Free The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories by Geoffrey Household Page A

went together in my mind. I saw they needn’t necessarily go together. And I knew where I wanted my farm, too. Up here. None of your tropics and deserts for me. I like grass.
    â€œI didn’t give my fellow passengers another thought. I didn’t want to talk, nor did they. When we got to Riobamba I gave them a nod and strolled over to the hotel carrying my own bag. That seems unlikely, I know, considering all the boys in town earn their pocket money at the station. But they were busy struggling for Doña Clara’s baggage and, when they got it, arguing about who should carry what. She disorganized that station good and proper, and then put the hotel out of action by having everything she possessed taken up to her room. After that she abode by her stuff, like the chap in the Bible.
    â€œAs soon as the hall was clear I made tracks for the bar to see if I couldn’t shake that depression. I had perched myself on a high stool before I saw Don Anastasio. He was hiding behind a palm tree at the side of the door into the hall, so that anyone looking through could honestly say they hadn’t seen him. He had a whiskey and soda in a pint glass on the table at his side. A good rich yellow it was, too. It was mixed about half and half—as I found out when I tasted the one he ordered for me.
    â€œYes, he waved me into the next chair as soon as our eyes met. That’s why I bless that hotel. If I hadn’t come down to the bar just then, I might be—well, anywhere to-day. Clerking it in Costa Rica, for example, and stealing enough from my boss to get tight every night.
    â€œWe had a couple of drinks together, and he asked me what I was doing in Ecuador and how I liked it. I couldn’t tell him the truth. He’d have laughed probably, but I was too ashamed of it myself. I’d never been ordered out of a country before, you see. I’d deserved it several times—plenty of times! But it hadn’t actually happened. It takes a fact to make my conscience work. I suppose that’s so for most people. We think ourselves bloody angels until the judge hands out a sentence of five years’ hard, and then we see what we really are.
    â€œI told Don Anastasio that I’d been up and down the coast for years without ever visiting Quito, and that I’d come up to have a look at it—which was true so far as it went. I said I liked it best of all the republics. That pleased him. And what pleased him still more was that I treated him with proper respect. He was a jolly fellow of about my own age, but that was no reason for forgetting he was vice president. Don’t think I’m a snob, but I’ve been knocking around South America long enough to enjoy calling a man Excellency if he’s entitled to it. And Don Anastasio was. He was one of the old sort, rich as they make ’em, and free and easy in his ways. He looked taller than his height, for he had a fine head on him with a wavy, pointed brown beard and a moustache that didn’t go up or down, but straight out to the sides in two soft even waves. Gallant—that’s the word for his face. A man you liked at first sight, with a twinkle in his eyes when he wasn’t looking at Doña Clara.”
    â€œWhere is he now?” I asked.
    â€œGone off as a diplomat. His party was thrown out in the last revolution, but he always gets a job. Everyone likes him, so they see that his missus has something to keep her quiet.
    â€œWell, after a bit he asked me if I’d care to join them at dinner. I said I feared the señora would be too tired for a guest. I thought, you see, that she’d probably object. I’d misjudged Don Anastasio there. He was much too polite to ask a chap to sit down with his wife unless he knew she would approve. He wasn’t afraid of her; he was just too damned courteous. It came to the same in the end.
    â€œDon Anastasio insisted. She had said, it seemed, that I looked very