ztec cruelty. Jealous of
Andrea's luck--as they had deemed it--in marriage, Pancha had thirsted
for the opportunity which came as they drew water together that morning
from the brink of the flood.

"'Tis the luck of us all!" she exclaimed, malevolently ornamenting her
evil tidings. "They take their pleasure of us, these Gringos, then when
the hide wrinkles, ho for a prettier! They say Tewana hath not such
another as his new flame, and thy house is a hovel to that he fits up
for her on the Promontory."

Here the hag paused, for two good reasons. That the barbed shaft might
sink deep and rankle from Andrea's belief that her supplanter was a girl
of her tribe, but principally because, just then, she went down under
the ruins of her own _olla_. A fighter, after her kind, with many a
cutting to her credit, she cowered like a snarling she-wolf among the
sharp potsherds cowed by the enormous anger she had provoked; lay and
watched while the tall beauty ripped shawl, slip and skirt from her
magnificent limbs, then turned and plunged into the flood. Pancha rose
and shook her black fist, hurling curses after.

"May the alligators caress thy limbs, the fishes pluck thine eyes, the
wolves crack thy bleached bones on the strand."

That was the lightest of them, but, unheeding Andrea swam on. As her own
house stood in the extreme skirt of the town, the Promontory lay more
than a mile below, but she could see neither it nor the night's
devastation because of the river's bend. Because of the same bend, she
had the aid of the current, which set strongly over to the other shore,
but apart from this the river was one great danger. Floating logs, huge
trees, acres of tangled greenery, the sweepings of a hundred miles of
jungle, covered its surface with other and ghastlier trove. Here the
saurians of Pancha's curse worried a drowned pig, there they fought over
a cow's swollen carcass; yet because of carrion taste or food plethora,
they let her by. There an enormous saber, long and thick as a church,
turned and tumbled, threshing air and water with enormous spreading
branches, creating dangerous swirls and eddies. These she avoided, and,
having swum the river at ebb and flood every day of her life from a
child, she now easily clove its roar and tumble; swam on, her heat
unabated by the water's chill, till, sweeping around the bend, she
sighted the lone house on the Promontory.

That gave her pause. Had death, then, robbed her anger? The