Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/207

Rh low-foreheaded coolies, with tarnished rings in their ears, negresses with bold preying eyes, and the equally predatory but subtler glances of soft-eyed quarter and half-bloods. Now and then a derelict Spaniard or American, in white as limp as their persons and morals, sagged along in the polyglot crowd, always stopping when the way was blocked, not having enough energy to elbow a passage through, and rich only in eternities of time, which they could not barter for the vicious pleasures of the place.

Locked arm in arm with Phil and with MacAllister, whose tall bloodless face and figure, at last clothed in white, seemed cool as ever even in the all-developing heat, walked Carlotta. There was just a little of the old swagger left. The boy walked unsteadily, and his blood-shot eyes were dull and heavy except when they picked out in the sluggish stream the lazy grace of some full-curved figure, faintly outlined by the light of a half-drunken street-lamp, or the summoning eye of a handsome quadroon, velvety and full of languid allure even in the darkness of the unlighted spaces.

The uneven stones of the street were hard on Carlotta's stilted French heels. She was very hot, and the subterranean V of her sheer waist gave her the appearance of greater nakedness than the frank-bosomed mothers in the doorways, whom her impudent black eyes scorned.

She had romped in a tropical village once for three months, but then there were little rows of electric bulbs, and an orchestra playing in front, and well-barbered youths in ultra suits, waiting at the stage door. As different as a patent medicine man's open-air clinic from a city hospital in