Without amazement Tansey took note of these phenomena.  He was on some new plane of understanding, though his mind seemed to him clear and, indeed, happily tranquil.

A desire for movement and exploration seized him:  he rose and turned into the black gash of street to his right.  For a time the high wall formed one of its boundaries; but further on, two rows of black-windowed houses closed it in.

Here was the city’s quarter once given over to the Spaniard.  Here were still his forbidding abodes of concrete and adobe, standing cold and indomitable against the century.  From the murky fissure, the eye saw, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of his Moorish balconies.  Through stone archways breaths of dead, vault-chilled air coughed upon him; his feet struck jingling iron rings in staples stone-buried for half a cycle.  Along these paltry avenues had swaggered the arrogant Don, had caracoled and serenaded and blustered while the tomahawk and the pioneer’s rifle were already uplifted to expel him from a continent.  And Tansey, stumbling through this old-world dust, looked up, dark as it was, and saw Andalusian beauties glimmering on the balconies.  Some of them were laughing and listening to the goblin music that still followed; others harked fearfully through the night, trying to catch the hoof beats of caballeros whose last echoes from those stones had died away a century ago.  Those women were silent, but Tansey heard the jangle of horseless bridle-bits, the whirr of riderless rowels, and, now and then, a muttered malediction in a foreign tongue.  But he was not frightened.  Shadows, nor shadows of sounds could daunt him.  Afraid?  No.  Afraid of Mother Peek?  Afraid to face the girl of his heart?  Afraid of tipsy Captain Peek?  Nay! nor of these apparitions, nor of that spectral singing that always pursued him.  Singing!  He would show them!  He lifted up a strong and untuneful voice: 

   “When you hear them bells go tingalingling,”

serving notice upon those mysterious agencies that if it should come to a face-to-face encounter

   “There’ll be a hot time
    In the old town
    To-night!”

How long Tansey consumed in treading this haunted byway was not clear to him, but in time he emerged into a more commodious avenue.  When within a few yards of the corner he perceived, through a window, that a small confectionary of mean appearance was set in the angle.  His same glance that estimated its meagre equipment, its cheap soda-water fountain and stock of tobacco and sweets, took cognizance of Captain Peek within lighting a cigar at a swinging gaslight.

As Tansey rounded the corner Captain Peek came out, and they met vis-a-vis.  An exultant joy filled Tansey when he found himself sustaining the encounter with implicit courage.  Peek, indeed!  He raised his hand, and snapped his fingers loudly.