They had stayed two hours, and had left the moment the
trouble began. Yet here he was arrested.
I bade him cheer up, to consider the trip to Ancon merely an
afternoon excursion on government pass. He remained downcast.
"But think of the experience!" I cried. "Now you can tell exactly
how it feels to be arrested--first-hand literary material."
But he was not philosopher enough to look at it from that point of
view. To his Spanish mind arrest, even in innocence, was a
disgrace for which no amount of "material" could compensate. It is
a common failing. How many of us set out into the world for
experience, yet growl with rage or sit downcast and silent all the
way from Pedro Miguel to Panama if one such experience gives us a
rough half-hour, or robs us of ten minutes sleep.
At the hospital the Peruvian gurgled and spat, beckoned for paper
and wrote:
"This is the man."
"What man?" I asked.
"The man who came with that man," he scribbled, nodding his heavy
face toward the blue-eyed boy.
"But is this the man that shot you?" I demanded.
"The man who came with that man is the one," he scrawled.
"Well, then this is the man that shot you?" I cried.
But he would not answer definitely to that, but sat a long time
glaring out of his swollen, vindictive countenance propped up in
his pillows at the tall, solemn correspondent.
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