at that time San Antone was the hub of the wheel of Fortune, and the names of its
spokes were Cattle, Wool, Faro, Running Horses, and Ozone. In those times cattlemen
played at crack-loo on the sidewalks with double-eagles, and gentlemen backed their
conception of the fortuitous card with stacks limited in height only by the interference of
gravity. Wherefore, thither journeyed the sowers and the reapers--they who stampeded
the dollars, and they who rounded them up. Especially did the caterers to the amusement
of the people haste to San Antone. Two greatest shows on earth were already there, and
dozens of smallest ones were on the way.
On a side track near the mean little 'dobe depot stood a private car, left there by the
Mexican train that morning and doomed by an ineffectual schedule to ignobly await,
amid squalid surroundings, connection with the next day's regular.
The car had been once a common day-coach, but those who had sat in it and gringed to
the conductor's hat-band slips would never have recognised it in its transformation.
Paint and gilding and certain domestic touches had liberated it from any suspicion of
public servitude. The whitest of lace curtains judiciously screened its windows. From its
fore end drooped in the torrid air the flag of Mexico. From its rear projected the Stars
and Stripes and a busy stovepipe, the latter reinforcing in its suggestion of culinary
comforts the general suggestion of privacy and ease. The beholder's eye, regarding its
gorgeous sides, found interest to culminate in a single name in gold and blue letters
extending almost its entire length--a single name, the audacious privilege of royalty and
genius. Doubly, then, was this arrogant nomenclature here justified; for the name was
that of "Alvarita, Queen of the Serpent Tribe." This, her car, was back from a
triumphant tour of the principal Mexican cities, and now headed for San Antonio,
where, according to promissory advertisement, she would exhibit her "Marvellous
Dominion and Fearless Control over Deadly and Venomous Serpents, Handling them
with Ease as they Coil and Hiss to the Terror of Thousands of Tongue-tied Tremblers!"
One hundred in the shade kept the vicinity somewhat depeopled. This quarter of the
town was a ragged edge; its denizens the bubbling froth of five nations; its architecture
tent, jacal, and 'dobe; its distractions the hurdy-gurdy and the informal contribution to
the sudden stranger's store of experience. Beyond this dishonourable fringe upon the old
town's jowl rose a dense mass of trees, surmounting and filling a little hollow. Through
this bickered a small stream that perished down the sheer and disconcerting side of the
great canon of the Rio Bravo del Norte.
In this sordid spot was condemned to remain for certain hours the impotent transport of
the Queen of the Serpent Tribe.
The front door of the car was open. Its forward end was curtained off into a small
reception-room. Here the admiring and propitiatory reporters were wont to sit and
transpose the music of Senorita Alvarita's talk into the more florid key of the press. A
picture of Abraham Lincoln hung against a wall; one of a cluster of school-girls grouped
upon stone steps was in another place; a third was Easter lilies in a blood-red frame. A
neat carpet was under foot. A pitcher, sweating cold drops, and a glass stood on a fragile
stand. In a willow rocker, reading a newspaper, sat Alvarita.
Spanish, you would say; Andalusian, or, better still, Basque; that compound, like the
diamond, of darkness and fire. Hair, the shade of purple grapes viewed at midnight.
Eyes, long, dusky, and disquieting with their untroubled directness of gaze. Face,
haughty and bold, touched with a pretty insolence that gave it life. To hasten conviction
of her charm, but glance at the stacks of handbills in the corner, green, and yellow, and