“True,” said Joseph, “true. If it wasn’t for The Bright Shawl, where would all of us be?—Still in the inkwell.”
⁂
Pilar wore it at the danzon in the teatro. Joseph sat in a box and Arco de Vaca told him that Andrés was about to be killed. He loved Andrés with his whole soul, such as it was, so he watched the last scene with interest from a safe place. To free Cuba and be shot while the band played was one thing. To mix up in the murder of his best friend and maybe get arrested—that was something else again.
But his iron nerve failed him. He took his hat and fled blindly—right into the midst of the fracas, where Pilar was stabbing Andrés and ink flowed like blood. Some kind friend batted Joseph over the head and he passed out. Curtain.
⁂
That was about all—except that the S. P. C. C. shipped the little dare-devil back to his mother, unpunctured.
He thought the matter over for forty years and was finally inclined to the belief that the blow on his head....
Well, maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. Who can tell?
THE JUDGE
or
TURNING THE TEA TABLES
Illustrating the influence of Henry James upon an otherwise perfectly good novelist,