for you, good friend.'

"'They? Who?'

"'Oh, you shall see.' And he led Cogan to the second floor, to where a
fine suite of rooms opened from the wide hall. Her father and Juan were
in the outer room.

"These two clasped him to their bosoms. 'You brave one,' said her
father--and 'Bueno Americano!'--said Uncle Juan, and patted him on the
head as if he were a son. 'He will live--Oh, be sure of that. But never
will he fight bulls again. Never, never. And that is sad. But we have
him. Let us not mourn. And you'--Juan raised both hands high--'you and
Torellas--I love you both.'

"Cogan thought he heard her voice, the voice which never in his life he
had heard, and hesitated. 'Proceed,' said her father, and pushed him
toward the door of the middle room. 'She is there. And Tina--you
remember Tina--that night in Colon? She is also there. The senora'--he
looked at Juan and Juan smiled back at him--'she is too fatigued to
come, but Tina came.'

"Cogan softly crossed the second room, but paused on the threshold of
the inner room. He saw a great, stout woman back to. He knew her--Tina.
He looked further, and under the half light saw the face of the matador.
She was beside the bed. He could not see her face, but he heard her
voice, and it was over her shoulder that he saw the matador's face.

"There were murmured words in Spanish which he did not understand, and
then a phrase at which he could guess, then words which there was no
mistaking, and which were not for him or any other man to hear. He
backed out.

"Juan, Ferrero, and her father were still at the outer door of the outer
room. They were not looking. He saw that from this middle room a window
led on to a balcony. He stepped through the window, found a post,
dropped to the ground, made his way through the garden in the rear, and
so on to a back street. He ran on--one street, another, a dozen, and
then uphill to a wall which he seemed to know. He looked about, and saw
that near by was the monastery where he had been given his first
breakfast in Lima. It was the same old wall.

"He climbed the wall and sat there. He had been sitting so that morning
when the pretty flower girl had tossed him the blue flower--blue as the
sky. Only now it was night and no one to see and smile. He looked up to
the sky, the night sky of the tropics. The twisted Southern Cross shone
on him. He turned and faced the north.

"Somewhere he could hear a band playing. In one of the parks probab