hooters sentence of "walking the plank," the mongrel crew of Broadway pirates sailed away, leaving the frenzied officials of the port to take toll of their casualties.
Meanwhile, between the acts of this comic opera, the girl Linda, in her stifling room in the Café of Many Tongues, was enacting a real drama of her own. She was genuine enough herself, but, as business is business in all cities and ports, her father, a Spaniard who conducted the café in the way all such places must be run, was not heavily burdened with scruples of any sort, and her own life as his assistant had been necessarily free from many conventions. But her mother, an emigre Frenchwoman, thrifty and a regular worshipper in the big white Cathedral, had left with the girl a set of principles far beyond the conception of the average patron of the Café of Many Tongues.
She sat at the narrow window, mending the jacket of the wounded man, who lay asleep on her bed. His head was bound with a bandage of her own careful making.
She had her arts. She could use the grace of that olive-brown shoulder, all of her lithe body if necessary. Yet now, for all its softly rounded outlines, it gave only the impression of strength, boundless vitality, and the refreshing repose that the wounded man needed most. The face softly-rounded, too, was that of an olive-brown Madonna, faintly flushed with rose and Love. The sun-ray slanting through the window revealed a faint silken floss on the cheek.
From below sounded the voice of her father, busy with foaming spigots, and ordering jabbering coolies to their duties; the clatter of shifted chairs, and the clink of glasses.
