Torres whirled on his heel and was gone. Yi Poon watched him and his two companions go down the street, then rounded the pillar to find the old peon sunk down in collapse at his disappointment of not getting any pulque, groaning and moaning and making sharp little yelping cries, his body quivering as dying animals quiver in the final throes, his fingers picking at his flesh and garments as if picking off centipedes. Down beside him sat Yi Poon, who began a remarkable performance of his own. Drawing gold coins and silver ones from his pockets he began to count over his money with chink and clink that was mellow and liquid and that to the distraught peon's ear was as the sound of the rippling and riffling of fountains of pulque
"We are wise," Yi Poon told him in grandiloquent Spanish, still clinking the money, while the peon whined and yammered for the few centavos necessary for one drink of pulque. "We are wise, you and I, old man, and we will sit here and tell each other what we know about men and women, and life and love, and anger and sudden death, the rage red in the heart and the steel bitter cold in the back; and if you tell me what pleases me, then shall you drink pulque till your ears run cut with it, and your eyes are drowned in it. You like that pulque, eh? You like one drink now, now, soon, very quick?"
The night, while the Jefe Politico and Torres organized their expedition under cover of the dark, was destined to be a momentous one in the Solano hacienda. Things began to happen early. Dinner over, drinking their coffee and smoking their cigarettes, the family, of which Henry was accounted one by virtue of his brotherhood to Leoncia, sat on the wide front veranda. Through the moonlight, up the steps, they saw a strange figure approach.
"It is like a ghost," said Alvarado Solano.
"A fat ghost," Martinez, his twin brother, amended.
"A Chink ghost you couldn't poke your finger through," Bicardo laughed.
"The very Chink who saved Leoncia and me from marrying," said Henry Morgan, with recognition.
"The seller of secrets," Leoncia gurgled. "And if he hasn't brought a new secret, I shall be disappointed."
"What do you want, Chinaman?" Alesandro, the eldest of the Solano brothers, demanded sharply.
"Nice new secret, very nice new secret maybe you buy," Yi Poon murmured proudly.