“But does not the senora know that Senor Merriam sailed on the Pajaro for Panama at three o’clock of this afternoon?”

II

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 disordered white hair and her bankbook tucked well hidden beneath her tattered shawl begged.  Bridger stopped and disinterred for her a quarter from his holiday waistcoat.

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 along the 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 concerning 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 cocoanut palms.