He listened intently, expecting to hear a tumult at the barracks, but all was still there. He brushed the plaster and tile dust from his clothes. He regretted that he had no hat: not even “A present from Bradford,” which he had left screening the shutter on the door of his cell. He remembered suddenly three cases of murderers arrested from having lost their hats at the scene of their crimes. He remembered another case, from the time of the Terror in Paris, of a man saved from the guillotine by having a hat thrust suddenly upon his head, while he waited his turn in the dusk and rain at the place of execution. When his turn came at the end of the batch, he was judged to be one of the spectators and passed by.
“I’m suspect without a hat,” he thought, “and I am also guilty of train-trespass and prison-breaking. But I’m not going to beat it from here till I know whether that man has beaten it.”
He turned to his left, walked along another sandy road of silent adobe houses and sleeping dogs, and soon reached a road which he recognised. Far down it, a quarter of a mile away, on the left, was the barrack entrance, with its flag-pole, bearing the green-grey-blue tricolour of the Occidental Republic. Opposite Sard, as he stopped to reconnoitre, was a pulperia, with a hoarding on its roof. It was this hoarding which was familiar; he had noticed it while he was being led to the barracks; it bore a legend which he could now read, in translation:
Palace of Pleasure.
Look. The biggest Glass in Tlotoatin. 5¢.
Beds for Knights, Artists, Travellers.
Beans. Beer. Wine. Beds.
“Beans, beer and a bed,” Sard thought, “how good those things are, and how lucky they are who can afford them. Well is it called a palace of pleasure, if that is the kind of life they live here. I begin to understand the phrase now: ‘he hasn’t got a bean.’ And at this time yesterday I was mate of a crack ship.”
From a mine to the westward from him there came the blare of a hooter, giving warning that siesta was nearly ended. Other hooters took up the blast, till the place rang with echoes coming back from the hills. Now from some of the houses workers came half awake, like sailors coming on deck, buttoning their shirts. They went slouching off towards the mines, rubbing their eyes.
A man came yawning from the door of the Palace of Pleasure. He had a straw-broom in one hand with which he pretended to sweep the doorstep. Half his face was covered with one hand as he yawned. It was the train-hand.