d you come to us?"

A different light stole into the younger man's eyes. "Because"--he
answered, "because I loved something else better than either." And he
reached his hand under the cloth to one who understood.

That is all--except that the next offer of Consolidated Pepsin was,
"Will you please name your own terms?"

THE TEWANA

BY

HERMAN WHITAKER

Reprinted from _The Blue Mule_ _A Western Magazine of Stories_, of
February, 1906 by permission

SHE WAS a Tewana of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman,
round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled
Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied
by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's
brink, wringing her tresses after the morning bath, it were justifiable
to mistake her for some beautiful bronze. Moreover, it were easy to see
her, for, in Tehuantepec, innocence is thoughtless as in old Eden. When
Paul Steiner passed her one morning, she gave him the curious open-eyed
stare of a deer, bade him a pleasant "_Buenos dias, Senor!_" and would
have proceeded, undisturbed, with her toilet, but that he spoke. In this
he was greatly mistaken. Gringos there are--praise the saints!--who can
judge Tehuantepec by the insight of kindred purity, but Paul had to
learn by the more uncomfortable method of a stone in the face.

He ought not, however, to be too severely handled for his dulness.
Though a mining engineer, nature had endowed him with little beyond the
algebraic qualities necessary to the profession; a German-American, a
dull birth and heredity had predestined him for that class which clothes
its morality in fusty black and finds safety in following its neighbor
in the cut of its clothes and conduct. As then, he was not planned for
original thinking, it is not at all surprising that he should--when
pitchforked by Opportunity into the depths of tropical jungles--lose his
moral bearings, fail to recognize a virtue that went in her own golden
skin, and so go down before a temptation that, of old, populated the
sexless desert.

That his error continued in the face of Andrea's stone is certainly more
remarkable, though this also should be charged rather against her
mismarksmanship than to the wearing quality of his electro-plate
morality. It is doubtful if even the ancient Jews had found "stoning" as
efficacious a "cure for souls" had they thrown wide as she. Anyway, Paul
stood "unc