"So while 'Chita is stepping on the gas button and handing out a swell line of sympathy I begins to hint that there's one particular reason why I hated to leave El Placida. Oh, we'd played around some before that. Strictly off stage stuff, though; a little mandolin practice in the moonlight, a few fox trot lessons, and so on. But before the old man I'd let on to be skirt shy. It went big with him, I noticed. But there in the car I decides that the only way to keep in touch with the family check book is to make a quick bid for 'Chita. So I cut loose with the best Romeo lines I had in stock. Twice 'Chita nearly ditched us, but finally she pulls up alongside the road and gives her whole attention to what I had to say. Oh, they know how to take it, those sonoritas. She'd had a whole string of young rancheros and caballeros dangling around her for the past two years. But somehow I must have had a lucky break, for the next thing I knew we'd gone to a fond clinch and it was all over except the visit to the church."
"And you married the job, eh?" says I. "Fast work, I'll say. But how did papa take it?"
"Well, for the first ten minutes," says Ambrose, "I thought I'd been caught out in a thunderstorm while an earthquake and a sham battle were being staged. But pretty soon he got himself soothed down, patted me on the shoulder and remarked that maybe I'd do as well as some others that he hadn't much use for. And while he didn't make McNutt eat his words or anything like that, he gave him to understand that a perfectly good son-in-law wasn't expected to be such a shark at shopping for wool. Anyway, we've been getting along fairly well ever since. You have to, in a place like El Placida."
"And this is a little postponed honeymoon tour, eh?" I suggests.
"Hardly," says Ambrose. "I hope it's a clean break away from the continent of South America in general and El Placida in particular."
"Oh!" says I. "Will Senor Alvarado stake you to that?"
"He isn't staking anybody now," says Ambrose. "Uh-huh! Checked out last winter. Good old scout. Left everything to 'Chita, the whole works. And I've been ever since then trying to convince her that the one spot worth living in anywhere on the map is this little old burg with Broadway running through the middle."
"That ought to be easy," says I.
"Not with a girl who's been brought up to think that Buenos Ayres is the last word in cities," says Ambrose. "Why, she's already begun to feel sorry for the bellhops and taxi drivers and salesladies because she's discovered that not one of 'em knows a word of Spanish. Asks me how all these people manage to amuse themselves evenings with no opera to go to, no band playing on the plaza, and so on. See what I'm up against, Torchy?"
"I get a glimmer," says I.