“No hurry,” the suave Jaime put in; “no one will leave here until after tattoo.”
At nine o’clock the drums and bugles sounded from various parts of the city. There was one more tune played directly under the palace windows, after which the band and its guards left briskly to the measure of a quickstep. Charles led the way through the crowd to the Prado and the Parque Isabel. A number of carriages were 63 there before them, the occupants mostly eating ices, and the café was being rapidly filled. Waiting keen-eyed at the entrance, they saw the volante with La Clavel before it drew up, and the calesero had scarcely dismounted from his horse when the dancer was offered her choice of the available sweets. She preferred, rather than an ice, an orchata, and sipped it slowly with an air of complete enjoyment. Her every movement, Charles Abbott saw, the turn of the hand holding the glass, her chin and throat against the black film of lace, her slender body’s poise, was utterly and strongly graceful: it was, more than any other quality, the vigor of her beauty that impressed him. It seemed as though she must be superbly young, and dance magnificently, forever.
As Charles was considering this he was unceremoniously thrust aside for the passage of Captain Santacilla with another cavalry officer whose cinnamon colored face was stamped with sultry ill-humor. Santacilla addressed the dancer aggressively with the query of why she misspent her evening with the cursed Cuban negroes.
La Clavel made no reply, but tended her 64 empty glass to Andrés; then she glanced indifferently at the captains. “Their manners,” she said, “are very pretty; and as for the negro—” she shrugged her delectable shoulders.
“My blood is as pure, as Castilian, as your own,” Tirso Labrador began hotly; but Remigio stilled him with a hand on his arm. In an uncolored voice he begged the dancer to excuse them; and, sweeping off their hats, they were leaving when Santacilla’s companion stepped forward in a flash of ungoverned anger like an exposed knife:
“I’ve noticed you before,” he addressed Tirso, “hanging and gabbling around the cafés and theatres, and it’s my opinion you are an insurrectionist. If the truth were known, I dare say, it would be found you are a friend to Cespedes. Anyhow, I’m tired of looking at you; if you are not more retiring, you will find yourself in the Cabañas.”
“Good evening,” Remigio repeated in an even tone. With his hand still on Tirso’s arm he tried to force him into the café; but the other, dark with passion, broke away.
“You have dishonored my father and the name of a heroic patriot,” he said to the officer of cavalry. “In this I am alone.” With a suspicious 65 quickness he leaned forward and his big hands shut about the Spaniard’s throat.
Charles, with a suppressed exclamation, recalled Tirso’s determination to choke one of the enemies of Cuba. The man in the gripping fingers stiffened and then, grotesquely, lost his aspect of a human form; suddenly he was no more than a thing of limp flesh and gay fabrics. Instantly an uproar, a surging passionate excitement grew, at the heart of which Tirso Labrador was curiously still. Heaving bodies, at once closing in and prudently scattering, hid from Charles his friend. There was an onrush of gendarmes, harsh exclamations and oaths; then, at the flash of steel, a short agonized cry—Tirso’s voice at once hoarse and inhuman with death.