the unnatural mystery of the situation, his preposterous conflict with the improbable dwarf—these things roused and angered him, but left no impression of the unreal.
“I’ll go back there to-morrow,” he grumbled aloud, “and knock the head off that comic-opera squab. Running out and picking up perfect strangers, and shoving them into cold storage!”
But the kiss remained uppermost in his mind. “I might have done that long ago,” he mused. “She liked it, too. She called me ‘Sam’ four times. I’ll not go up that street again. Too much scrapping. Guess I’ll move down the other way. Wonder what she meant by saying they were going to eat her!”
Tansey began to feel sleepy, but after a while he decided to move along again. This time he ventured into the street to his left. It ran level for a distance, and then dipped gently downward, opening into a vast, dim, barren space—the old Military Plaza. To his left, some hundred yards distant, he saw a cluster of flickering lights along the Plaza’s border. He knew the locality at once.
Huddled within narrow confines were the remnants of the once-famous purveyors of the celebrated Mexican national cookery. A few years before, their nightly encampments upon the historic Alamo Plaza, in the heart of the city, had been a carnival, a saturnalia that was renowned throughout the land. Then the caterers numbered hundreds; the patrons thousands. Drawn by the coquettish señoritas, the music of the weird Spanish minstrels, and the strange piquant Mexican dishes served
