Whirligigs | Page 9

away, nebulously aglow with its array of kerosene lamps.
Mrs. Conant paused, with streamin eyes. "I must, I must see him once
before I go," she murmured in anguish. But even then she did not falter
in her decision. Quickly she invented a plan by which she might speak
to him, and yet make her departure without his knowing. She would
walk past the hotel, ask some one to call him out and talk a few
moments on some trivial excuse, leaving him expecting to see her at
her home at seven.
She unpinned her hat and gave it to Mateo. "Keep this, and wait here
till I come," she ordered. Then she draped the mantilla over her head as
she usually did when walking after sunset, and went straight to the
Orilla del Mar.
She was glad to see the bulky, white-clad figure of Tio Pancho standing
alone on the gallery.
"Tio Pancho," she said, with a charming smile, "may I trouble you to
ask Mr. Merriam to come out for just a few moments that I may speak
with him?"

Tio Pancho bowed as an elephant bows.
"Buenas tardes, Señora Conant," he said, as a cavalier talks. And then
he went on, less at his ease:
"But does not the señora know that Señor Merriam sailed on the Pajaro
for Panama at three o'clock of this afternoon?"

THE THEORY AND THE HOUND
NOT many days ago my old friend from the tropics, J. P. Bridger,
United States consul on the island of Ratona, was in the city. We had
wassail and jubilee and saw the Flatiron building, and missed seeing
the Bronxless menagerie by about a couple of nights. And then, at the
ebb tide, we were walking up a street that parallels and parodies
Broadway.
A woman with a comely and mundane countenance passed us, holding
in leash a wheezing, vicious, waddling, brute of a yellow pug. The dog
entangled himself with Bridger's legs and mumbled his ankles in a
snarling, peevish, sulky bite. Bridger, with a happy smile, kicked the
breath out of the brute; the woman showered us with a quick rain of
well-conceived adjectives that left us in no doubt as to our place in her
opinion, and we passed on. Ten yards farther an old woman with dis-
ordered white hair and her bankbook tucked well hidden beneath her
tattered shawl begged. Bridger stopped and disinterred for her a quarter
from his holiday waist- coat.
On the next corner a quarter of a ton of well-clothed man with a
rice-powdered, fat, white jowl, stood holding the chain of a devil-born
bulldog whose forelegs were strangers by the length of a dachshund. A
little woman in a last-season's hat confronted him and wept, which was
plainly all she could do, while he cursed her in low sweet, practised
tones.
Bridger smiled again -- strictly to himself -- and this time he took out a
little memorandum book and made a note of it. This he had no right to
do without due explanation, and I said so.
"It's a new theory," said Bridger, "that I picked up down in Ratona. I've
been gathering support for it as I knock about. The world isn't ripe for it
yet, but -- well I'll tell you; and then you run your mind back along the
people you've known and see what you make of it."
And so I cornered Bridger in a place where they have artificial palms

and wine; and he told me the story which is here in my words and on
his responsibility.
One afternoon at three o'clock, on the island of Ratona, a boy raced
alongthe beach screaming, "Pajaro, ahoy!"
Thus he made known the keenness of his hearing and the justice of his
discrimination in pitch.
He who first heard and made oral proclamation con- cerning the toot of
an approaching steamer's whistle, and correctly named the steamer, was
a small hero in Ratona -until the' next steamer came. Wherefore, there
was rivalry among the barefoot youth of Ratona, and many fell victims
to the softly blown conch shells of sloops which, as they enter harbour,
sound surprisingly like a distant steamer's signal. And some could
name you the vessel when its call, in your duller ears, sounded no
louder than the sigh of the wind through the branches of the cocoa- nut
palms.
But to-day he who proclaimed the Pajaro gained his honours. Ratona
bent its ear to listen; and soon the deep-tongued blast grew louder and
nearer, and at length Ratona saw above the line of palms on the low
"joint" the two black funnels of the fruiter slowly creeping toward the
mouth of the harbour.
You must know that Ratona is an island twenty miles off the south of a