tiny; a defiant, challenging, atavistic
recklessness. Spirit of corsair, adventurer, lover, poet,
bohemian, possessed him. The stars he saw above him seemed no more
unattainable, no less high, than the favour of Miss Peek or the
fearsome sweetness of her delectable lips. His fate seemed to him
strangely dramatic and pathetic, and to call for a solace consonant
with its extremity. A saloon was near by, and to this he flitted,
calling for absinthe--beyond doubt the drink most adequate to his
mood--the tipple of the roue, the abandoned, the vainly sighing
lover.

Once he drank of it, and again, and then again until he felt a
strange, exalted sense of non-participation in worldly affairs
pervade him. Tansey was no drinker; his consumption of three
absinthe anisettes within almost as few minutes proclaimed his
unproficiency in the art; Tansey was merely flooding with unproven
liquor his sorrows; which record and tradition alleged to be
drownable.

Coming out upon the sidewalk, he snapped his fingers defiantly in
the direction of the Peek homestead, turned the other way, and
voyaged, Columbus-like into the wilds of an enchanted street. Nor is
the figure exorbitant, for, beyond his store the foot of Tansey had
scarcely been set for years--store and boarding-house; between these
ports he was chartered to run, and contrary currents had rarely
deflected his prow.

Tansey aimlessly protracted his walk, and, whether it was his
unfamiliarity with the district, his recent accession of audacious
errantry, or the sophistical whisper of a certain green-eyed
fairy, he came at last to tread a shuttered, blank, and echoing
thoroughfare, dark and unpeopled. And, suddenly, this way came to an
end (as many streets do in the Spanish-built, archaic town of San
Antone), butting its head against an imminent, high, brick wall.
No--the street still lived! To the right and to the left it breathed
through slender tubes of exit--narrow, somnolent ravines, cobble
paved and unlighted. Accommodating a rise in the street to the right
was reared a phantom flight of five luminous steps of limestone,
flanked by a wall of the same height and of the same material.

Upon one of these steps Tansey seated himself and bethought him of
his love, and how she might never know she was his love. And of
Mother Peek, fat, vigilant and kind; not unpleased, Tansey thought,
that he and Katie should play cribbage in the parlour together.
For the Cut-rate had not cut h