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from her hotel.
    “Well,” asked the barman, grinning with what was intended to be sociable jocularity, “have you seen the jaguar yet?”
    Manning put down his drink abruptly, as though it sickened him. He gave the bartender a look in kind, as though he did, too. He snapped down a coin, turned around, and walked out without saying anything and went somewhere else.
    Again he ordered. Again the barman, trying to make him feel at home, began cheerily: “What’s the latest on the jaguar?”
    Again Manning put down his drink short, scowled, and turned on his heel.
    At the third place he beat the barman to the punch. “I want two things,” he said bitterly. “A whisky and water, and not to hear about the jaguar. Will you do that for me, try not to mention it? I came in here to forget it.” He drew an imaginary line through the air, lengthwise to his own face. “ Terminado . Finished. It’s over.”
    But it wasn’t.
    Night brooded enigmatically over Ciudad Real, seeming to hold its breath. Three quarters of a million people, and somewhere in the midst, shadow slim, with velvet tread, and fangs for those who crossed its ill-omened path—
     
    II. Teresa Delgado
     
    Even the Senora Delgado’s trusty broom handle, that persuader of last resource, seemed to have very little effect tonight in getting her oldest girl to do her bidding. She reached threateningly toward it, and that alone was usually sufficient impetus to start her toward the door. Tonight it failed to. Next she picked it up and brandished it. Even that failed. She finally was driven to actually swinging it at the recalcitrant one’s calves in order to drive her before her. Even this was a partial failure. The girl simply moved nimbly from side to side, but gave very little ground. Most of the light passes struck emptily against the wall, the girl avoiding being in the way each time.
    There was always reluctance, dilatoriness, strife, whenever any question of going out on an errand arose. But tonight there was more than that. There was a deadlock, a form of passive resistance. Such opposition had never before been met with. Something stronger than fear of her mother’s light broom whacks seemed to be holding the girl back.
    She crouched in implicit unwillingness against the wall, large brilliant black eyes fixed imploringly, yet inscrutably, on her mother the whole time she continued to side-step the broom’s corrective promptings. She was fairly tall for her age, and particularly her racial antecedents; already full-grown in height if not yet in girth. She was about eighteen or seventeen. Or perhaps sixteen; they didn’t keep very strict count of ages in this household. Her skin was the pale gold of wheat, but would probably darken slightly as she grew older. She had donned a rebozo * [A shawl, almost invariably blue in color, worn coifed over the head and with one end flung back behind its opposite shoulder.] —the ubiquitous head covering of lower-class Latin American girls and women—as a first step toward going out, but beyond that one preliminary she seemed unwilling or incapable of going.
    Her mother began to poke the broom forward at her now, its broadside swipes having failed of effect. She was shrilly denunciatory as she did so. “Three times I have asked you already! Will you go?” She lunged. “Has any other woman in town got such trouble with her children? Why do you afflict me like this, Teresa? What is it that has gotten into you tonight? Is it so much to ask you to bring back a little charcoal from the tienda , that your poor father may find his food hot when he comes back from working hard? You could have been there and back already, twice over!”
    “ Madrecita ,” the girl implored dolorously, “why can’t Pedro go for a change? I work all day in the laundry and I’m tired.”
    “Pedro can’t be trusted to go, and you know it. He throws the money up in the air all the way there, and then the first thing you know he loses