and the ultimate loss of the Cafferty soul.
Don Juan, with the perversity of the Celt, and contrary to precept and example, forbore to curse Sobrante. On the contrary, he liked Sobrante immediately upon arrival and so stated in public—this unusual state of affairs doubtless being due to the fact that his job furnished much of excitement and interest, for his driving tactics were not calculated to imbue in his dusky section-hands a love for the new section-boss; and from the day he took charge until he lost the job, the life of Don Juan Cafetéro had been equivalent in intrinsic value to two squirts of swamp water—possibly one.
Something in the climate of Sobrante must have appealed to a touch of laissez faire in Don Juan's amiable nature, for in the course of time he had taken unto himself, without bell or book, after the fashion of the proletariat of Sobrante, the daughter of one Estebân Manuel Enrique José Maria Pasqual y Miramontes, an estimable peon who was singularly glad to have his daughter off his hands and no questions asked. Following the fashion of the country, however, Esteban had forthwith moved the remainder of his numerous progeny under the mantle of Don Juan Cafetéro's philanthropy, and resigned a position which for many years he had not enjoyed—to wit: salting and packing green hides at a local abattoir. This foolhardy economic move had so incensed Don Juan that in a fit of pique he spurned his father-in-law (we must call Esteban something and so why split hairs?) under the tails of his camisa, with such vigour as to sever forever the friendly relations hitherto existing between the families. Mrs. Cafferty (again we transgress, but what of it?) subsequently passed away in childbirth, and no sooner had she been decently buried than Don Juan took a week off to drown his sorrows.
In this condition he had encountered Esteban Manuel Enrique José Maria Pasqual y Miramontes and called him out of his name—for which there appears to be little excuse, in view of the many the latter possessed. In the altercation that ensued Esteban, fully convinced that he had received the nub end of the transaction from start to finish, cut Don Juan severely in the region of the umbilicus; Don Juan had thereupon slain Esteban with a .44-calibre revolver, and upon emerging from the railroad hospital a month later had been tried by a Sobrantean magistrate and fined the sum of twenty thousand dollars, legal tender of the Republic of Sobrante. Of course he had paid it off within six months from his wages as section-boss, but the memory of the injustice always rankled in him, and gradually he moved down the scale of society from section-boss to day labourer, day labourer to tropical tramp, and tropical tramp to beach-comber, in which latter state he had now existed for several months.
While waiting to round out the brief period of existence which drink and the devil had left him, this poor human fragment had become a protégé of Ignatz Leber, an Alsatian, manager for a German importing and exporting house, and agent for the cable company. By the grace of the philanthropic Ignatz, Don Juan slept under Leber's warehouse and ate in his kitchen.
To return to Mother Jenks.
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