xplained; "they have dried and shifted. You should have greased them
every week."

La Clavel stood, lost in thought, like a woman in a dream. Her hair,
over which she had spent such time and curses, was an elaborate
silhouette against the light. "Ceaza, Ceaza," she implored, going to
him, "you must let me go and dance in Buenos Aires, they have never
seen me there, it is necessary to my career." She was close beside
him, when he rose suddenly, pushing the chair between them.

"You Andalusian devil!" he cried, and put the whistle to his lips.
Before he could blow, the dancer had flung herself on him, with an arm
bound about his neck, a hand dragging at his throat. The whistle fell,
the chair was brushed aside, and the man and woman, in a straining
desperate grip, swayed into the middle of the floor.

Charles, driven by an inherited instinct to protect La Clavel, to
replace her in such a struggle, caught at either of the locked
shoulders; but, whirling in the passion of their strife, they struck
him aside. He made another effort to pull Santacilla to the floor,
without success; and then, with a small stout chair in his hands, he
waited for an opportunity to bring it crashing on the officer's head.
He was appalled by the fury of the woman silently trying to choke her
enemy; her other hand, grasping the thin glimmer of the knife always
convenient in her stocking, the officer held away from them. Her years
of dancing, her early hardening life in the mountains, had given her a
strength and litheness now tearing at the weight, the masculinity, of
Santacilla. He was trying, in vain, to break her wrist, to close his
fingers into her throat; and, bending, the fragility of her clothes
ripped across her sinuous back. Shifting and evading the thrust of his
power, she was sending the blood in purple waves over his neck and
thick cheeks. Neither of them cried out, spoke; there was only the
sound of hoarse breathing, inarticulate expressions of unendurable
strain. Charles Abbott, raising, holding poised, the chair, and
lowering it, was choked with the grappling horror before him.

La Clavel's face was as blanched as the officer's was dark, her eyes
were wide-open and set, as though she were in a galvanic trance. Again
and again Santacilla tried to tear away her arms, to release himself
from the constriction at his neck. His fingers dug red furrows through
her flesh, they tormented and outraged her. A palm closed upon her
countenanc