“These two clasped him to their bosoms.  ‘You brave one,’ said her father—­and ’Bueno Americano!’—­said Uncle Juan, and patted him on the head as if he were a son.  ’He will live—­Oh, be sure of that.  But never will he fight bulls again.  Never, never.  And that is sad.  But we have him.  Let us not mourn.  And you’—­Juan raised both hands high—­’you and Torellas—­I love you both.’

“Cogan thought he heard her voice, the voice which never in his life he had heard, and hesitated.  ‘Proceed,’ said her father, and pushed him toward the door of the middle room.  ’She is there.  And Tina—­you remember Tina—­that night in Colon?  She is also there.  The senora’—­he looked at Juan and Juan smiled back at him—­’she is too fatigued to come, but Tina came.’

“Cogan softly crossed the second room, but paused on the threshold of the inner room.  He saw a great, stout woman back to.  He knew her—­Tina.  He looked further, and under the half light saw the face of the matador.  She was beside the bed.  He could not see her face, but he heard her voice, and it was over her shoulder that he saw the matador’s face.

“There were murmured words in Spanish which he did not understand, and then a phrase at which he could guess, then words which there was no mistaking, and which were not for him or any other man to hear.  He backed out.

“Juan, Ferrero, and her father were still at the outer door of the outer room.  They were not looking.  He saw that from this middle room a window led on to a balcony.  He stepped through the window, found a post, dropped to the ground, made his way through the garden in the rear, and so on to a back street.  He ran on—­one street, another, a dozen, and then uphill to a wall which he seemed to know.  He looked about, and saw that near by was the monastery where he had been given his first breakfast in Lima.  It was the same old wall.

“He climbed the wall and sat there.  He had been sitting so that morning when the pretty flower girl had tossed him the blue flower—­blue as the sky.  Only now it was night and no one to see and smile.  He looked up to the sky, the night sky of the tropics.  The twisted Southern Cross shone on him.  He turned and faced the north.

“Somewhere he could hear a band playing.  In one of the parks probably, and there would be leaves rustling there, and the scent of flowers, and the senoritas walking with their mothers, while the young men hung around the edges, striving to get a word, a look.  And there would be the arched jets of a fountain playing under colored lights, and back in Portland, Oregon, by this time was perhaps Tommie Jones married to his plump waitress.

“It was a good band—­playing something he had never heard before, but something very soothing.  He looked toward the Pacific.  He knew where the harbor of Callao should lie, and in the middle of the harbor he could see them, one great cluster of lights, the lights of the battle fleet.  And there were the fleet’s search-lights playing on the great stone pier.