T. S. Stribling

“ The promoter peered at him through the gloom.
“Do you mean——”
“Si, señor,” and the whirlpool will be more dashing than still water, more fitting for caballeros——”
“It's all the same, Nunes.”
“But—but, señor,” pleaded the muleteer in a queer voice, “I hate going down alone—I hate it— I was standing here thinking— I will tell you——
“I meant to take the girl down with me in this bolsa. Ah, Señor Lassiter, that would have been a death! To be sucked down the whirlpool in her arms. Madre de Dios! What a death for a caballero! Kissing her scarlet lips, pressing her soft body! What a death!” ”

“ The roaring of the water drowned every thought but the image. The bolsa swung up on the piled water and swung round and round with narrowing and increasing spin. Came a vast sucking in Lassiter's ears. The front of the bolsa tipped up crazily. Lassiter, in the stern, felt himself being drawn down backward. Water came squirting down on him through a hundred interstices of the top. It covered the spuming figure of the man with a swishing sound.
The promoter suddenly began struggling for air. He strove to pull himself up. ”

“ Would blotting out despair ease it? In the shimmer of the lake he would find neither peace nor pain—he would find nothing. Could becoming nothing rectify his wrong to Tilita? His remorse was a kind of unbalanced force, and forces cannot be blotted; they can only be counteracted. Was it possible for his sin toward Tilita somehow to escape his body? It was a sick man's notion, absurd, feverish. A shiver went over him.
THE dark blur of Nunes' bolsa still lay at the foot of the piazza; as Lassiter approached it, he heard a scraping and presently saw a movement in the mass of the boat. ”