Teresa went shopping in Panama. It was rather amusing. A boy trudged behind her with a large, shiny new suitcase in which the various purchases were stowed. He followed her to a side-entrance of the hotel and so to her room.
Having dismissed him and locked the door, Teresa sat and looked at herself in the glass. Adios to the girl who had been so proud of Ricardo’s admiration! She let down her black hair. It flowed over her lovely shoulders. Snip, snip, the wicked new shears severed the tresses. Her hand was unsteady. It was a dreadful thing to do. Even the sight of bobbed hair made her feel like swearing. This was much worse.
A ragged job it was when she gloomily surveyed the result. Carefully, tenderly, she gathered up her tresses and wrapped them in a silk scarf. She could not bear to throw them away. Presently she was slipping a belt through the loops of linen trousers. She scowled at the canvas shoes. The clumsy pattern disguised a narrow foot and an arching instep. The soft white shirt with a rolling collar was open at the throat. A loose coat of gray Palm Beach cloth completed the costume. The brim of her own Panama hat was bent down in front with a touch of jauntiness.
Teresa surveyed herself with a critical scrutiny. Her girlish bust and slender hips were unobtrusive. What she saw in the glass was a supple youth as straight as a lance, a youth with an oval face and dark eyes too somber for his years. At a glance he resembled a hundred others who strolled in the plazas or sat at the café tables of any Spanish-American city. His name was Rubio Sanchez, so he was informed, as the farewell message of Señorita Teresa Fernandez before she made her exit from the stage.
The young Colombian, Rubio Sanchez, busied himself in the room a little while longer. Then he sauntered down to the lobby in which men loafed and smoked and talked of many things. It was near the dinner hour. Behind the desk the night clerk was on duty. He had been denied the pleasure of welcoming Señorita Fernandez in the afternoon. The slim, debonair youth from Cartagena sauntered over to say to him in a voice of a pleasant contralto quality:
“The lady, my sister, wishes to leave her trunk in storage. I will pay her bill. Here is the key. Have your porter bring down the suitcase. I will look after it for her. She has been sent for in haste. An uncle old and sick needs her.”
The clerk was an obliging person. He expressed his regrets and arranged matters promptly. Young Rubio Sanchez and his large, shiny suitcase presently departed in a one-horse hack which was instructed to proceed until told to stop. The passenger sat indolently, a cigarette between his lips.
What made him alert was the blazing electric sign of “The Broadway Front” which seemed to be a pretentious lodging-house with a saloon, restaurant, and dance-hall on the ground front. It was the most flamboyant place of good-cheer along the street. It loomed like a beacon to draw the wandering footsteps of sailormen weary of the sea. Captain Bradley Duff and his shipmates of the Valkyrie never could have passed it by.
Rubio Sanchez, a blasé young man who knew his way about, halted the hack and swung his shiny suitcase to the pavement. Here were rooms to rent. The building was new. It looked neither dingy nor dirty. It would do for the night, or until fortune beckoned elsewhere.
He spied a barber shop next door. It occurred to him as advisable to finish what the shears had so awkwardly begun. The barber eyed him critically, with a smirk of amusement. Never had he beheld such a ragged hair-cut. Rubio Sanchez curtly told him to make it smooth, leaving enough to part. The barber laughed and asked in Spanish: