CHAPTER SIX
THE BARON'S PERFECTOS
Strange things happen in my "Village of Vagabonds." It is not all fisher girls, Bohemian neighbours, romance, and that good friend the curé who shoots one day and confesses sinners the next. Things from the outside world come to us—happenings with sometimes a note of terror in them to make one remember their details for days.
Only the other day I had run up from the sea to Paris to replenish the larder of my house abandoned by the marsh at Pont du Sable, and was sitting behind a glass of vermouth on the terrace of the Café de la Paix when the curtain rose.
One has a desire to promenade with no definite purpose these soft spring days, when all Paris glitters in the warm sun. The days slip by, one into another—days to be lazy in, idle and extravagant, to promenade alone, seeking adventure, and thus win a memory, if only the amiable glance of a woman's eyes.
I was drinking in the tender air, when from my seat on the terrace I recognized in the passing throng the familiar figure of the Brazilian banker, the Baron Santos da Granja. The caress of spring had enticed the Baron early this afternoon to the Boulevard. Although he had been pointed out to me but once, there was no mistaking his conspicuous figure as he strode on through the current of humanity, for he stood head and shoulders above the average mortal, and many turned to glance at this swarthy, alert, well-preserved man of the world with his keen black eyes, thin pointed beard and moustache of iron gray. From his patent-leather boots to his glistening silk hat the Baron Santos da Granja was immaculate.
Suddenly I saw him stop, run his eyes swiftly over the crowded tables and then, though there happened to be one just vacated within his reach, turn back with a look of decision and enter the Government's dépôt for tobacco under the Grand Hotel.