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Author of "Thus Spake the Prophetess," "Luisma's Return" etc.
ANDREA had appealed to many men in the heyday of her youth. More than one man had dishonored his family name and proved faithless to some better woman for Andrea. It would have been difficult for any one to tell just why this should be. Looking at her, one would be hard put to it to understand wherein lay her appeal to the male of the species. Yet history shows that through her many an otherwise good man had become outcast because of a careless smile from her thick lips. She was once a president's favorite. She once fled from a good husband and journeyed across the Dominican Republic to hold high carnival with a simple chauffeur. She was a strange mixture of Amazon, Cro-Magnon, Circe and Lucrezia Borgia. No magazine would ever dare publish the details of her long line of conquests.
She died with her back against a stone wall and her face toward a negro firing squad.
She was forty years of age, the mother of a demented son, the wife of a good man whose name she had borne for twenty-two years, and the mistress of a black gavillero! The latter faced the firing squad before her and she, knowing that her turn was coming within a brace of seconds, calmly asked the corporal of the firing squad for a cigarette. She lighted it without a tremor of her huge hands, drew the smoke deep into her lungs, flicked away the bit of ash and said:
"Puh, Lolo was afraid to die! And to think that I am to face the firing squad for the sake of vermin like that! Are you ready, corporal!"
"AREN'T you coming to bed, Andrea?"
It was the petulant voice of Pedro Andujar. The bedsprings creaked dismally as Pedro turned his face impatiently toward the wall. He never had understood this fiery woman he had taken to wife.
"In a moment, perhaps, Pedro," answered Andrea in honeyed tones.
Hearing those tones and not seeing the woman, one would instinctively have visioned a woman built on the plan of a Lady Godiva. He would never have thought of a woman shaped like a stuffed mattress, hands large and red from much labor, stringy hair and dirty dresses. And if he had looked into her eyes before noticing her body he would never have noticed the body at all, for Andrea's eyes were the curse that the
