To my way of thinking the young lady at least wouldn't require much explanation; and, talking of one thing and another, we had a bite of lunch and after lunch a smoke, and we were absorbing, to abate the heat—he a plain and myself another lemonado Porto Bello—when a mahogany-tinted boy with a musical voice and his pants held up by one suspender stops in front of us to chant of a bull-fight which is to come off that afternoon.
"Maybe," I says to my new young friend, "this bull-fight would make you forget your troubles for a while." And he agrees it might. So "Boyo! Muchacho!" I hail the waiter. "Duo—two-o seatso for the bull-fighteo! You know—good seatso—the besto!"
"Bueno, señor," says the waiter, and hurries off, and pretty soon is back with two yellow tickets for three pesos each, proving again what I'd said about talking the language.
'Twas the advice of the waiter to take a blue-line trolley-car for the bull-ring, the same being quick and cheap. But it was no blue or any other colored trolley-car that I hailed from the shadow of the hotel portales. No, no. A rakish, two-horse cruiser of low freeboard—that was the craft befitting two American señors of importance to go sailing through the streets of Porto Bello on a hot day to a bull-fight, and, that the inhabitants of the benighted place might be fully informed of our high rating, I stuck both feet over the port side. "And I want to see any five-foot spig policeman try to put 'em back inboard," I said.
No policeman tried to, and in due season and good order we made entrance to a plaza that was crowded with long-legged tables piled high with chile con carnes and olla podridas and various other comestibles indigenous to the region; and under the tables, where the shade was deepest, were many cases of native beer piled high with ice.
From behind the tables men and women in green and yellow and red and blue and purple and I don't know what-all colors of clothes were crying out what they had to sell, and up and down the long lines of waiting people were men telling how they had the best seats to sell to the bull-fight.
"Beer on ice and the speculators with the best seats out on the sidewalk—it makes me almost feel that I'm back on Broadway," says my young friend. 'Twas the first sign of life he'd shown since he'd jumped into the hotel to look for the young lady of his sorrows, and the same encouraged me to hope that maybe before the afternoon was over he'd remember that 'twasn't yet the Last Day—that the blue waters of the Gulf and the golden rays of the sun was still shining and sparkling, the one to the other below and above us—glory!
'Twas a plaza of promise we had come to. On a stand over by the bull-ring entrance was a band of hill Indians trying to jam a little music out of a collection of queer-looking instruments, but making a poor job of it, not to speak of resting up too frequently to please a young American bluejacket who was standing by. A festive lad he was, and he climbed up on the band-stand and stepped a lively jig by way of speeding up the band.
But the band hadn't come there to be speeded up. It was a hot day, and after the crazy Americans were come and gone there would be other hot days—or such, I gathered, was the leader's retort.
"No hurry?" says the young bluejacket. "No hurry uppo? Then you guys watch me do an imitation of a whirlin' dervish I see one time in the Caffey dee Joy in Cairo. Watch!"