed shaft might sink deep and rankle from Andrea's belief that her supplanter was a girl of her tribe, but principally because, just then, she went down under the ruins of her own _olla_. A fighter, after her kind, with many a cutting to her credit, she cowered like a snarling she-wolf among the sharp potsherds cowed by the enormous anger she had provoked; lay and watched while the tall beauty ripped shawl, slip and skirt from her magnificent limbs, then turned and plunged into the flood. Pancha rose and shook her black fist, hurling curses after.

"May the alligators caress thy limbs, the fishes pluck thine eyes, the wolves crack thy bleached bones on the strand."

That was the lightest of them, but, unheeding Andrea swam on. As her own house stood in the extreme skirt of the town, the Promontory lay more than a mile below, but she could see neither it nor the night's devastation because of the river's bend. Because of the same bend, she had the aid of the current, which set strongly over to the other shore, but apart from this the river was one great danger. Floating logs, huge trees, acres of tangled greenery, the sweepings of a hundred miles of jungle, covered its surface with other and ghastlier trove. Here the saurians of Pancha's curse worried a drowned pig, there they fought over a cow's swollen carcass; yet because of carrion taste or food plethora, they let her by. There an enormous saber, long and thick as a church, turned and tumbled, threshing air and water with enormous spreading branches, creating dangerous swirls and eddies. These she avoided, and, having swum the river at ebb and flood every day of her life from a child, she now easily clove its roar and tumble; swam on, her heat unabated by the water's chill, till, sweeping around the bend, she sighted the lone house on the Promontory.

That gave her pause. Had death, then, robbed her anger? The thought broke the spring of her magnificent energy. Feeling at last the touch of fatigue, she steered straight for the building and climbed in, to rest, at a lower window, without a thought of its being occupied till Ethel moved above.

Who shall divine her thoughts as, standing there in the door, she gazed upon her rival? Did she not recognize her as such, or was she moved by the touch of sorrow, aftermath of the morning's bitterness, that still lingered on the young wife's face? Events seemed to predicate the former, but, be that as it may, the eyes which grief and despair had heated till they flamed like small crucibles of molten gold, now cooled to their usual soft brown; smiling, she refused the proffered blanket.

"_Ven tu! Ven tu!_" she exclaimed, beckoning. Her urgent accent and gesture carried her meaning, and without question Ethel followed down to a lower window.

"But the canoe?" she objected, when Andrea motioned for her to disrobe. "It will soon be here!"

"_Canoa_?" From the one word Andrea caught her meaning. "_No hay tiempo. Mira!_"

Leaning out, Ethel looked and shrank back, her inexperience convinced by a single glance at the wall. She assisted the strong hands to rip away her encumbering skirts. It took only a short half-minute, and with that afforded time for a small femininity to come into play. Placing her own shapely arm against Ethel's, Andrea murmured soft admiration at the other's marvelous whiteness. But it was done in a breath. Slipping an arm about Ethel's waist, Andrea jumped with her from the window, one minute before the soaked walls collapsed.

If Ethel's head had remained above, she might have retained her presence of mind, and so have made things easier for her saviour, but, not supposing that the whole world contained a mature woman who could not swim, Andrea loosed her as they took the water. A quick dive partially amended the error, retrieving Ethel, but not her composure. Coming up, half-choked, she grappled Andrea, and the two went down together. The Tewana could easily have broken the white girl's grip and--have lost her. Instead, she held her breath and presently brought her senseless burden to the surface.

Of itself, the struggle was but a small thing to her strength, but coming on top of the long swim under the shock and play of emotion, it left her well nigh spent. Yet she struggled shoreward, battling, waging the war of the primal creature that yields not till Death himself reenforces bitter odds.

To this exhaustion, the tales that float in Tehuantepec lay her end, and Bachelder has never taken time to contradict them. But as she floated almost within reach of his hand, she steadied at Paul's shout as under an accession of sudden strength, and looked at her erstwhile husband. Then, if never before, she knew--him, as well as his works! From him her glance flashed to the fair face at her shoulder. What power of divination possessed her? Or was it Bachelder's fancy? He swears to the chosen few, the few who understand, that her face lit with the same glory of tender pity that she held over her sick child. Then, before they could reach her, she shot suddenly up till her bust gleamed wet to the waist, turned, and dived, carrying down the senseless bride.

Shouting, Bachelder also dived--in vain. In vain, the dives of his men. Death, that mighty potentate, loves sweetness full well as a shining mark. Swiftly, silently, a deep current bore them far out on the flooded lands and there scoured a sepulcher safe from saurian teeth, beyond the scope Pancha's curse. Later, the jungle flowed in after the receding waters and wreathed over the twin grave morning-glories pure as the white wife, glorious orchids rich as Andrea's bronze.

HERE ENDS THE SPINNERS' BOOK OF FICTION BEING SHORT STORIES BY CALIFORNIA WRITERS COMPILED BY THE BOOK COMMITTEE OF THE SPINNERS' CLUB FOR THE SPINNERS' BENEFIT FUND INA D. COOLBRITH FIRST BENEFICIARY ILLUSTRATED BY VARIOUS WESTERN ARTISTS THE DECORATIONS BY SPENCER WRIGHT THE TYPOGRAPHY DESIGNED BY J. H. NASH PUBLISHED BY PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY AND PRINTED FOR THEM AT THE TOMOYE PRESS NEW YORK NINETEEN HUNDRED AND SEVEN

End of Project Gutenberg's The Spinner's Book of Fiction, by Various