“We are wise,” Yi Poon told him in grandiloquent Spanish, still clinking the money, while the peon whined and yammered for the few centavos necessary for one drink of pulque. “We are wise, you and I, old man, and we will sit here and tell each other what we know about men and women, and life and love, and anger and sudden death, the rage red in the heart and the steel bitter cold in the back; and if you tell me what pleases me, then shall you drink pulque till your ears run out with it, and your eyes are drowned in it. You like that pulque, eh? You like one drink now, _now_, soon, very quick?”
The night, while the Jefe Politico and Torres organized their expedition under cover of the dark, was destined to be a momentous one in the Solano hacienda. Things began to happen early. Dinner over, drinking their coffee and smoking their cigarettes, the family, of which Henry was accounted one by virtue of his brotherhood to Leoncia, sat on the wide front veranda. Through the moonlight, up the steps, they saw a strange figure approach.
“It is like a ghost,” said Alvarado Solano.
“A fat ghost,” Martinez, his twin brother, amended.
“A Chink ghost you couldn’t poke your finger through,” Ricardo laughed.
“The very Chink who saved Leoncia and me from marrying,” said Henry Morgan, with recognition.
“The seller of secrets,” Leoncia gurgled. “And if he hasn’t brought a new secret, I shall be disappointed.”
“What do you want, Chinaman?” Alesandro, the eldest of the Solano brothers, demanded sharply.
“Nice new secret, very nice new secret maybe you buy,” Yi Poon murmured proudly.
“Your secrets are too expensive, Chinaman,” said Enrico discouragingly.
“This nice new secret very expensive,” Yi Poon assured him complacently.
“Go away,” old Enrico ordered. “I shall live a long time, yet to the day of my death I care to hear no more secrets.”
But Yi Poon was suavely certain of himself.
“One time you have very fine brother,” he said. “One time your very fine brother, the Senor Alfaro Solano, die with knife in his back. Very well. Some secret, eh?”
“You know?” he almost screamed his eager interrogation.
“All I possess!” Enrico cried, ere turning to Alesandro to add: “You deal with him, son. Pay him well if he can prove by witness of the eye.”