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Rh felt his throat tighten in a rageful, childish impulse to break out weeping.

On a box, a little apart from the crowd, there sat a fat, sleek, pale-yellow personage. He observed the scene through his narrow eyes with the arrogantly skeptical air of the Chino mestizo. His falsetto voice now broke the silence.

"Porque no Usted?" he said, suavely, while his eyes narrowed to a line with a gleam in it. "Why not you?"

Burke opened his mouth, left it open for a good second, then shut it again with a grinding of teeth.

"By God, I'll do it," he muttered, as he turned away.

He went to the boy, made a movement as if to pick him up, hesitated, stood irresolute for a moment, then, with a blinding flash of resolution, such as in the past had carried him off into postures of which others said resounding things and of which he himself was vaguely ashamed, he stooped quickly and whisked up the little body into his arms. He crossed the deck, and as he passed his old army blanket, lying still open on the floor, he picked it up and wrapped it about the boy; then he laid the whole burden down in a sheltered spot against the cabin. A sudden, springy alertness had seized his body, and beneath the pussy alcoholic flesh of his face had sprung tight