"Was Don Tadeo here?"
"Did you not see how obligingly he caused a message to be delivered to the bandit Pepito Rechifla, that one of the prettiest Chinas in Mexico dictated to me?"
"What! was that man in the sombrero and red cloak Don Tadeo the licentiate?"
"It was."
"And where shall I find him now?"
"I do not know; for, to say the truth, he has no settled abode, but lives a little every where. If, however, you wish to consult him on urgent business, go this very evening, between the hours of nine and twelve o'clock, to the Callejon del Arco (blind alley of the arcade); you are sure to find him in the last house on the right as you pass the square."
I thanked the scribe, and, after giving him a few reals for his trouble, directed my steps to the Callejon del Arco. Although it was scarcely seven o'clock in the evening, I went to try to find out, before nightfall, the house which I intended to visit two hours afterward. Experience had taught me that such precautions were not useless in Mexico; besides, the Callejon del Arco had long been notorious as one of the most dangerous places in the Mexican capital.
The appearance of the alley justified but too well the reputation which it had acquired. The dense mass of houses, of which the Merchants' Arcades form a part, known by the name of the Impedradillo, does not form one compact cuadra. On the southwest side of the Cathedral, a narrow lane runs into the Impedradillo; this is the Callejon del Arco. It is like one of those caverns which the sea sometimes hollows out in the face of a cliff. When still blinded by the overpowering rays of the sun with which the square is flooded, and which beat in all their intensity on the white walls and granite pavement, the eye, at first dazzled by the glare, sees only after a few moments another street cutting this one at right angles, and forming with it a dark cross-road. There, as in the caverns by the sea-shore, you can not hear the noise without, except it be a dull, mournful hum, which resembles as much the wail of the wind-tossed waves as the tumult of a populous city. A few rope-spinners' shops, their massive doors fast closed, and here and there a few dark passages, are the only signs which remind you that you are in a city, and in the midst of inhabited houses. Water is constantly oozing out of the walls; a perpetual moisture reigns every where; and scarcely, even at midday, at the time of the summer solstice, does a sunbeam visit this dismal den. A little new life then begins to stir, till the sun has advanced into the winter solstice, when it relapses into its former gloom and silence.
It was there, then, in one of these sinister-looking houses, that I was to meet a man able to settle a piece of business for me from which all the other lawyers in Mexico had recoiled. I stopped some moments to gaze with wonder and amazement upon the situation chosen for the office of the lawyer; but had not the episode, which I had witnessed a short time before, already prepared me for the eccentricities of Don Tadeo? How could I explain the easy, familiar tone which he had employed with the wretch to whom he was consigning the message to Pepito Rechifla? How the relations which appeared to exist between the bandit and the licentiate? The strange intimacy of a lawyer with thieves and assassins seemed, at first sight, not at all to be expected. The hope, however, of obtaining a solution of this seeming enigma decided me, and I left the Callejon del Arco with the intention of visiting it again two hours afterward.