Past All Dishonor Read Online Free PDF

Morina?”
    She burst out crying, and it was deep, ugly crying that shook her way down inside, so I knew that whatever it was about, it was terrible to her. I took her in my arms, but when I woke up she was gone, and so were her things and her trunk and my boat. It wasn’t till three or four o’clock in the afternoon that a boy came rowing across with it, with a note. It said she had to leave and good-bye and she loved me.
    I addressed my envelopes, put in my dispatches, and wrote Annapolis a note about the battalion of recruits that had started downriver that morning on a transport, bound for San Francisco. Then I rowed across, mailed my stuff, came back, and ate my supper. But when I brought a chair outside and sat down to wait till it was time to go to bed, I thought I’d die. Every boat that went clunking by reminded me of her, every frog in the tule patch made me pine for her. I tried to tell myself I was glad she was gone, that she was a thief, that she could only mean trouble and I ought to be dancing a hornpipe I was rid of her. It was no use. Around nine I put on my gray suit and white shirt again and rowed over to the city, looking for her. First I went to the restaurants, thinking she might still be at dinner. Then I went to the hotels. I didn’t ask for her by name. I was afraid to, for fear they’d been notified to watch out for her, and it didn’t look smart to, because she’d know better than to give herself away. I would go up to the desk, spin the register around, and start looking over the names, figuring I could spot her if she had come in that day. If they said anything, I told them I’d heard that a bunch had started out from my home town for the West, and I didn’t know who they were, but could spot my friends if there were any. That looked harmless and I didn’t have any trouble. Then I went to the gambling halls, which was where I really expected to find her. I visited every roulette wheel, but what I found was nothing.

3
    “ Ah! que bonitos
    Son los enanos
    Los chiquititos
    Y mejicanos.”
    I T WAS THREE NIGHTS later, and I’d looked until I was sick of looking, and found there was kind of a gang that went from one place to another, first the bunch of army officers that were all over the town, then the losers that wanted to change their luck, then the girls that hooked a man and wanted to take him some place else so nobody knew how they got him, and then these here Mexicans that play and sing and pass the hat for coppers. There were two or three bunches, but the one with this song had a leader named Paddy, that was short for Padillo, and he was a bandy-legged little man with white teeth and a funny grin. He sang the song slow, so I could copy it in my notebook, and then I asked him: “But why do you stoop down when you sing this song?”
    “Estoop? How estoop?”
    “You don’t call that standing up, do you?”
    “No estoop—eshrivel! Thees song, is about liddle enanos —how you say—dwarfidos! Smalle pipple. So, sing song, make me small!”
    He sang it again, and the other four joined in, and the song was pretty but the singing wasn’t, which was why I wanted the words, so I could learn them and sing it to myself. So he kind of apologized for it: “Me, am really a miner. I sing in mariachi while my brodder, he get married, bring liddle muchacha wife from San Mateo.”
    “Well, I knew you weren’t any singer.” That got a shout from the others, and after a while they said I should come up to their shack for supper, but not just yet, because they had quite a little to do before we could sit down to eat. So when the lights began to come on he and I strolled down to my boat and started upriver, but we hardly started out before somebody was calling him from a boat off the embarcadero. We pulled in, and the other four were there, and the idea was they were going to help themselves to a fish from a barge market that had live boxes alongside, in the river. The trouble was it was such