BRADSHAW'S TOMBSTONE
339
"Coo," said the man's mad sister, "Coo ...
nmo.
.
esposo."
The free hand, equally white, crept with its beads out of the
folds of black cloth and fastened upon the cross which hung from
her wattled neck.
Suddenly Bradshaw comprehended; it was as
if
he had blundered
into a hotel room where there was being enacted an obscene
tableau
vivant.
Words he had never used leaped into his mind, and from
these, grotesquely, he chose something from the buried vocabulary
of his fraternity.
"Meatball," he shouted at Senor Orquienz. "You lousy greasy
meatball."
The derisive snigger of Senor Orquienz followed him down the
blazing street and for a long time thereafter.
"Don't forget your coffin,
Mister
Pratsore," the man called after
him.
It was a short walk in the sun Bradshaw had taken that day but
it had saddened and perhaps confused him, for he could find no terms
in which to account for the vision of gratuitous evil he had been
accorded.
This
vision competed in his mind with that outlined in his
report and that document proved to be less sanguine than had been
anticipated by those who knew Bradshaw. Especially unfortunate
was the section which he called "The Human Factor," and this oddly
illiberal passage was edited from the final version. "It's really outside
our frame of reference," his chief explained kindly.
Bradshaw sometimes worried that he should have been so mis–
taken in Senor Orquienz' character, and, what was worse, in his own,
for had not that malevolent and corrupt man discovered to Bradshaw
the possibility, hitherto unthinkable, that he should insult another
human being in terms of his race.
Bradshaw's wife was crazy about the serapes and the coffin lid,
and told Bradshaw he should write a book.
