into the store.
Holding him with one hand, he raised the lid of an enormous chest
half filled with cakes of ice, flung Tansey inside, and closed down
the cover.

The force of the fall must have been great, for Tansey lost
consciousness. When his faculties revived his first sensation was
one of severe cold along his back and limbs. Opening his eyes, he
found himself to be seated upon the limestone steps still facing the
wall and convent of Santa Mercedes. His first thought was of the
ecstatic kiss from Katie. The outrageous villainy of Captain Peek,
the unnatural mystery of the situation, his preposterous conflict
with the improbable dwarf--these things roused and angered him, but
left no impression of the unreal.

"I'll go back there to-morrow," he grumbled aloud, "and knock the
head off that comic-opera squab. Running out and picking up perfect
strangers, and shoving them into cold storage!"

But the kiss remained uppermost in his mind. "I might have done that
long ago," he mused. "She liked it, too. She called me 'Sam' four
times. I'll not go up that street again. Too much scrapping. Guess
I'll move down the other way. Wonder what she meant by saying they
were going to eat her!"

Tansey began to feel sleepy, but after a while he decided to move
along again. This time he ventured into the street to his left. It
ran level for a distance, and then dipped gently downward, opening
into a vast, dim, barren space--the old Military Plaza. To his left,
some hundred yards distant, he saw a cluster of flickering lights
along the Plaza's border. He knew the locality at once.

Huddled within narrow confines were the remnants of the once-famous
purveyors of the celebrated Mexican national cookery. A few years
before, their nightly encampments upon the historic Alamo Plaza, in
the heart of the city, had been a carnival, a saturnalia that was
renowned throughout the land. Then the caterers numbered hundreds;
the patrons thousands. Drawn by the coquettish _senoritas_, the
music of the weird Spanish minstrels, and the strange piquant
Mexican dishes served at a hundred competing tables, crowds thronged
the Alamo Plaza all night. Travellers, rancheros, family parties,
gay gasconading rounders, sightseers and prowlers of polyglot,
owlish San Antone mingled there at the centre of the city's fun and
frolic. The popping of corks, pistols, and questions; the glitter of
eyes, jewels and daggers; the ring of laughter and coin--these wer