Page:Christopher Wren--the wages of virtue.djvu/287

Rh ministered to her customers' needs, the unsmiling, broken-looking Carmelita, all of whose vitality and energy seemed concentrated in her burning eyes beckoned to the American and led him into her room Gripping his wrist with her cold hand, and almost shaking him in her too-long suppressed frenzy:

"Have you told Jean Boule?" she asked. "When will he kill him? Where? Quick, tell me! I must be there. I must see him do it.… Oh! He will die too quickly.… It is too good a death for such a reptile.… It is no punishment.… Why should he not suffer some thousandth part of what I suffer?"

"Look at hyar, Carmelita, honey," interrupted the American, putting his arm round the little heaving shoulders as he mentally translated what he must first say in his own tongue. "Thet's jest whar the swine would git the bulge on yew. Why shouldn't he git a glimpse o' sufferin', sech as I had ter sit an' see yew git, las' night? … An' I gits it in the think-box las' night, right hyar. Listen, ma honey. I'm gwine ter beat him up, right naow, right hyar, in yure Caffy—an' before yure very eyes. In front of all his bullies an' all the guys he's beat up, I'll hev' him on his knees a-blubberin' an' a-prayin' fer mercy.… Then he shall lick yure boots, little gel, same as he makes recruits lick his. Then he shall grovel on the ground an' beg an' pray yew to marry him, and at that insult yew shall ask me to put him across my knee and irritate his pants with my belt—an' then throw him neck and crop, tail over tip, in the gutter! Termorrer John Bull smacks his face on the barrack-square an' tells him he was only playin' with him about lettin' him off that dool."