"It was bright light now and the city beginning to come awake. People
came out and took down the shutters of shops. Indian women went by with
loaded baskets of fruit, and other people drove little burros in carts
filled with eggs, chickens, and green stuff; and men and women, with
fish to sell in big dishes on their heads, came sliding by, and all
yelled loud enough to wake a watch below. Girls with baskets of flowers
went by, and one, looking up, spied Cogan and stopped and held her
basket up and made a motion for him to buy. He turned his pockets inside
out and threw his hands apart. That made her laugh, and she took a
flower from the basket, touched her lips to it and threw it up to him.
She was a pretty girl,--all the girls were pretty this morning,--but she
was prettiest of all, and the flower was of a big blue kind which Cogan
had never seen before. He blew a kiss after her and she went singing on
her way. Cogan sang a little himself. He was beginning to feel pretty
good.
"Boys came and gazed up at Cogan, and sometimes men, and some of them
laughed, but mostly they paid no attention to him. He heard a bell
tolling and he saw people below him filing toward a gate. They all
carried tin cups. He looked further and saw that it was a monastery they
were heading for, and that at the gate of the monastery two monks in
brown habits were passing out bread and filling the tin cups with
coffee. Cogan dropped over the wall, and when he saw that one man had
finished with his tin cup he asked him for it. He knew Spanish enough
for that. The man smiled and handed it over. Cogan went up to the
grating and a monk filled his tin cup with coffee. Another handed him
three slices of dark bread. Cogan thanked them, but the monks seemed not
to hear. He thanked them again, at which one monk, looking up, set a
finger to his lips and motioned him to step aside for the next.
"Cogan finished his breakfast, thanked the native for the loan of the
cup, and started to look around. He first tried to find the park where
he had left Tommie, but there were so many parks with trees and flowers
and fountains in them! He crossed a bridge over a river that must have
come tumbling all the way from the top of the Andes, it had such a head
of speed on. He patrolled he did not know how many streets, and at last
gave up hunting for Tommie, on whose account, anyway, he wasn't
worrying, for he knew that Tommie, an experienced old sailor man, had by
this time laid his course for the Consul's and been taken care of. He
sat on a bench at the curbstone in front of a fruit store to think
things over. It was a comfortable seat, except that every time a trolley
passed he had to lift his feet high so he wouldn't be swept off his
perch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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