bull-tenders was brought in. The bulls were real ones from the Staked Plains, and many a gory fight delighted the Rio Grande Valley folk from Santa Fé to Socorro. Old Town made the most of the occasion, with flags and guns and everything to sell.

Two sad episodes brought the royal sport to an end. One was a bull who would not play and who responded to all the airy temptations of the picadors only with a dull incurious eye. He had to be removed for his more fitting end in the slaughter-house. On the other occasion the bull showed too much fight. Quite unexpectedly he turned on his tormentors, them around the arena, and finally reduced them to the very unsportsmanlike method of attacking him from the rear. This so incensed the audience that they threatened vengeance on the bull-fighters, and the sheriff was obliged to end the fight in order to save them.

ran

Fuentes stayed around for some time, making love to the señoritas. But by the end of two years his money was spent, his gay spirit broken, and one summer afternoon he was found on the steps of the jail, stabbed to death with one of his own daggers. So the royal sport came to an end with the royal fighter, and Albuquerque lost its Valentino.

Another event of sporting interest was the Territorial fair which was put on in 1881 and which proved to be the first of a long succession of fairs. Racing was the drawing card. Horses were imported from Colorado, from Texas, even, rumor said, from Kentucky's blue-grass

region. A race-track was graded near the river, a grand stand built, the newspapers shrieked with enthusiastic forecastings. The races were all that had been hoped. Money changed hands in rapidly increasing sums from railroad magnate to cowboy, from miner to professional man, from Mexican to gringo and back again. Even the owners who had first protested at the accommodations offered their horses were appeased and eagerly contracted to come again. Roulettewheels spun wildly, peanut and popcorn sellers did a thriving business, as did the venders of "spiced lemonade" beneath the grand stand, where ladies of voluptuous beauty reigned.

The governor of New Mexico that year was Lew Wallace, then engaged in writing "Ben-Hur." The governor came from Santa Fé as an honored guest, driving sixtyfive miles to attend the fair. The president of the fair, anticipating the governor of North Carolina, said: "Governor, I have some fine old bourbon. Would you, do you-" "Bring it on, governor; bring it on," boomed Governor Wallace, anticipating the governor of South Carolina. Such geniality prevailed at that fair that even an unseasonable downpour of rain could not spoil it. The exhibits of fine old Spanish shawls and embroideries were ruined. The agricultural and mining exhibits got stuck in the mud and never arrived at all. But Albuquerque was doing things, and it held its next fair according to plan.

Since those days everything has changed. Paved streets are now the town's boast. People who used

"B

UT, WARM or cold," concluded the ex-conductor of taxis, wiping from his brow the perspiration sweated upon it by the vividness of his memory, "that is not, one must confess, the pleasantest thing to find in one's taxi."

They shivered, all of them, at Ventrillon's dinner at that expensive Café de la Victoire; and in the bright, squat-mirrored, art-nouveau private dining-room, there stirred for the moment an uneasy silence.

The beautiful Madame de Rigmaraule sat mute and motionless in her draperies of mourning purple, a single scarlet blossom like an open wound beneath her left breast. She had said nothing, done nothing; and nobody but Ventrillon had noticed that. But from the very beginning of the tale, her face had grown continually paler beneath its brown dust of brunette powder; her scarlet-enameled lips, which, when parted upon her huge yellow teeth, made of her the living embodiment of a poster-artist's idea of a courtezan of the cafés, had become compressed almost to invisibility; her bosom, what fashion had left of it, had heaved ever more rapidly; and, by some subtle contagion, quite without their knowing whence it spread, the nervous intensity of her interest had extended to all the rest.

Ventrillon watched her, his dark

eyes deepening in wonder, as he became aware of an arresting possibility behind what he saw. "Sacré Ventrillon!" he said under his breath.

If that possibility should prove to be a certainty, there was within his power a coup de théâtre which, if anything could, might turn that dinner of his into a success after all; and that, as one will see, was absolutely imperative. But that was not all. It would set Madame de Rigmaraule forever free from the responsibility which, until then, had blighted her life, and that would be virtuous. And it was not beyond the range of possibility that, through her gratitude, it might enable him to manage a commission for her portrait; and that, in the case of a woman with a millionaire for a husband, was a detail not to be ignored.

Then, quietly, unobtrusively, nobody but Ventrillon knew exactly when, Madame de Rigmaraule did the thing that convinced him.

"Ought I, or ought I not?" asked Ventrillon. "The answer is: I shall."

But who was this Ventrillon, this slim youth with eyes that were precocious connoisseurs of all the fruits on the tree of knowledge, but with the countenance of one into whose diet none of those delicacies had as yet entered? Ventrillon was Ventrillon. Aside from that, he painted, as nobody but Ventrillon

could paint, or perhaps the devil himself. But he was not in the habit of giving dinners. He was hardly in the habit of eating them. Not regularly, at least, and never at that expensive Café de la Victoire.

But that dinner was not banal. There was the ex-conductor of taxis. There was the very blonde and very ample café singer who had brought him. There was an authentic Russian princess who in her exile had, at middle age, found freedom-and was making the most of it. There was a dancing-man from Montmartre who existed only to produce an effect of ultra-chic, even at the risk of looking exactly like a dancingman—and was one, though only one, of her ways of making the most of it. There was a brusque old lady of eighty-six who had just returned from crossing the Sahara Desert on a camel. She had brought her grandson, a corpulent youth of eighteen"to see a little of life," she said. "Great hulk that he is, he is still too innocent to understand his prayerbook." There were a little typist who posed on the side as a photographer's model for picture postcards, a bulky piano-tuner with communist tendencies, an American girl who was "studying voice," and a young government employee who, she thought, looked like a count. Also there was a sour-visaged little old maid who had come alone, tightly shirt-waisted to chin and wrists, ate not a morsel of food, and spent her time glaring with malevolent suspicion at each of the others in turn. Also there was little Trictrac, the poet, who was not a guest. And also there were Monsieur and Madame de Rigmaraule.

But least banal of all was the fact that until they had entered that room Ventrillon, their host, had never set eyes on any of his guests; that is to say, with the exception of Monsieur and Madame de Rigmaraule. maraule. And he had first set eyes on them only that afternoon.

He had often heard of them, of course. Who that had ever been in Paris had not? Who indeed in the whole civilized world had not heard of the fatal loveliness of that somber lady, Madame de Rigmaraule?

Of all that was told of her, however, all that was known for certain was that, with all her fatal loveliness, she was-amazing fact!—respectable as the Mother of God, and that for that fatal loveliness, somewhere, somehow, a man had died.

As for Monsieur de Rigmaraule, Monsieur de Rigmaraule was the husband of Madame de Rigmaraule.

Before that he had been a certain Achille de Rigmaraule who imported frozen beef from the Argentine, and his existence had been only one of the things that are as they are. Even during the war, he had been forced, for supply of the army and the nation, to continue precisely that existence, precisely as it was. But it had made him a millionaire. Whereupon Madame de Rigmaraule, then a widow, had married him.

For him the marriage had been epic. He, Achille de Rigmaraule, pure and simple, very pure and very simple, expecting nothing from the exhilarating pageant of life, getting nothing from it save a fair profit on frozen beef from the Argentine, had been married by one of the great and tragic figures in it, a lady for desire of whose fatal loveliness a man had

died. It was exactly as if he had been married by Helen of Troy.

Such was Ventrillon's dinner. But until the tale of the ex-conductor of taxis, nothing had happened. Nothing, that is, save what has happened to the miserable host at many a more conventional affair.

When the first flutter of arrival and introduction had subsided, though they continued to smile politely, he found their eyes continually meeting his, inimically, helplessly, accusingly, fixing upon his youthful shoulders alone the blame, as who should say: “Eh b'en, here we are! But why the devil are we?"

So he had set them talking upon the topic, The Most Terrible Experience of My Life.

"Whatever it leads to," he thought hopefully, "they will at least have an opportunity to tell about their operations for appendicitis."

It had led to the tale of the exconductor of taxis.

His most terrible experience had taken place while he was yet a simple conductor of taxis. One moonless night, in an unfrequented and sinister quarter, he had opened the door of his taxi to find inside a faint smell like the taste of bitter almonds, a small glass vial glittering on the seat in the gas-light that streamed green-cold through the window, and, sprawling in one corner, with its mouth and eyes wide open, the corpse of a young man, which stared at the roof of the taxi like a lost soul listening to its damnation read from above. The ex-conductor of taxis, under the nameless fascination that compelled him, had put out his hand and touched it. It was still quite warm. But, warm or cold, it was

But these remarks went entirely unheard. One by one the rest of the company had turned to stare with Ventrillon down the long table to that end where sat Madame de Rigmaraule. Then they pushed back their chairs and rushed to her aid.

Quietly, unobtrusively, nobody but Ventrillon knew exactly when, Madame de Rigmaraule had fainted.

It must be admitted that she had done it becomingly, even magnificently. Instead of falling forward with her head and hair in the sauce of her perdrix truffée, the tall woman had draped herself handsomely over the back of her chair, the folds of her purple garments flowing from her, clinging to her, like her own somber past, and the scarlet blossom bleeding stanchlessly among them.

"Thank God!" cried the American girl with emotion; "at last this party is getting a little pep to it!"

"Sacré Ventrillon!" repeated Ventrillon. "Madame de Rigmaraule was the woman in that taxi!”