My little table was up by the main entrance, and as if for no more than to let her lovely glance rest on some manly creature who might be sitting unattached in the neighborhood, she stopped on the lowest step of the hotel doorway and her eyes were slanted in my general direction.
"Jeepers!" I said to myself, for even with a gray hair here and there impinging on the black mop above my temples—even so, I needed no ship's surgeon to testify that the pension-list was a long way from me yet. And as for the rank, 'twas well I knew that when the heart goes cruising 'tis little the rank matters. Gunner's mate, even as an admiral of the line, may well have his fair romance: that I knew.
But what man of intelligence and natively good intentions may run riot through the years of tempestuous youth and not arrive some day at a belated wisdom? After another upward glance I saw that not for me was that look of virginal yearning and distress. The line of fire of her gaze had for its target the back of the head of the young fellow who so melancholy and abstracted was gazing on the blue waters of the Gulf from the next table.
"Jeepers!" I said to myself, "is he asleep or what?" and above my lemonade I points a soft cough at him.
But no sign from him, and I coughed again—the short double cough which is the signal among all males from Kamchatka to Punta Arenas, sailing east or west, north or south, great or little circles, as you please—for all males above the age of apprentice boys to stand to attention—that 'tis lovely ladies coming over the side.
But never a sign of hearing from him, and "Mucho calero, mucho heato," I said respectfully, and with a side look of apology, meaning in that way to intimate to the lovely creature that I had gone as far as the regulations would permit a rough and simple nature who hadn't been formally introduced.
I thought she would step down onto the walk beside us there to speak, but a voice from within the hotel called out: "Marguerite! Marguerite!" A firm, commanding voice it was, and with it the lovely vision faded somewhere into the forbidding dark between-decks of the hotel.
By and by the chin of the young fellow at the next table lifted off his chest, his eyes came slowly back from the blue waters—or whatever it was they were staring at—to the white marble top of his table, and he stared, puzzled, at his full glass. "I thought I drank that," he says, and has a sip of it.
"I never ordered anything like that," he says, and shoves it from him, and then he spies me. "Excuse me," he says, "but did you speak?"
"I did," I says, "but so long ago that I've most lost the use of my tongue. But no harm; I'll speak now again," and I clapped my hands and "Muchacho! Boyo!" I calls. "Oono lemonado plaino—and oono lemonado Porto Bello with much frio—you know—mucho iceyo and hurry like helleo!"