Diego walked down to the river and stripped off his clothes. He took from the pocket of his tattered pants one of the bars of hotel soap that he had found in Margie’s pocketbook. He stepped gingerly into the slowly moving water, keeping an eye out for snakes and alligators. Then, with a sigh, he lowered himself into the water and began to wash.
People think that bandits like being all dirty and grimy. They don’t. It’s just that they spend so much time in the bush that they have to get used to it. But most of them were brought up in homes where their mothers made them wash behind the ears and looked at their fingernails to see if they were clean. Diego was no different. He had hoped for a wash when they brought him to the jail in Cotabaya, but had been disappointed. It was another thing to
