"Oh, Mrs. Gallito," pleadingly, "can't you see that me and Pearl are born for one another? You know that she can't live away from the footlights. She just can't. And you know that I can put her where she belongs. You know that our hearts are better guides than all Bob Flick and her Pop can plan for her."
His efforts were not wasted. As he had foreseen, his arguments were of a nature to appeal to Mrs. Gallito, and it required only a little more persuasion to win her promise of assistance. He further flattered her self-esteem by interlarding his profuse thanks with vague hints of the extreme lengths to which his despair might have led him had it not been for the saving power of her sympathy and understanding.
He had already risen and was halfway to the door before he appeared to remember something. "Oh," halting, his hand on the latch, "where is that—that José? Pearl could not go up there with him about."
Mrs. Gallito, all timorousness again, beat her hands lightly together, in a distressful flurry. "No, he's there," she whispered, and glanced anxiously about her. Then she came nearer. "I heard Gallito and Bob talking about him only yesterday and Bob said there was some mischief brewing among José's pals down on the coast, and Gallito said, yes, and if he let José leave the mountain he'd be right back there again and in the thick of it and sure to be taken and that he, Gallito, meant to keep José in Colina all year, if necessary."
So great was Hanson's satisfaction at this news that he had difficulty in concealing it, but Mrs. Gallito was not an observant person, fortunately, and, hastily changing the subject, he again expressed his thanks and departed.
He left the next morning for Los Angeles to the regret of his benefactress, Jimmy and the station agent.
CHAPTER VIII
The train which bore Pearl and her father to Colina had already completed its smooth progress through smiling foot hills and had begun a steep and winding ascent among wild gorges and great overhanging rocks before she noticed the change.
For the greater part of the journey she had sat motionless, huddled in a corner of the seat, a thick veil covering her face; but now she began to observe the physical changes in the landscape with a somber satisfaction, and, for the first time, accepted the mountains listlessly, almost gratefully, instead of rebelliously. In truth any change was grateful to her; she did not want to think of the desert or be reminded of it, and this transition, so marked, so sharply defined as to make the brief railway journey from the plains below seem the passage to another world, was especially welcome.
The human desire for change is rooted in the conviction, a vain and deceptive one, that an entirely different environment must include or create a new world of thought and emotion. So for once the Pearl's desire was for the hills. She who had ever exulted in the wide, free spaces of the desert, who had found the echo of her own heart in its eternal mutation, its luring illusions, its mystery and its beauty, now turned to the austere, shadowed, silent mountains as if begging them to enfold her and hold her and hide her.