“‘Maybe she meant the rose for me,’ I said, whistling the Spanish Fandango.
“For the first time since I’d known O’Connor, he laughed. He got up and roared and clapped his knees, and leaned against the wall till the tiles on the roof clattered to the noise of his lungs. He went into the back room and looked at himself in the glass and began and laughed all over from the beginning again. Then he looked at me and repeated himself. That’s why I asked you if you thought an Irishman had any humor. He’d been doing farce comedy from the day I saw him without knowing it; and the first time he had an idea advanced to him with any intelligence in it he acted like two twelfths of the sextet in a ‘Floradora’ road company.
“The next afternoon he comes in with a triumphant smile and begins to pull something like ticker tape out of his pocket.
“‘Great!’ says I. ‘This is something like home. How is Amalgamated Copper to-day?’
“‘I’ve got her name,’ says O’Connor, and he reads off something like this: ‘Dona Isabel Antonia Inez Lolita Carreras y Buencaminos y Monteleon. She lives with her mother,’ explains O’Connor. ‘Her father was killed in the last revolution. She is sure to be in sympathy with our cause.’
“And sure enough the next day she flung a little bunch of roses clear across the street into our door. O’Connor dived for it and found a piece of paper curled around a stem with a line in Spanish on it. He dragged the interpreter out of his corner and got him busy. The interpreter scratched his head, and gave us as a translation three best bets: ‘Fortune had got a face like the man fighting’; ‘Fortune looks like a brave man’; and ‘Fortune favors the brave.’ We put our money on the last one.
“‘Do ye see?’ says O’Connor. ‘She intends to encourage me sword to save her country.’
“‘It looks to me like an invitation to supper,’ says I.
“So every day this señorita sits behind the barred windows and exhausts a conservatory or two, one posy at a time. And O’Connor walks like a Dominecker rooster and swells his chest and swears to me he will win her by feats of arms and big deeds on the gory field of battle.
“By and by the revolution began to get ripe. One day O’Connor takes me into the back room and tells me all.