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the man with a jerk of his sharp, padded shoulder toward San Rafael
y Todos Los Angeles. Bradshaw's discomfiture had evidently cheered
the man up; his receding anger had left him in possession of a vast
gratifying sneer.
"So," he said, "she must do what God is too busy to do. She
must punish me. Of course, she cannot do this, so she must punish
the results of my sins."
"But how?" Bradshaw asked stupidly. "How can she know?"
Infinitely patronizing, Senor Orquienz raised his panama, indi–
cating his mottled brow and reddish thatch, and with a lean fore–
finger indicated three of the children shrinking into the shadows by
the wall.
These were, by color, the "nutritional casualties" of Bradshaw's
report-rust-red, spindle-shanked, distorted, it was now apparent by
heredity, rather than poverty.
"All 'awkins," said Senor Orquienz, with complacence. "All
rubeos.
"She buys candy to give them.
If
they come near enough to take
it, she...." Here, Senor Orquienz gave Bradshaw's arm a sharp
tweak, so that he snatched it away, angrily.
"But your sister?" asked Bradshaw. He was about to ask could
not the unhappy woman be given some suitable medical treatment
when a phrase from the Merriwell books came into his head with
supreme absurdity: "A fellow's sister is sacred."
Not, however, to the unspeakable Orquienz.
"You are sorry for them and you are sorry for her. You are
stupid. Look! I do not think she is hating me very much, no? She is
hating them because they are not her keeds, not because they are my
keeds.
"But, I do not think she is hating me very much.
"Look," and with one hand, Senor Orquienz smoothed his upper
lip in a gesture acquired from some film. "I think she is mostly crazy
for me, no?" Indeed, a blurred smile had moved upon the woman's
mad face; Orquienz proffered his Palm Beach sleeve as one being
measured for a suit and Bradshaw was aware that the woman's
blanched claw had fastened on it, but not in anger, nor in token
punishment, but in a tender appraising way as one testing the flesh
of a mango, and that she was uttering low crooning syllables of
endearment.
