As she passed, John Stuart Webster looked fairly into her face, v started as if bee-stung, and hastily lifted his hat preposterous situation, and the more she weighed it, the more interesting and attractive the proposition appeared. But one consideration troubled her. How would the unknown knight manage an introduction? Or, if he failed to manage it, how was she to overcome that obstacle?
“Oh, dear,” she murmured, “I do hope he's brave.”
She need not have worried. Hours before, the object of her thought had settled all that to his own complete satisfaction, and as a consequence was sleeping peacefully and gaining strength for whatever of fortune, good or ill, the morrow might bring forth.
CHAPTER VI
DAY was dawning in Buenaventura, republic of Sobrante, as invariably it dawns in the tropics—without extended preliminary symptoms. The soft, silvery light of a full moon that had stayed out scandalously late had merged imperceptibly into gray; the gray was swiftly yielding place to a faint crimson that was spreading and deepening upward athwart the east.
In the Calle Nueva a game cock, pride of an adoring family of Sobrante's lower class, crowed defiance to a neighbouring bird. A dog barked. From the patch of vivid green at the head of the Calle San Rosario a troupe of howling monkeys raised a sun-up cheer that marked the finish of a night of roystering; from wattled hut and adobe casa brunette women in red calico wrappers came forth, sleepy-eyed and dishevelled; and presently from a thousand little adobe fireplaces in a thousand backyards thin blue spirals of smoke mounted—incense to the household gods of Sobrante—Tortilla and Frijoles. Brown men, black men, lemon-tinted men, and white men whose fingernails showed blue instead of white at the base, came to the doors of their respective habitations, leaned against them, lighted post-breakfast cigarettes, and waited for somebody to start something.
To these indolent watchers of the dawn was vouchsafed presently the sight of Senora Concepcion Josefina Morelos on her way to early mass at the Catedral de la Vera Cruz. Men called to each other, when she passed, that Senora Morelos shortly would seek, in a Carmelite convent, surcease from the grief caused by the premature demise of her husband, General Pablo Morelos, at the hands of a firing-squad in the cuartel yard, as a warning to others of similar kidney to forbear and cease to tamper with the machinery of politics. And when Senora Morelos had passed, came Alberto Guzman with two smart mules hitched to a dilapidated street-car; came Don Juan Cafetéro, peseta-less, still slightly befuddled from his potations of the night before, and raising the echoes in the calle with a song singularly alien to his surroundings:
Green were the fields where my forefathers dwelt—