“One million dollars?” Valeda gasped “How can you ask such an enormous sum?”
They were speaking in Spanish so that the other men understood and now one of them laughed derisively and pulling a battered newspaper from his pocket, pointed to it and said,
“One million dollars not enough, Ask two or three, Ramón. La Señora can afford that.”
La Señora“We agreed one million,” Ramón replied, “and if we ask too much, we may be left with the child on our hands.”
There was silence. Then one of the other men said something about Valeda that she knew was not only unpleasant but lewd.
The others all laughed and suddenly she was afraid in a different way from before. Impulsively she said to the man called Ramón,
“Show me where I can write the letter. The sooner we are out of this place and away fr
