“Pick up your skirts and run, Mrs. Van!” suggested Adams. “You may be cooking for a Mexicano yet.”
“If I do he’ll know it,” was the prompt reply. “I ain’t the runnin’ kind. Anybody who’s staved off the landlord in New York as many times as I have ain’t going to worry about Mexicans. What I think those young folks ought to do is to go East for their honeymoon.”
“They can’t,” replied Adams, with a grin. “It wouldn’t look sporting for the Supe to leave his underlings without protection in such a crisis.”
“I like Bob Street as well as any young chap I know,” said Mrs. Van Zandt, meditatively, “but I don’t know as I’d want him standin’ between me and Angel Gonzales—if Angel was much mad.” Angel Gonzales was a local bandit; a man of many crimes and much history. “But, of course, it wouldn’t look well for the Sup’rintendent to run away.”
“Street’s not the running kind, either; don’t fool yourself about that,” remarked Scott, quietly.
“He’s a good kid. I don’t care if he is a rich man’s son,” said Adams with sincerity. “If my Dad had money I wouldn’t be keeping books, you bet.”
“No, son, you’d be playing the ponies up at Juarez,” responded Hard, cheerfully.
“Not ponies, Henry dear, roulette,” replied Jimmy, pleasantly. “Me and Mrs. Van are going to get spliced just as soon as the Ouija board tells her the winning system.”
“It’s all very well for you to make fun of things you don’t know any more about than a baby, Jim Adams.” Mrs. Van’s scorn was intense. “If you’d read that article I showed you in the magazine about the man that talked to his mother-in-law by the Ouija——”
“Mother-in-law? Great guns, is that the best the thing can do?”