on the
fountain and upon Felipe perched upon the rim of the basin, with his
lame leg stuck out straight and his mouth working as he fastened a
nail in the end of his beggar's crutch.

I cannot tell you the hour exactly, but it was early morning, and the
date the twenty-fourth of February, 1671. I learnt this later. We in
the _patio_ did not bother ourselves about the date, for the world had
come to an end, and we were the last four left in it. For three weeks
we had been playing hide-and-seek with the death that had caught and
swallowed everyone else; and for the moment it was quite enough for
the women to sleep, for me to gnaw my bone in the shade, and for
Felipe to fasten the loose nail in his crutch. Many windows opened on
the _patio_. Through the nearest, by turning my head a little, I could
see into a noble room lined with pictures and heaped with furniture
and torn hangings. All of it was ours, or might be, for the trouble of
stepping inside and taking possession. But the bone (I had killed a
dog for it) was a juicy one, and I felt no inclination to stir. There
was the risk, too, of infection--of the plague.

"Hullo!" cried Felipe, slipping on his shoe, with the heel of which he
had been hammering. "You awake?"

I put Felipe last of us in order, for he was an old fool. Yet I must
say that we owed our lives to him. Why he took so much trouble and
spent so much ingenuity in saving them is not to be guessed: for the
whole city of Panama comprehended no two lives more worthless than old
Dona Teresa's (as we called her) and mine: and as for the Carmelite,
Sister Marta, who had joined our adventures two days before, she, poor
soul, would have thanked him for putting a knife into her and ending
her shame.

But Felipe, though a fool, had a fine sense of irony. And so for
three weeks Dona Teresa and I--and for forty-eight hours Sister Marta
too--had been lurking and doubling, squatting in cellars crawling on
roofs, breaking cover at night to snatch our food, all under Felipe's
generalship. And he had carried us through. Perhaps he had a soft
corner in his heart for old Teresa. He and she were just of an age,
the two most careless-hearted outcasts in Panama; and knew each
other's peccadilloes to a hair. I went with Teresa. Heaven knows in
what gutter she had first picked me up, but for professional ends I
was her starving grandchild, and now reaped the advantages of that
dishonouring fiction.

"How can a gentleman sl