Black Alibi Read Online Free PDF

it.”
    “Why can’t you use sticks or papers until tomorrow? Why do I have to go now?”
    “Is paper charcoal? How long does it last? It flames and then it’s gone!” This reminded her. She desisted momentarily from her broom cudgeling to waddle back to the russet-tiled brasero she had quitted some time before. She snatched up a palm-leaf fan, jerked aside an earthenware receptacle, and anxiously fanned the orifice thus exposed until it had begun to glow a dull red again from below. “See that?” she said accusingly. “It’s going down already! If it goes out—”
    She rushed back for the broom, this time bent on inflicting the final stage of chastisement, all else having failed: an actual belaboring about the shoulders. In the face of this onset, the girl at last retreated as far as the doorway itself, but then she still hovered there, as though hoping against hope to win some miraculous last-minute reprieve.
    A small boy of nine or ten, the aforementioned Pedro, pulled his face out of a bowl it had been buried in until now and remarked jeeringly: “I know what she’s afraid of. She’s afraid of the jaguar.”
    The girl flashed him a parenthetic look that was an admission. Then, as though the first reference to it, by coming from someone else, had been enough to free her own powers of expression at long last, she began to importune her mother, in a half-eager, half-bated voice: “They say there’s one around somewhere. They say a rich lady had it on a string, and it got away and it hasn’t been found yet. I heard the girls talking about it in the laundry today—”
    The broom was arrested only momentarily. “A jaguar? What’s that, one of those things they have in the mountains?”
    “They’re big and they jump on you,” said the impish Pedro, with a sidelong look at his sister that showed what prompted him to make the remark.
    The Senora Delgado wasn’t having any of this nonsense. She was too hard-working and careworn to take into account anything not of and within her daily toil and habits. “Did you ever meet one of those things yet when you went to the tienda for me?” she bellowed.
    The girl swallowed, shook her head mutely.
    “Then you won’t meet one this time either! Now get Out! Do as I told you!” And she gave the broom such a backward swing of final purpose that the girl disengaged the door behind her and slunk out backwards, big liquid black eyes, still futilely pleading, the last to go.
    The exasperated Senora Delgado laid her broom aside and returned to her interrupted duties, grumbling darkly and shaking her head. But a moment later the door had stealthily reopened and the girl was attempting to sidle in again unnoticed behind her back.
    She caught her just in time, made a tempestuous start in that direction, but the door had closed a second time before she was able to reach it, and the girl was once more outside.
    The Senora Delgado took care of that by driving the mid-section bolt home, not without a great deal of difficulty. It was rusted from lack of use. It probably hadn’t been driven home into its socket for years past. Their door was never barred; there was nothing in the place that anyone would have cared to make off with. Flakes of scabrous rust fell off the bolt and a little cloud of dust winged up as she finally jammed it all the way in, by main force, and compelled to use both her sculpturesque forearms to master it.
    Then she shook her hand at the sightless wooden barrier. “Now you’ll stay out there until you’ve done my bidding! You won’t get in again until you’ve brought that charcoal back with you!”
    Outside the girl cowered for a moment in the shelter of the set-in doorway. She gave her rebozo a tightening pluck over her mouth. That was to ward off the night air, known to be unhealthful; keep it out of her nostrils and breathing passages. Only strangers, Americans and such, braved it. She peered cautiously up one way and down the other, along the