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"'I'm feelin' particularly good right now.'"

The

BLACK PEARL

BY

MRS. WILSON WOODROW

AUTHOR OF

"SALLY SALT," "THE NEW MISSIONER," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Published August, 1912

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

["'I'm feelin' particularly good right now'"]

["I'll show you what I'll do']

["There stood the Black Pearl alone"]

["Holding cautiously to a little branch, she bent over him"]

THE BLACK PEARL

CHAPTER I

It was just at sunset that the train which had crawled across the desert drew up, puffing and panting, before the village of Paloma, not many miles from the Salton Sea. After a moment's delay, one lone passenger descended. Paloma was not an important station.

Rudolf Hanson, the one passenger, whom either curiosity or business had brought thither, stood on the platform of the little station looking about him. To the right of him, beyond the village, blooming like an oasis from the irrigation afforded by the artesian wells, rose the mountains, the foothills green and dimpled, the slopes with their massed shadows of pines and oaks climbing upward and gashed with deep purple cañons, and above them the great white, solemn peaks, austere and stately guardians of the desert which stretched away and away, its illimitable distances lost at last in the horizon line.

Hanson, of the far west, was used to magnificent scenic effects, but the desert that sparkled like the gold of man's eternal quest, that lay with its sentinel hills enfolded and encompassed in color, colors that seemed as if some spinner of the sunset courts wove forever fresh combinations and sent these ethereal tapestries out to float over the wide spaces of the wilderness—this caused him to catch his breath and exclaim.

It was truly a sight to take any man's breath away; but even such a view could only arrest Hanson's interest temporarily. He was hungry, and the station agent, a weedy youth, was making a noisy closing up. Intentionally noisy, for when one is the agent of a small desert station, the occasional visitor is apt to whet one's curiosity to razor edge.

Roused by these sounds, and by his growing hunger, which the cool purity of the air only augmented, Hanson turned to the boy.

"Where's a place to stay?" he asked.

"There ain't but one," replied the youth; "the San Gorgonio hotel. You walk right up this street until you come to it, on the left side. It's got a sign out, electric," he added with some pride. He looked curiously at Hanson, standing tall and straight with his ruddy, good-looking face, keen, quick, gray eyes and curling light hair. "Going to be here long?" he asked tentatively.

"I don't know," returned Hanson idly. "Guess not. No string on me, though, even if I'd choose to put in a month or so here. This way, you say?" He lifted his suit case and began to walk in the direction the station agent had indicated.

"Say," the latter called after him, "you don't want to miss the show to-night."

"What show?" Hanson turned, interest amounting almost to eagerness in his tone.

"Benefit." The boy rolled the word unctuously under his tongue. "I guess maybe you saw why in the papers. The river got on a tear and cut into a nice little town here on the desert, drowned some of the folks and did a lot of damage generally, so we're raising some money to send to 'em."

The stranger's interest had increased perceptibly. "Sounds good to me," he said heartily. "What's your features?"

"Just one," the other answered impressively. "We don't need no more in this part of the world, if we got her."

"Her!" cried Hanson, and now his cold eyes were alight. "Who the hell is her?"

"Why, the Black Pearl!" as if surprised that anyone should be unaware of the fact. "'Course we got a few thousand square miles of desert waiting to be reclaimed, and any amount of mountains full of ore, but to us they's small potatoes and few in a hill beside the Black Pearl."

Hanson swore softly and ecstatically. "If that ain't that good old blind luck of mine hitting me again after all these years," he muttered. "Say, son, I'm making no secret of my business. Don't have to. I am a theatrical manager—vaudeville. Got great backing this year and am out for new features. Set my heart on the Black Pearl and got to figuring on her. Sweeney had her on his circuit last winter. Well, Sweeney, let me tell you, is pretty shrewd. He knows a good thing when he's got it, so I thought there was no show for me. Presently, I hear that she's scrapped with Sweeney and is off to the desert like a flash. So she's really here?"

"Sure," said the boy.

"So," continued Hanson, who was loquacious by nature, but sufficiently shrewd and experienced only to let himself be so when he thought it worth his while, "I begin to figure on my chances. I learn that Sweeney's trying to coax her back by letter, so I says to myself: 'Rudolf, you just chassez down to Paloma and see what you can do,' but honest, son," he put his suit case down in the road and pushed his hat back on his head and put his hands on his hips, "honest to God, I didn't expect anything like this, the first night I got here, too."

His companion shifted his quid of tobacco to the other side of his mouth and nodded understandingly.

Hanson's eyes were fixed ruminatively but unseeingly upon the golden desert, its sand dunes touched with a deep rose soon to be eclipsed by the jealous tyrian purples which were beginning to mass themselves gorgeously beneath the oranges and flame of the setting sun.

"Gee whiz!" he muttered, "and I was figuring that if I hung round here a week or so and played my hand all right, I'd maybe get her to do a few steps for me in the parlor. Oh, Lordy! And now I got a chance to see her before the footlights and size up her capacity for getting over them."

The station agent looked puzzled and a little offended. "There won't be any footlights," he said; "and you're mistaken if you think she's up to any rough work like climbing over them, any way."

Hanson laughed loudly. "That's all right, son, you ain't on to the shop talk, that's all. But now, where is this show and what time does it begin?"

"Oh, in an hour or so, whenever Pearl's minded, and it's to be held at Chickasaw Pete's place—saloon. You see," apologetically, "we ain't a very big community, and that's the only place where there's a decent floor for her to dance on."

Hanson raised his brows and laughed. "Well"—he pulled out his watch and looked at it—"I've got time to wash the upper crust of sand off anyway, and get a bite or so first. I suppose I'll see you later. Up this way, you say?"

The agent nodded assent. "It's a good betting proposition," he mused. "He knows what he wants and he usually gets it, I'm thinking, or there's something to pay. But what'll the Pearl do? I guess she's the biggest gamble any man could tackle."

As his new acquaintance had predicted, Hanson had no difficulty in finding the San Gorgonio, a small hostelry not by any means so gorgeous as its name implied, being merely an unpretentious frame building with a few palms in the enclosure before it, and there he speedily got a room and some supper. It might be deemed significant that he gave more time and attention to his toilet than his food, but that may have been because he believed in the value of a pleasing appearance as well as in a winning address when transacting business with a woman. In any event, his motives, whatever they might be, were quite justifiable, as he undoubtedly possessed a bold and striking type of good looks which had never failed of receiving a due appreciation from most women.

Assured, aggressive, his customary good humor heightened by the comforting sense of his luck being with him, he finally emerged into the open air to discover that the stars were out and that it might be later than he thought. The air, infinitely pure, infinitely fresh, exhaled from the vast, breathing desert, and the delicious aromatic desert odors touched him like a caress. He drew them in in great draughts. The air seemed to him a wonderful, potent ichor infusing him with a new and vigorous life. Hanson was sure of himself always, but now, in this awakened sense of such power and dominance as he had never known, he threw back his head and laughed aloud.

"Gosh!" he muttered, "I feel like all I got to do was to reach up and pull down a few of those stars and use them for poker chips." He exulted like a sleek and lordly animal in this thrilling vitality, this imperious and insistent demand for conquest.

Chickasaw Pete's place, as he soon discovered, was no more pretentious in appearance than the San Gorgonio. It also was a long, low frame building with some great cottonwood trees before it and a few palms with their infinite and haunting suggestions of the tropics.

It was with a sense of mounting excitement which still held that strong element of exultation that Hanson crossed the porch, opened the door and walked in. He saw before him a long room well lighted with electricity and with a shining polished floor. The bar ran along one side, and behind it lounged a short, stout, round-faced man with very black hair and eyes and a perpetual smile. This was the bar-keeper, known familiarly as Jimmy. At the rear of the room, covering about half of the floor, were rows and rows of chairs, occupied by both men and women, strong, sun-burned looking people in the main, but with the invariable and unmistakable sprinkling of "lungers" in various stages of recovery.

Hanson saw his friend, the station agent, leaning across the bar talking to Jimmy, and knew from the interested glances cast in his direction that he was the topic of conversation.

At the opposite end of the room was a piano. A young man sat before it facing the wall, while beside him there stood a woman intently tuning a violin which she held tucked under her chin. Approaching middle age, she was rather stout, with a sallow, discontented face, which yet held some traces of its former evanescent prettiness. Both lashes and brows of her faded light eyes were heavily blackened, and the rouge which lay thickly on her cheeks only served to accentuate their haggard lines. The hair, dark at the roots, was blondined to a canary color where it rolled back under her hat, large and black, of a dashing Gainsborough style and covered with faded red roses. For the rest, her costume consisted of a white shirt waist, a wine-colored skirt and shoes with very high heels which were conspicuously, and no doubt uncomfortably, run over.

Her violin finally tuned to her satisfaction, she bent her head to speak to the young man at the piano. He turned to answer her, and for a moment his delicate, sad face was outlined against the wall behind him. Then, with an emphatic little nod, he began to play and the woman lifted her violin and swung in with him.

The only virtue she possessed as a violinist was that she kept good time, but although it was extremely unlikely that any member of that audience recognized the fact, the boy was a musician by the divine right of gift, a gift bestowed at birth. A wheezy old piano, and yet he drew from it sweet and thrilling notes; a hackneyed, cheap waltz measure, and yet he invested it with the glamour of romance.

A ripple stirred all those waiting people, as a wind stirs a field of wheat, a movement of settling and attention. Hanson, who had been careful to secure a seat in the front row of chairs, was conscious that his heart was beating faster.

"This is where she whirls in through that door by the piano," he muttered to himself with the acumen born of long knowledge of the stage and its conventions. He had a swift mental vision of a graceful painted creature, all undulating movement, alluring smiles, twinkling feet and waving arms. This passed with a slight shock as a girl entered the door by the piano, as he had foreseen, and walked indifferently to the center of the room, and then, without a bow to he audience, began, still with an air of languor and absorption, to take vague, sliding steps, gradually falling in with the waltz rhythm, but, even so, the movement was without any definite form, certainly not enough to call it a dance.

As she swayed about, listless, apparently indifferent to any effect she might be producing, Hanson had a full opportunity to study her, and, in that concentrated attention, the man and the manager were fused. He was at once the cynical showman discounting every> favorable impression and the most critical and disillusioned of audiences.

In this dancer he saw a woman who was like the desert willow and younger than he had supposed; straight and supple, with a body of such plasticity, such instant response to the directing will of its possessor as only comes from the constant and arduous exercises begun in early childhood.

"Been trained for it since she was born, almost," was Hanson's first unspoken comment.

She wore a soft, clinging frock of scarlet crêpe. It was short enough to display her ankles, slender for a dancer, and her arched feet in heelless black slippers. In contrast to her red frock was a string of sparkling green stones which fell low on her breast. Her long, brown fingers blazed with rings, and in her ears, swinging against her olive cheeks, were great hoops of dull gold. Her black shining hair was gathered low on her neck, her unsmiling lips were scarlet as a pomegranate flower, and exquisitely cut; and the fainter, duskier pomegranate bloom on her oval cheeks faded into delicate stains like pale coffee beneath her long, narrow eyes.

"She ain't done a thing yet; she ain't even showed whether she can dance a few bars or not, but, Lord! how she has got over!" was Hanson's unspoken comment. "Clean to the back seats. There's nobody else here."

Although still aimlessly moving with the rhythm of the waltz she no longer merely followed the music. She and it were one now. And Hanson, a connoisseur, familiar with the best, at least in his part of the world, recognized the artist whose technique is so perfect that it is absorbed, assimilated and forgotten; but its essence remains, nevertheless, a sure foundation upon which to build securely future combinations and improvisations.

The Black Pearl was generous to-night. She was the program—its one feature. She gave the audience its money's worth, judged by their standards, which were measured by time; and yet, when she finished, she gave one no idea of having exhausted her repertoire. In fact, she could not have defined that repertoire. Dancing was her expression, and the Black Pearl was conscious of infinite and unsounded phases of self.

Most of the features of the program were familiar to Hanson by her reputation. They included some old Spanish dances, some gypsy ones and others manifestly her own. But dancer though she was by nature and training, her personality dominated and eclipsed her art.

Hanson was not imaginative, but as he watched her he seemed to be gazing at some gorgeous cactus blossom opening its scentless petals to the burning sun. Beneath and beyond her stretched the gray wastes of the desert turning to gold under her feet, but still untrammeled and merciless, holding strange secrets close to its savage heart; now, exerting all its magic of illusion in delicate and exquisite mirages, all of its luring fascination which has drawn men to it from the beginning of the world; and now revealing itself desolate and unashamed in all of its repulsive, stark aridity.

The Pearl certainly made no effort to attract. If a glance from those narrow eyes enthralled, it stung too. It was the flame of wine in the blood, the flick of a whip on the raw, which roused in a man's heart, in Hanson's at least, the passionate disposition to conquer and subdue.

Finally she gave a slight signal to the musicians, her steps slowed, the music stopped, and she went over and sat down beside the woman, who had placed her violin on the piano, and then flung herself into a chair, where she sat, carefully dabbing her warm brow with her handkerchief.

The vague pictures which Hanson had been seeing vanished. "Gee! She got me going!" he said to himself, half dazedly, "hypnotized me sure." This, the manager. But the man exulted: "She ain't easy. She ain't easy."

The moment the Pearl stopped dancing the audience was on its feet applauding, and then, to a man, it eddied about her, casting banknotes into her lap. These she lifted in handfuls and gave to two men who had sat down beside her to count, while a third bent over them watching the operation.

Hanson, although he had drawn nearer her, still stood on the edge of the crowd, leaning against the bar. "So that's the Black Pearl!" he said presently to the bar-keeper.

"That's her," responded Jimmy equably. "Can't be beat. What'll you have?"

"Nothing, just yet. Say, those stones around her neck look good to me." Hanson narrowed his eyes.

"Good!" Jimmy laughed shortly, a characteristic, mirthful little chuckle. "I guess so. Bob Flick, up there beside Pearl, counting that money, he gave 'em to her after she found him when he'd been lost on the desert about three days. I'll tell you about it when I got more time."

Hanson had been conscious from time to time of the close but furtive scrutiny of the man whom the bar-keeper had designated as Bob Flick, and now he, in turn, made Flick an object of observation.

He saw a tall man of noticeable languor and deliberation of movement, doubtless so long studied that it had become natural. His face, with regular, rather aquiline features, was devoid of expression, almost mask-like, while the deep lines about the mouth and eyes showed that he lived much in the hard, brilliant, western sunlight.

Hanson was quick enough to size up a man and a situation. "I'll make a note to look out for you," he thought, "just about as cold and just about as deadly as a rattler."

"Say," he turned to Jimmy again, "I want to meet her. I'm a theatrical manager, always looking out for new turns. Heard of this Black Pearl and thought I'd run down and sign her up if I could."

"She does go traveling once in a while," returned Jimmy dubiously, "but it's all in the mood she's in whether she'll let you even talk to her. You might as well count on the desert out there as the Pearl."

"I suppose she's out for big money?" queried Hanson.

"She'll get all she can, I guess," Jimmy chuckled. "But," he added boastfully, "she can make big money by staying right here. Look at what she's pulled in to-night. And there's her father, old Gallito, he's got more than one good 'prospect,' and is foreman beside of one of the big mines in the mountains. And her mother, there, that played the violin, she's got some nice irrigated land, and even Hughie, that played, he makes money playing for dances in the different towns. Oh, they're smart folks."

"Is Hughie the brother?" asked Hanson, looking at the boy, who sat listlessly at the piano.

"No. Adopted." Jimmy spoke briefly. "Born blind, but let me tell you, he sees considerable more than those of us who have eyes."

"Well, the Pearl's a certain winner," said the manager earnestly, "a flower of the desert, a what-you-may-call-'em, a cactus bloom."

"Correct, and don't forget the spines," chuckled Jimmy. "Looks as if they were all out to-night, too. Kind of sulky, ain't she? Well, did you say you was waitin' to be introduced? I'll take you up and ask her. Like as not, she'll turn you down. She ain't looked at you once, I notice. I been watching her."

"So've I," said Hanson good humoredly, "but you're wrong, son"—there was a brief, triumphant flash of his light eyes—"she's looked at me twice, took me all in, too. Numbered the hairs of my head and the size of my shoes. Threw a search light on my heart and soul. Gee! It felt like the violet rays. Now, look here, friend, I ain't going to take chances on a turn-down, nor of your Mr. Bob Flick having fun all night shooting holes in the floor while this little Johnny Tenderfoot does his imitation Black Pearl dancing. Listen," he tapped the bar sharply, "when I meet the Black Pearl, it's because she requested an introduction. You take me up to that old lion tamer, her mother."

Jimmy threw him a glance of ungrudging admiration. "You ain't so dumb," he vouchsafed. "Say, have one on me."

"A little later," replied the other. "Never drink during business hours."

A small table had been placed before Mrs. Gallito, upon which were two glasses, one of beer for herself, and one of lemonade for her daughter.

As Jimmy performed the introduction, she put down her beer from which she had been somewhat thirstily drinking and received Hanson with a perfunctory bow and a brief mechanical smile. "Think of settling here?" she asked politely.

"No, I'm just down for a few days," replied Hanson genially. He had drawn a chair up and seated himself on the other side of the table, directly opposite Mrs. Gallito and her daughter.

The surprise of the glance she threw at him was heightened by a quick curiosity. "Just prospecting?" she asked. "I saw at once that you weren't a 'lunger.' I didn't think you were an engineer, so I made up my mind that you were looking for land."

"None of them," returned Hanson, smiling, and hastened to inform her of his real calling. Immediately she relaxed, her smile became genuine, the bored and constrained politeness vanished from her manner.

"Well, that is certainly nice," she exclaimed with real animation and cordiality. "I'm always glad to meet any of the profession. No folks like your own folks, you know." She bridled a little.

"That's so," agreed Hanson heartily. "I knew the minute that I saw you that you belonged."

She lifted her head with a gesture of pride, the glow and color came back into her face, giving it a transitory appearance of youth, and restoring, for a fugitive moment, something of its vanishing beauty.

"Born to it," she said. "My mother and her mother, and my father and his father, and, 'way back on both sides, was all circus people. Yes, I was born in the sawdust—rode—drove—tight-rope—trapeze—learned dancing on the side—ambitious, you know. Say, you must have heard of my mother—greatest bare-back rider ever in the ring. Isobel Montmorenci. English, you know. I wasn't so shy myself, Queenie Madrew."

"Gee! Well, you were some. Shake." Hanson extended his hand, which Mrs. Gallito shook warmly. "And I do remember your mother. I should say so. First time I went to the circus, I was about ten years old—ran off you know. Knew well enough what I'd get when I turned up at home. Pop laying for me with a strap. Goodness! It takes me right back. It's all a kind of jumble, sawdust clowns and all; but what I do remember plain is Isobel Montmorenci, her and a big black horse she was riding."

"Cæsar!" cried Mrs. Gallito excitedly. "Lord! don't I remember! I learned to ride on him."

"Yes," mused the manager, "all I recall of that circus is her and my two nickels. I broke my bank to get 'em. They seemed a fortune to me; but even then I was a shrewd kid and meant to get my money's worth. Well—the first one I laid out in a great tall glass of lemonade. Say, that was the first time I came up against the disillusions of life. Nothing but a little sweetened water. The next nickel went for peanuts, and they were too stale for even a kid to chew."

"Ain't that just like a young one at the circus!" Mrs. Gallito laughed loudly.

"What's the joke, mom?" drawled a lazy, sliding, soft voice on the other side of her.

"A circus story, honey. Oh!" as the sudden formal silence recalled her to her duty. "I forget. You two ain't been introduced, have you? Pearl, make you acquainted with Mr. Hanson. He's in the show business."

Pearl bowed without lifting her eyes, giving Hanson ample opportunity to note the incredible length, as it seemed to him, of the upcurling lashes upon her smooth cheeks. But just as he bent forward to speak to her, she half-turned from him and said something to one of the men beside her.

The manager's quickness saved him. He was perfectly aware of all those jealous masculine eyes, flickering now with repressed and delighted laughter over his discomfiture. He recovered himself in a moment and slipped easily and with unabated geniality into a conversation with Mrs. Gallito.

"Funny you should marry out of the profession," deftly catching up his threads.

"She didn't," again that soft, sliding voice. "Pop was born in the sawdust, too."

Without a change of expression in his face, Hanson waited imperturbably for Mrs. Gallito's answer. Since his eyes were fixed on the red spark at the end of his cigarette, who could see the quick flash in them?

Mrs. Gallito took a hasty gulp of beer. "It's just like Pearl says," she murmured. "Her pop came of a long line of circus people, same as me, but he broke clean away from it, couldn't bear the life." There was unabated wonder in her tones. "I guess," resignedly, "it's the Spanish of him."

"Say," cried Hanson, and now his voice rang with a new note in it, something of gay, masterful, masculine dominance, "say, what you ladies drinking beer and lemonade for? It's got to be wine to-night. Hey, Jimmy. Wine for this table, and treat the house. Wine, understand? Got enough to float 'em?"

"Hold on a minute, Jimmy." Hanson heard Bob Flick's voice for the first time, soft as the Pearl's, liquidly southern, gentle, even apologetic. "I'm sorry, stranger"—he leaned forward courteously to Hanson—"we all would enjoy accepting your hospitality, but you see, it ain't etiquette."

A silence that could be felt had fallen upon the room. Mrs. Gallito, pale under her paint, was nervously biting her handkerchief and glancing from one man to the other, while the Pearl leaned back in her chair as lazily, languidly, scornfully indifferent as ever.

Then Hanson laughed, and a little thrill went over the room. The new man was game. "Ain't that just your ruling, stranger?" he asked pleasantly. "Since we've not been introduced, I can't call your name. But I hold that it is etiquette. Jimmy, get on your job. The occasion when I first set my eyes upon the Black Pearl has got to be honored."

"Hold on just a moment, Jimmy." It was Flick now. "You see," again to Hanson, his voice more apologetic than ever, "you being new here, naturally don't understand. It ain't etiquette on a Benefit night, when Miss Pearl Gallito, whose name you have, most unfortunately, just miscalled, condescends to dance. I'm afraid I got to ask you to take back your order and to apologize to Miss Gallito."

Hanson was on his feet in a minute. "I'm sure ready now and always to apologize my humblest to Miss Gallito, although I don't know what's the offense. But the order stands."

"Oh, Pearl," wailed her mother, "you raise mischief wherever you go. You know Bob wouldn't go on so if you'd ask him to stop. You just like to raise the devil."

Then, for the first time, the Pearl's face became animated. It broke into brilliance, her eyes gleamed, she showed her white teeth when she laughed.

"Quit your fooling, both of you," she said composedly, rising to her feet. "I ain't going to have tales flying all over the desert about the ructions stirred up the night I danced for the benefit of the flood sufferers. Shake hands, you two," imperiously. "Go on, do what I tell you. That's right," as the two men perfunctorily shook hands. "Bob don't mean a thing, Mr. Hanson. It's just his temper, and there ain't going to be any wine, because I'm going home, but—" and here she smiled into his eyes—"you can walk a piece of the way with me, if you want to. Come on, mother and Hughie. Good-night, Bob."

CHAPTER II

Hanson had decided that the best way to gain certain information he desired was to seek the bar-keeper, who, after his constitution,> gossiped as naturally and as volubly as a bird sings; so, quite early the next morning, he sauntered into Chickasaw Pete's place.

Jimmy, who was industriously polishing the bar and singing the while one of the more lugubrious and monotonous hymns, looked up with his customary little chuckle.

"Feeling fine, ain't you?" he said derisively. "Want to start right out and corral the whole desert, don't you? Think you can travel right over to San Bernardino yonder? Looks about three miles off, don't he?"

"Me?" said Hanson, expanding his chest. "I feel like I was about sixteen. Like I was home in Kaintucky, jumping a six-bar fence after a breakfast of about fifty buckwheat cakes and syrup."

"That's the way it takes them all; but you just wait until about noon, and you won't feel so gay," warned Jimmy. "What are you doin' to-day, anyway, hunting more trouble?"

"Not me," cried the other. "I came here to the desert pearl fishing."

"That's a good one." Jimmy's chuckle expanded into a series. "But you ain't the only one. There's Bob Flick, for instance, as you discovered last night."

The smile went out of Hanson's eyes, his face set. He ceased to lounge against the bar and involuntarily straightened himself:

"What about Bob Flick?" he asked.

"Lots about Bob." Jimmy's tone was equable, but he shot Hanson a quick glance. "He was our faro dealer for a while, but he's interested in mines now. He's dead sure. Come to think of it, he's a lot of dead things," he mused; "but don't ever confuse him with a dead one." Delight at his own wit expressed itself in mirthful chuckles. "He's dead game, and he's a dead shot, two important things for a man that's playing to win when in certain localities, and he's dead certain that he's the God-appointed guardeen of the Black Pearl."

"What's she got to say about it?" growled Hanson.

The bar-keeper shrugged his shoulders. "Ask me what the desert out there's thinking, and I'll tell you what's going on inside the Pearl's head. Say," animatedly, "I told you to ask me about those emeralds last night, didn't I?"

The manager laughed shortly. "I saw 'em close, son, after I left you. I know stones. Square cut emeralds. Lord! They sure cost some good man his pile, and he was no piker, either."

"Bob Flick," said Jimmy, with a glow of local pride. "Kind of thank offering, when the Pearl found him in the desert after he'd been lost three days. Bob was new to this country then and reckless, like a tenderfoot is, and the first thing he did was to go and get lost. Well, they had several searching parties looking for him, but the Pearl, she got on her horse and went after him alone, and, by George! she found him, lying about gone in a dry arroyo.

"Bob said he'd been wandering round crazy as a loon, seeing three big lions with eyes like coals of fire stalking him night and day, and him always trying to dodge 'em. He says at last they came nearer and nearer until he stumbled and fell, and then he felt their hot breath on his cheek, and he knew nothing more until he finally realized that some one was trying to pour water down his throat and he kind of half come to himself; and suddenly, he said, that awful gray desert, worse than any hell a man ever feared, seemed all kind and tender like a mother, and then, some way, it burst into bloom, and that bloom was the Black Pearl bending over him. Oh, you ought to hear him tell it! Well—she got him up on her horse and got him home, and her and her mother nursed him back to health. And since that time Bob ain't never felt the same about the desert. You couldn't drive him away now.

"When he was well enough to travel, he went to 'Frisco and ordered a jeweler there to get him the handsomest string of matched emeralds that money could buy. The fellow was a year matching them, had to make two trips to the other side. They do say," Jimmy lowered his voice cautiously, "that Bob's father was a rich man and left him a nice little fortune, and that he blew every cent of it in on those stones. The Pearl certainly likes jewels. All the rings and things that she wears were given her by the boys."

"Umm-m-hum. Great story!" he nodded perfunctorily. "Guess I'll take a walk." He strolled toward the door.

"Bet I know which way you're going," chuckled Jimmy, as he disappeared.

The unspoken surmise was perfectly correct. Hanson took his way slowly and with apparent abstraction in the direction of the Gallito home, and it was not until he was at the very gate that he paused and looked up with a start of well simulated surprise.

The house stood beyond a garden of brilliant flowers, and in the shadow of the long porch—a porch facing the desert and not the mountains—sat Pearl, swinging back and forth in a rocking chair and talking impartially to the blind boy, who sat on the step beneath her, and a gorgeous crimson and green parrot, which walked back and forth in its pigeon-toed fashion on the arm of her chair, muttering, occasionally screaming, and sometimes inclining its head to be scratched.

"Good morning," called Hanson in his blithest, most assured fashion. "Can I come in?"

"Sure," drawled the Pearl. "Hughie and I were just waiting for company, weren't we, Hughie?"

The boy tossed his head impatiently, but made no answer. From the moment Hanson had spoken he had assumed an air of immobile and concentrated attention, tense as that of an Indian listening and sighting in a forest, or of a highly trained dog on guard.

"Take you at your word," laughed Hanson, and swung up the path, a big, dominant presence, as vital as the morning. "Howdy," he shook hands with Pearl and then turned to the boy, but Hugh drew quickly away from that extended hand, quite as if he saw it before him.

Hanson raised his eyebrows in involuntary surprise, but his good humor was unabated. "What's the good word with Hughie?" he asked genially. "I can't call you anything else, because I don't know your last name."

"My name is Hugh Braddock," said the boy coldly.

Again Hanson lifted his brows, this time humorously, as at a child's unexpected rebuff, and looked at Pearl, and again he experienced a feeling of surprise, for she was gazing at Hugh with a puzzled frown, which held a faint touch of apprehension.

"Then," Hanson looked from one to the other, but spoke to Pearl, "you ain't brother and sister?"

"No," said Pearl, and it disturbed Hanson more than he would have dreamed to notice the change in voice and manner. The warm, provocative, inherent coquetry was gone from both smile and eyes; instead of a soft, alluring girl ready to play with him a baffling, blood-stirring game of flirtation, she was again the sphynx of last night, whose unrevealing eyes seemed to have looked out over the desert for centuries, until its infinite heart was as an open page to her, and she repressed in the scarlet curves of her mouth its eternal, secret enigma.

"We are brother and sister." Hugh edged along the step until he could lay his head against Pearl's knee. "But we're not blood relations, if you're curious to know." The insolence of his tone was barely veiled. "My mother was a circus woman that Mrs. Gallito knew. She deserted me when I was a baby, and Mrs. Gallito has been all the mother I ever had or wanted, and Pearl the only sister. I was born blind."

"Oh, Hughie," remonstrated Pearl, "you've got no call to say that. He don't see with his eyes," she turned to Hanson, "but I never saw anybody that could see so much."

"How's that?" asked Hanson easily. He was used from long experience to the temperamental, emotional people of the stage, and he had no intention of being daunted by any moods these two might exhibit.

"Hughie, what color are Mr. Hanson's clothes?" asked Pearl.

Still with a petulant, disdainful expression, the boy leaned forward and ran his long, slender fingers with their cushioned tips over Hanson's coat. "Brown," he replied indifferently.

"He can tell you the color of every flower in the garden, just by touching them," explained Pearl. "He knows all the different kinds of birds just by the whirr of their wings. He can tell the color o every dress I wear. He—"

But Hugh had risen. "I don't like you to tell strangers about me," he cried with passionate petulance, "and you know it. I'm going to find mother."

"Well, tell her that Mr. Hanson's here," called Pearl after him, unaffected by his outburst. "He hasn't taken a shine to you," she remarked frankly to Hanson.

Again he was disturbed to notice that she seemed to give this obvious fact some weight. She had rested her chin on her hand and was gazing meditatively at the gay garden. A shadow of disappointment was on her face, and more than a touch of it in her voice.

"That don't bother me," affirmed Hanson confidently. "All that I'm caring about is whether some one else shares his opinion." His bold, gay eyes looked straight into hers.

"I wonder who?" drawled Pearl. The gleam of her eyes shining through narrowed lids and black, tangled lashes flicked him like the tang of a whip.> "Maybe you mean Lolita?"

The parrot, which had perched on her shoulder and was tweaking her ear, now hearing its name, looked up, fluttered its wings, and called out in a gruff, masculine voice: "Mi jasmin, Pearl. Mi corazon."

"He's talking for me, sure," said Hanson, who knew enough Spanish to make out.

"Oh, damn," said the parrot disgustedly; "why the hell can't you shut up?"

Hanson gave a great burst of laughter. "Lolita and Hughie are well matched when it comes to politeness."

"They got the artistic temperament, and me, too, and mom, also," said Pearl. "That's what the newspaper boys always wrote about me when I was on the road."

The manager did not miss the opening. "Look here," he said earnestly; "ain't you tired loafing around here? I guess you know what I'm in Paloma for. I've made no secret of it. Now all you got to do is to show me your contract with Sweeney and I'll double what he gave you, play you over a bigger circuit, and advertise you, so's before your contract with me's expired you'll be asked to do a few turns on the Metropolitan Opera stage of New York City, New York."

"Love me to-day," sang Lolita, meltingly, if with grating harshness.

"That's right, Lolita, sing your pretty song," coaxed Pearl. "Come on, I'll sing with you." She lifted her languorous eyes and sang softly, almost under her breath, but straight at Hanson:

"Love me to-day,
Love me an hour;
Love is a flower,
Fading alway."

The blood surged to his temples at the direct challenge, he half rose and leaned toward her. Then, as she laughed at him, he sat down. "Treble Sweeney's offer, by God!" he said hoarsely. "Cash down beforehand." He brought his fist down on the arm of the chair with a crash.

"Oh, I ain't ready to make any plans yet," Pearl announced indifferently. "I want to talk things over with Pop first. He'll be down from the mines before long, maybe to-day."

She sat for a few moments in silence, her eyes fixed on the far purple hazes of the desert. "Oh, I wish there weren't so many of me," she said at last and wistfully. "After I'm 'out' a while, I'll get to longing so for the desert that I'm likely to raise any kind of a row and break any old contract just to get here. I can't breathe. I feel as if everything, buildings and people and all, were crowding me so's if I didn't have a place to stand; and then, after I'm here a while, I got to see the footlights, I got to hear them clapping, I got to dance for the big crowds. Oh, Lord! life's awful funny, always trying to chain you up to one thing or another. But I won't be tied. I got to be free, and I will be free." She threw out her arms with a passionate gesture.

"You'd be free with me," he cried.

But, if she heard him, she gave no indication of having done so. "Can you ride?" she asked presently.

"You bet," said Hanson eagerly. "I was born in Kaintucky. Just tell me where I can get a horse here, and—"

"I'll lend you one of mine, and we'll have some rides. I'll take you out on the desert. It ain't safe to go alone. You see those sand hills yonder? Do you think you could walk out to them and back?"

"Sure," said Hanson confidently and looking at her in some surprise.

Pearl laughed. "Oh, Lolita!" she cried; "a tenderfoot is sure funny. The chances are, Mr. Hanson, that if you started to walk around those dunes you'd never get back. Goodness! ain't that mirage pretty?"

The desert, which had lain vast, dun-colored and unbroken before their eyes, had vanished; instead, a sapphire sea sparkled in the sunshine, its white-capped waves breaking upon the beach. Upon one side of it spread a city with white domes and fairy towers, and palm trees uplifting their graceful fronds among them.

Hanson rubbed his eyes and looked again. It was the first time that he had ever seen one of these miracles of illusion, and he became so absorbed in it that he failed to notice that some one else had entered the gate and was making a leisurely progress toward the house.

It was Bob Flick, and Rudolf Hanson could not repress a slight scowl at this unexpected appearance of one whom he was constrained to regard as more or less of an enemy, and certainly this morning as a blot upon the landscape.

Without a smile, but politely enough, Flick greeted him, after speaking to Pearl, who looked at the newcomer with a sort of resigned resentfulness. Lolita, however, made up what was lacking in cordiality. With a loud squawk of welcome she flew to Flick's shoulder, uttering gutteral and incoherent expressions doubtless meant to convey endearment.

"Call Mom, Bob," commanded Pearl lazily, and Flick obediently stepped inside of the door in search of Mrs. Gallito. She must have been near at hand, for she and Flick emerged before the manager could do more than give Pearl a glance of eloquent disappointment, which she returned with teasing mockery.

Mrs. Gallito had evidently been making a toilet, and it is to be regretted for her own sake that she might not have reserved all of her appearances for the evening, for this brilliant desert sunshine was pitiless in revealing those artificial aids with which she strove to recreate and hold her vanished youth and bloom.

Bob Flick she evidently regarded as a matter of course, but at the sight of Hanson she showed unmistakable pleasure.

"Hughie told me you were here," she said, sitting down beside him and patting somewhat anxiously the mass of canary-colored puffs on the back of her head; "and I been hurrying to get out before you got away."

"I wouldn't have thought of going before you came," Hanson assured her. She smiled and bridled a little, evidently well pleased.

"Has Pearl told you that her Pop'll probably be down to-day?" she leaned across Hanson to speak to Flick.

"No, is that so?" he asked in his smooth, pleasant tones.

"Where are the mines that Mr. Gallito is interested in?" asked Hanson, determined to keep in the conversation.

"Up in Colina." It was Mrs. Gallito that spoke.

An up-darting gleam of suddenly aroused interest and curiosity flashed for a moment in Bob Flick's eyes. Was it possible that at the mention of that name Hanson had started and that something which might have been taken for the shadow of dismay had overfallen his face?

"Fine mining camp," Flick commented. "You know it at all, Mr. Hanson?"

Hanson had scratched a match to light his cigarette, but now he lifted his eyes and looked across its tiny flare straight at Flick. "No," he said indifferently, "never was in it in my life."

His tone and manner were both open and convincing, and yet the ruddy color, as Flick noticed with merciless satisfaction, had not returned to his face.

"He's an awful queer man," confided Mrs. Gallito in a low voice to Hanson. "I suppose," with a sigh, "it's the Spanish of him. Just think," she spoke as one who has never overcome an unmitigated wonder, "born in the sawdust same as me; his folks from way back all in the business, and him with no use for it. Never rested till he got away from it. Why, he didn't even want me to train Pearl, but," and here triumph rang in her tones, "he couldn't help that. She took to it like a duck takes to water. Always ready for it, never cried or complained at the long hours."

"She's sure got cause to be grateful to you." Hanson spoke sincerely.

"I wouldn't have known what else to do with a child," said Mrs. Gallito simply. "I always saw them trained that way. But her Pop didn't stand for it."

During this conversation Pearl and Flick had risen and, with Lolita still on Flick's shoulder, had sauntered down through the garden.

Seeing this, Rudolf, with his customary philosophy, made the best of the situation. "Well," with rather vague gallantry, "I don't see how he can stay away from a home like this."

"It's the Spanish of him." This was Mrs. Gallito's explanation of all the eccentricities in which her husband might indulge. "And," with unwonted optimism, "maybe it's a blessing, too, 'cause he's awful queer. And, anyway, he's what they call a man's man. Why, you might think he lived all by himself up there in Colina; but he don't. He's got more old Spaniards around"—she raised her eyes—"and they're the awfullest! Cut-throats and pirates, I call 'em. They come up from the coast. And it's funny, too," she exclaimed in a sort of querulous wonder, "because Gallito's awful respectable himself."

"That is queer, isn't it?" His tone was politely interested, but his errant glance strayed to where Pearl and Flick stood gazing over the vast spaces of the desert, flooded with illimitable sunshine.

But Mrs. Gallito needed only a modicum of interest upon which to launch her confidences. "Yes, he certainly is queer, and Pearl's like him in lots of ways. Neither of them can stand anything holding them. They're always wanting to be free, and they both got the strongest wills."

"And does he ever bring his cut-throat friends here?" asked Hanson.

"My, no!" cried Mrs. Gallito. "It wouldn't be safe."

"I should think it would be as safe here as in the mountains."

"He don't keep 'em there long, if they're wanted bad," whispered Mrs. Gallito. "He knows more than one secret trail over the mountains."

Hanson was beginning to show a more genuine interest now and, spurred on by this flattering appreciation of her revelations, Mrs. Gallito went on.

"If you won't ever tell," she bent toward him after glancing about her cautiously, "I'll tell you something. Of course, I'd never mention it if I didn't feel that you're as safe as a church and one of our very best friends."

"You haven't got a better in the world," he fervently assured her, his curiosity really aroused now.

"Well," glowing with the importance of her news, "did you ever hear of Crop-eared José?"

It was with difficulty that Hanson repressed a long, low whistle. "I should say," he answered. "He's been wanted by the police of several States for some time, and since that last big robbery they've had sheriffs and their parties scouring the mountains."

For once Mrs. Gallito really had a piece of news which was sure to command the most flattering attention.

Crop-eared José was a famous and slippery bandit, and his latest exploit had been the robbery of an express car and subsequent vanishing with a sum approximating thirty thousand dollars. It was supposed that he had jumped the train while it was making its slow progress across the mountains at night and had lain on the top of the car until what he regarded as the proper moment for action had arrived. He had then slipped down, forced the lock on the door, held up both messengers, making one tie and gag the other, under his direction, and then himself performed that office for the first with his own skillful hands. After that, to open the safe, take the money and drop from the train was mere child's play to so accomplished a professional as José.

"Gallito's got him." Mrs. Gallito enjoyed to the full the sensation she had created, and then a sudden revulsion of fright shook her. "But, for goodness' sake, Mr. Hanson, don't let on I told you. I—I wish I hadn't spoke," she whispered.

"Trust me," comfortingly. "Now don't give it another thought. I'll forget it on the spot, if you say so."

"Gallito'd kill me"—she still shook and looked at him fearfully.

"Oh, come now," his tone was infinitely reassuring, "forget it; I have already. Such things don't interest me."

"Love me to-day,
Love me an hour;"

sang Lolita, and his eyes turned to the two at the gate, still chaperoned by the faithful parrot. In them was a flash like fire on steel, as they rested on Bob Flick. Then he turned again to Mrs. Gallito. "Forget it," he said again, as he rose to take his leave; "and believe that I have, too."

But his musings on his way back to the hotel would certainly not have proved calming to that lady could she have but known them.

"Gosh!" he muttered, "and I thought it had broke, this blessed blind luck of mine, when I heard 'em mention Colina; but it's holding after all, it's holding. I guess what I know now about the whereabouts of Crop-eared José just about offsets anything Pop Gallito may know about me and anything that Mr. Bob Flick can discover."

CHAPTER III

Pearl's father came the next day, an older man than Hanson had imagined and of a different type. There was no smack of the circus ring about him, no swagger of the footlights; nor any hint of the emotional, gay temperament supposed to be the inheritance of southern blood. He was a saturnine, gnarled old Spaniard with lean jaws and beetling brows. His skin was like parchment. It clung to his bones and fell in heavy wrinkles in the hollows of his cheeks and about his mouth; and his dark eyes, fierce as a wild hawk's, were as brilliant and piercing as in youth.

Little resemblance between him, gaunt and stark and seamed as a desert rock, and his tropical blossom of a daughter, and yet, indubitably, Pearl was the child of her father. The secretiveness, the concentrated will, the unfettered individuality of spirit, which protected its own defiant isolation at all costs, the subtlety, the ability to seek sanctuary in indefinitely maintained silence, these were their traits in common.

Hanson, Gallito met with grave and impersonal courtesy which, the former was relieved to feel, held a real indifference. There were many moths ever circling about this glowing flame of a daughter. Gallito accepted that, met them, observed them, and assumed those introspective meditations in which he seemed ever absorbed.

There was evidently an understanding between Pearl and himself, but no show of affection, and what small tenderness of nature the Spaniard possessed appeared to be bestowed upon Hugh.

Grim and silent, sipping a little cognac from a glass on a table by his side, the old man would sit on the porch for an hour at a time listening to the boy playing the piano in the room within.

Flick and himself also seemed on fair terms of friendship and would hold apparently endless discussions concerning various mining properties. It was understood that Gallito had come down now to give his opinion on some claim that Flick had recently staked, and they two, usually accompanied by Hughie, would ride off over the desert and be gone two or three days at a time.

Hanson, finding that the theatrical tie, "we be brothers of one blood," had not that potency for Mr. Gallito that it exercised for his wife, and that it was not for him as for her the open sesame to confidence and friendship, speedily ceased to strike this note and approached him on the ground of pure business. The offer he had made to Pearl he repeated to her father.

And Gallito had gazed out over the desert and considered the matter with due deliberation. "Sweeney's been writing to me considerable," he said at last. "He's made a good deal better proposition that he did last year."

"I told your daughter I'd double any offer Sweeney made," Hanson said, and then expatiated on the advantage of the wider circuit and increased advertising that he proposed to give.

Gallito nodded without comment. Again he seemed to turn the matter over in his mind. "I'll write to Sweeney," he said finally, "and get him to give me a statement in writing of just what he proposes to do, a complete outline of his plans down."

The manager could not restrain the question which rose to his lips: "But your daughter, is she willing that you should make all these arrangements?"

Gallito looked at him sharply from under his beetling brows. There was surprise in his glance and a touch of cynical scorn: "She knows that I look out for her interests."

Another query crossed Hanson's mind, one he had no disposition to voice. Was the understanding between father and daughter, and this apparent and most uncharacteristic submission to his judgment on her part, based on a common passion, acquisitiveness? He thought of Pearl's jewels. More than once he had seen her lift her fingers and caress the gems on her hand, just as the Spaniard sat and shook his buttons and nuggets of gold together, pouring them from one palm to another, his frowning gaze fixed on the ground before him.

"Yes, I'll write to Sweeney," continued Gallito. "It'll take a few days, though, before I can get his answer." He looked at the other man questioningly. "It might be a week in all. I don't want to keep you here that time. I could write you."

"Nothing to do just now," said Rudolf easily. "Left things in good hands, business running easily. Came down here to stay a while, needed a vacation. And, Lord! This air makes a man feel like he never wanted to leave."

To this Gallito made no comment and, as there was nothing further to say, the subject was, for the time, dropped between them.

Hanson had made known his reasons, obvious reasons, for his presence in Paloma, so, as he would have expressed it, he let it go at that and left the observer to draw any conclusions he pleased as to his almost constant presence at the Gallito home, and yet, after all, his visits were only a little more frequent than those of a number of others, and no more so at all than those of Bob Flick.

There were long evenings when Hughie played the piano, and when Pearl, now and then, touched the guitar, when Mrs. Gallito indulged in her querulous monotonous reminiscences, while Gallito and various men sat and smoked cigarettes about the card table; but always, no matter who came or went, there was Flick, silent, impassive, polite, but, as Hanson realized with growing irritation, ever watchful.

Gallito sat down to his cards in the evening as regularly as he went to bed exactly at twelve o'clock; and not cards alone. When he came "inside" there were brought forth from various nooks of obscurity in his dwelling other gambling devices, among them a faro layout, a keno goose, and a roulette wheel.

Undoubtedly, the play ran high in the Gallito cabin, but although Hanson sometimes sat in at this or that game, more often he sat talking to Pearl in the soft shadow of the porch. To her he made no secret of his infatuation, but it seemed to him that when with her they were ever more constantly and more irritatingly interrupted. Either Mrs. Gallito, or Hughie, or some of the visitors would join them and Hanson realized that his opportunities for speech with Pearl were becoming increasingly rare.

The only times when he could really see her alone were on the occasions of some morning rides together, which they had begun to take.

As for her, she was still repelling, still alluring, still drawing him on, but how much of it was a game which she played both by nature and practice with consummate skill, or how much he might have caught her fancy or touched her heart, he had no way of determining, and this tormented him and yet daily, hourly, heightened his infatuation.

And he was still further goaded by the knowledge that he was, in a measure, under surveillance, which he was sure was instituted by Gallito and Flick and connived at by Hughie; a watchfulness so subtle that it convinced him even while he doubted. He felt often as if he were stalked by some stealthy and implacable animal. This situation, imaginary or real, began to affect his nerves and he would undoubtedly have left had it not been for his mounting passion for Pearl, a passion fanned always to a more ardent flame by her tantalizing coquetries.

Then, too, he felt that, although Bob Flick and Gallito had probably acquired some information about himself which he would gladly have withheld, still they did not hold all the winning cards. The ace of trumps, as he exultantly told himself, is bound to take any trick, and the ace of trumps he felt that he possessed in the information which Mrs. Gallito had so obligingly furnished him. In other words, his ace was Crop-eared José, and his ace was not destined to be unsupported by other trump cards.

Only the evening before, he and Mrs. Gallito had sat alone for a few moments on the porch gazing out over the wonder and glory of the desert flooded in moonlight, and the patient, flattering interest with which he invariably received her confidences had gained its reward, for she had leaned toward him and whispered with many cautious backward glances:

"He's up there in the mountains yet."

"Who?" asked Hanson, attempting to conceal his eagerness under an air of mystification.

"Crop-eared José," she answered, "and Gallito's going to keep him there for several months yet."

"Is he?" and again Hanson strove to speak with disarming indifference. "How do you know?"

"I heard him and Bob Flick planning it," she answered. "They don't think it's safe to try and get him out of the country now." Then, having delivered herself of her burden of important news, she suffered one of her quick revulsions of fright, and clapped her hand to her mouth and turned white.

"Oh, Lordy!" she cried. "Lordy! Ain't I the leaky vessel, though! Oh, say, Mr. Hanson," she clutched his arm like a terrified child, "promise me you won't give me away."

"Sure," soothingly. "Why, Mrs. Gallito, you got to believe that everything that you tell me just goes in one ear and out of the other. But look here, just to take your mind off of this, I wish you'd do me a little favor."

"'Deed I will," she fervently assured him. "What is it?"

"Why, Miss Pearl and I are going riding to-morrow morning, and I particularly want to talk business to her. You know how anxious I am to get her signed up. Well, I wish you'd manage to keep Hughie from butting in as usual?"

"Is that all?" she cried. "'Course I'll keep Hughie at home. I didn't realize how he was tagging round after you and Pearl. I want him to help me, anyway. We got to patch up my chicken house and yard so's to keep the coyotes out some way or other."

True to her word, she kept Hugh so busily employed the next morning that to Hanson's infinite relief he and Pearl were able to ride off alone.

"I'm going to take you to a palm grove to-day," said Pearl, as they started off.

She was in the gayest of humors, and for a time she bantered and coquetted with him with an unrestrained and childlike enjoyment in her mood, taking his ardent lovemaking as a matter of course; but, gradually, as they rode, she became more quiet and fell into silence, the Sphynx expression appearing on her face.

Suddenly she leaned forward in her saddle and looked at him. There was a hint of laughter in her glance, and yet behind it a certain serious scrutiny.

"I'm wondering a lot about you, do you know it?" she drawled softly.

"Turn about's fair play, then, honey," he answered. "You keep me guessing all the time. But what is it now?"

She did not answer him immediately, but rode on in silence as if cogitating whether or no she would reply to his question, and in some way he received the impression that it was not the first time she had mentally debated the matter. But finally she decided to speak, and again she turned in her saddle and regarded him with that piercing scrutiny which reminded him uncomfortably of her father.

"Say," she began, with apparent irrelevance, "what you been doing, anyway?"

"Me!" cried Hanson. "You know. Been falling in love with you as hard as I could, and"—his voice ringing with a passionate sincerity—"that's God's truth, Pearl."

She looked up at him, her wild eyes melting, her delicately cut lips upcurling in a smile; then her head drooped, her whole body expressed a soft yielding.

Hanson grew white, almost he stretched out his arms as if to clasp her, when she threw up her head with a low laugh, a tinkle of mockery through it, like the jangled strings of her guitar.

"But I mean it," she insisted, and now he saw that she had something really on her mind, something she had determined to say to him. "Listen to me," imperiously, "and stop looking at me as if you were looking through me and still didn't see me."

"I'm seeing your eyes, Pearl," he muttered, "and they drown me. And I'm seeing your lips and they draw me like a magnet does a needle; but if they drew me through hell, I'd go."

"Listen," she spoke more imperiously than before. "Have you noticed how Pop's been watching you—looking slantwise out of the corners of his eyes whenever you come around."

"I sure have," replied Hanson, "being as I'm not blind. But what of it? I supposed he treated every one that came around you like that."

"No," she shook her head thoughtfully. "I been studying over it, but I can't quite make it out. Pop don't pay much attention to men that ain't his kind, and you're not. And Bob Flick is always jealous, of course, but he doesn't usually take it out watching folks like a ferret does a rat hole. No, it isn't that."

"Well, what do you put it down to?" Rudolf tried to speak easily.

Pearl paid no particular heed to this question. "And it's not all Hughie," she mused. "Of course," and here he saw an expression of real regret, almost worry, on her face, "of course it's bad for all of us when Hughie takes a dislike to any one."

Hanson's sense of injury was inflamed. "But why the devil," he cried, "should Hughie's unreasoning cranks count with commonsense people? I can't understand," with wondering impatience, "why you all act like you do about that boy!"

"We've all learned that Hughie knows things that we don't know."

"Umph!" the exclamation was disgustedly incredulous. "And so, simply because Hughie chooses to take a dislike to me, I'm to be watched like a criminal and treated, even by you, with suspicion."

"No," she said, "I've been studying over it, but I can't quite make it out. Pop don't pay much attention, usually. But," she spoke slowly, "I thought maybe you'd tell me this morning."

"Well, there's nothing to tell," he affirmed obstinately.

She looked out over the desert for a moment. "Bob Flick hit the trail last night," she spoke casually.

"To go where?"

"I don't know. I wish I did. But I kind of feel, I can't help but feel, that it had something to do with you, and I wanted to tell you, to let you know, so that you can clear out if you've a mind to."

"I've no cause to clear out," said Hanson. "Gee!" his bold eyes looked gaily into hers, "you all seem determined to make me out bad, don't you? But if that's your way of trying to get rid of me, it don't go. When you tell me that you won't sign up with me, and are going back to Sweeney, for just half of what I offer you, then I'll know that you want to get rid of me, and I'll clear out."

"But I ain't told you that yet," the corners of Pearl's mouth were dimpling.

"No, and, by George, until you do I stay right here."

"Look!" she cried with a change in her voice. They had entered a cañon, where palms grew and involuntarily they drew up their horses to gaze at the sight before them. The stately, exotic palms lifted their shining green fronds to the blue, intense, illimitable sky, flooded with the gold of sunshine, and beyond them was the background of the mountains, their dark wooded slopes climbing upward until they reached the white, dazzling peaks of snow.

The sharp and apparently impossible contrasts, the magic illusions of color made it a land of remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative. And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him. Here was life and here was love. He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world's desire. Barriers there were none. A man and woman, both as vital as the morning, and love between them. The craving heart of the eternal man rose up in Hanson, imperatively urging him to claim his own.

He drew his hand across his brow almost dazedly. "Whew!" he muttered, "I kind of remember when I was a kid that my mother used to tell me about the Garden of Eden. I thought it was a pipe dream, but, George! it's true—it's true, and I can't quite believe it."

The Pearl stood leaning against a great palm tree. She seemed hardly to hear him. Her eyes were on the waving, shimmering horizon line of the desert. Her face held a sort of wistful dreaming.

"'The Garden of Eden!'" she repeated. "I've heard of it, too. It was a place where you were always happy, but"—still wistfully—"I haven't found that place yet." She turned her vaguely troubled eyes on him and then sighed and drooped against the tree.

"You can have things as you please, if you'll come to me." His speech was rapid, hard-breathing; it was as if he hardly knew what he was saying, but was talking merely to relieve the tension. "I'm boss and I can manage that you shall dance when you please, and come back here for a little breathing spell whenever you want. But," with an impatient gesture, "I ain't here to talk business. That's what I came to Paloma for—business. That's all I was before I met you, just a cold, hard business proposition. I guess I was pretty hard-headed. They seemed to think so in my line, anyway. I thought I knew it all." He gave a short laugh. "I'm not so young. I thought I knew life pretty well—had kind of wore it out, in fact. I thought I'd loved more than one woman; but I know now that I've never loved, never lived before, that I've just woke up, here in this Garden of Eden.

"Pearl," the beads of sweat stood out on his brow, "I ain't made you out. I know you're one thing one hour and another the next. I'm no vain boy. I can't tell whether you've been drawing me on one minute and holding me back the next just because you got to annex the scalp of every man your sweet eyes fall on. That's all right, honey, I ain't blaming you; but there's been moments lately, Pearl, when I've thought that maybe you might care, moments when I been plumb crazy with joy. You ain't let 'em last very long, honey," with a strained smile, "but they most made up for the black question mark that came after 'em." He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his wet brow with a trembling hand.

She threw back her head and smiled into his eyes through her narrowed lids. She held out her hands to him; and with one step Hanson lifted her clear off the ground, gathering her up in his arms, holding her against his heart and kissing her scarlet mouth.

And she wound her arms about his neck and returned those kisses.

"Put me down," she said at last, and Hanson did so, although he still held her close to his heart with one arm.

"Pearl!" he cried aloud, and it was like some strong affirmation of life. He lifted his eyes, bold and unafraid, as an eagle's, to the sun-flooded, brazen, blue heavens. Time stood still. He had drunk at a new fountain—love, and, although his thirst was still unquenched, he was eternal youth. The heart of life breathed through him. He looked upon the sky, a man unconquered, unbeaten, undaunted by life. He was its master. Did she ask the snow peaks yonder? He would gather them as footstools for her little feet. Was it gold she desired? It should be as dust for her hands to scatter to the winds. Was it name, place, state, she asked? They should be plucked forthwith from a supine world and offered her as a nosegay.

Again, confidently now, he stooped and kissed her lips. It seemed to him that roses and stars fell about them. "You love me, Pearl," he had cried, in incredulous joy, "you love me."

For answer she smiled sweetly, ardently into his eyes: "'Love me to-day,'" she sang, nestling close to his heart.

CHAPTER IV

It was almost a week before Bob Flick returned, and during that time Pearl saw Hanson almost constantly, although to do so she had continually to match her quickness and subtlety against that of her father and Hughie; but even while she and her father met each other with move and counter-move, check and checkmate, it was characteristic of both of them that Hanson's obvious infatuation and her equally obvious return of it were never mentioned between them.

With Hughie it was different, and Pearl met his petulant remonstrance, his boyish withdrawal of the usual confiding intimacy which existed between them, with laughter and caresses. As for Mrs. Gallito, she alone was unchanged, apparently quite oblivious to storm conditions in the mental atmosphere. But this was not unusual; when matters of importance were transacted in the Gallito household Mrs. Gallito did not count.

But these disturbing conditions could not daunt Pearl's high spirits; she was like flame, and the light of her eye, the glow on her cheek, the buoyancy of her step were not all due to the ardor of her loving and the joy of being ardently loved. There was also the zest of intrigue.

And, oh! what a mad and splendid game she and Hanson played together! He rose to her every soaring audacity; they took almost impossible chances as lightly as a hunter takes a hurdle. The lift of her eyelash, an imperceptibly significant gesture, a casual word spoken in conversation, these Hanson met with an incredible quickness of understanding. It was a game at which he was master, and which he had played many times before, but never had his intuitions been so keen, his always rapid comprehension been so stimulated.

Beneath the eye of another master of intrigue, Gallito, watchful as a spider, they met and loved until, it seemed to Hanson, that the whole, wide desert rang with their glorious laughter. And through it all Francisco Gallito sat and smoked and sipped his cognac imperturbably; apparently unruffled by defeat, a defeat—the Pearl with subtle femininity saw to that—which was not without its elements of ignominy.

But now Bob Flick had returned and had sat late with Gallito the night before, talking, although Mrs. Gallito, who tendered this information to her daughter, had not been able to overhear any part of their conversation, in spite of her truly persistent efforts to do so. These circumstances, and results which would probably ensue when a definite course of action had been decided upon, occupied the Pearl's thoughts as she stood at the gate gazing out on the gray wastes spread before her in the broad morning sunshine. Lolita was perched on the fence beside her, swaying back and forth, muttering to herself and occasionally dipping down perilously in a curious effort to see the garden upside down through the fence palings.

Pearl turned at last from her contemplation of the subject which absorbed her attention, and smiled as her glance fell upon the gaudy tail, the only part of Lolita now visible, although, even then, the horse-shoe frown, which showed faintly on her smooth forehead, a facsimile of the one graven deep on her father's wrinkled brow, did not disappear.

"They've got it in for us, Lolita—Rudolf and me." She laughed outright now. Pearl's laughter was ever a disagreeable surprise; low, harsh, unpleasantly vibrant, and in strange dissonance to her soft, contralto voice. "Lay you any odds you say, Lolita, that it's poor old Bob that's got to be the goat."

The parrot swung back to a normal position with surprising rapidity. "Bob, Bob," she croaked. "Mi jasmin, Pearl, mi corazon," and she gazed at her mistress with wrinkled, cynical eyes.

"Yes, Bob's got to do the telling." Pearl confided more to Lolita than she ever did in her fellow beings. "Oh, Rudolf, this is where you get knifed! They've been laying for you right from the first. When Bob's got to do a thing, he never wastes any time; he'll be along sure this morning. I guess we'll just wait right here and catch him."

Lolita hopped clumsily on to Pearl's shoulder and tweaked her ear. "Hell and damnation!" she muttered, and then sang:

"Love me to-day,
Love me an hour."

Pearl shrugged impatiently. "Shut up!" she cried, and resting her chin in her cupped hands gazed over the sparkling, shimmering plain, where all unshadowed day-beams seemed to gather as pure light and then, as if fused in some magic alembic, became color. There, the ineffable command: "Let there be light!" included all. It is only in the silence and light of the desert that men may fully realize that the universe is one, that light is music and music is color and color is fragrance, undifferentiated in the eternal harmony of beauty.

Pearl's eyes drank the desert, unconsciously seeking there in its haunting enigmas and unsolved mysteries an answer to the enigma of self. Like life, like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox. Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile for unmeasured fecundity.

For an hour thus she leaned and gazed, Lolita restlessly walking back and forth, singing and croaking, until, at last, as Pearl had predicted, Bob Flick appeared, a fact not unheralded by Lolita's cries; but Pearl did not alter her languid pose, nor even turn her head to greet him. She was watching a whirling column of sand, polished and white as a colossal marble pillar.

"It's kind of early for them to begin, ain't it, Bob?" she remarked casually.

"Yes." He paused by the gate, leaning one arm on it, and in the swift glance she cast at him from the corners of her eyes she could see that his expressionless face looked worn, the lines about the mouth seemed to have deepened and the eyes were heavy, as if he had not slept.

Lolita had, as usual, perched upon his shoulder, and was murmuring in his ear.

"Say, Pearl," Flick spoke again after an interval of silence, "I wish you'd take a walk with me. I—I got something on my mind that I want to talk about."

"All right," she acquiesced readily, the nicker of a smile about her lips quickly suppressed. "I'll be ready in a minute, as soon as I get my hat."

They walked through the village, the great broken wall of the mountains rising before them, deceptively near, and yet austerely remote, dazzling snow domes and spires crowning the rock-buttressed slopes and appearing sometimes to float, as unsubstantial clouds, in an atmosphere of all commingling and contrasting blues and purples. Presently they turned into a lane of mesquite trees. The growth of these trees was thick on either side and the branches arched above their heads. They had stepped in a footfall's space into a new world. It was one of those surprising, almost unbelievable contrasts in which the desert abounds.

A moment before they had gazed upon the mountains, spectacularly vivid in the clear atmosphere, white peaks and azure skies, green foothills, serrated with black shadows. Behind them the sun-flooded white glare of the great, waste place and behold! all these vanished as they set their feet in this garden inclosed, this bower as green and quiet as the lane of a distant and far softer and more fertile country.

Pearl never made any conventional attempts at conversation, and for a time they walked in silence through those fairy aisles where the light fell golden-green and the sun only filtered in tiny broken disks through the delicate lace of the mesquite leaves. Then Flick spoke:

"Pearl, I got something to say to you, and it's about the hardest thing I ever tried to do, because I know," his mouth twisted a little, "that you're not going to like me any better for it."

"What do you do it for then, Bob?" she asked, and there was more than a half impatient mockery in her tone, there was wonder.

"I got to," he said doggedly. "I guess there's no sense in it, but, whether you like it or not, I always got to do what seems the best thing for you."

It was an inflexible attitude, an ideal of conduct unfalteringly held, and uncompromisingly adhered to, and she knew it. Therefore, she shrugged her shoulders resignedly, the faint horse-shoe frown again appearing in her forehead. "Well—go on, then," her voice as resigned as her shoulders, "and get it over."

"It's this—" he hesitated and looked down at her a moment, and the tenderness his glance expressed she did not lift her eyes to see and would not have noticed if she had; "Pearl, Hanson ain't on the level."

She laughed that slightly grating, almost unpleasant, laugh of hers. "It's no secret to me, Bob, that several of you are thinking that."

"We got cause to," he answered moodily; and then, as if struck by something in her words, he looked at her quickly. "Has your Pop told you anything?" There was surprise in both glance and voice.

"Not a thing," she assured him, scornfully amused by the question, "but there are some things that don't have to be told. Do you suppose I haven't caught on to the way you've all been acting?"

Again he looked his surprise. "We all been acting?" he repeated.

"Yes. I've seen things and I've felt them. Oh, you might just as well out with it, Bob. What is it all about?"

He stared unseeing down the sun-sifted dusk of the green lane. Here the desert silence was like a benediction of peace, broken now and then by the faint, shrill note of an insect, or the occasional soft, mournful plaint of a dove.

"Pearl, you can laugh at me if you want to, and say I'm jealous. That's true, I am. I can't help it; but this time it wasn't all that. I got to size up men quick; that was my business for a good many years, and the first minute I set eyes on Hanson I knew he wasn't straight. And then, Hughie—"

"And so you stirred up Pop to watch him?" she broke in quick as a flash.

"No," he answered patiently, "no, but Hughie's feelings got so strong about him that your Pop kind of woke up and got to studying him, and then he saw what—what neither of you tried to hide," there was bitterness in his tone, "and then he kind of remembered something he'd heard up in Colina, and—"

"And so you've been up to Colina tracking round after a woman." Her verbal strokes were swift and hard as a flail. And again Flick started in surprise. His cheeks flushed faintly, his jaw set.

"What you mean, Pearl? Has he been having me trailed? I don't believe it."

"No," she drawled, taking a malicious amusement in this unwonted perturbation on his part, "he hasn't. You slipped away so quiet and easy that you didn't stop to say good-by, even to me. Were you afraid I'd put him on to it?"

She did not hesitate to plant her banderillos where they would sting most, and Flick winced at this imputation which struck so near home. "How did you know about the woman, then?" he asked quickly.

Pearl lifted her head and laughed aloud, and, at the unwonted sound breaking the desert silence, three pairs of brilliant eyes gazing through the screening mesquite branches vanished and the gray, shadowy figures of three coyotes disappeared as noiselessly as they had come.

"How did I know about the woman?" She repeated the question and considered it, still with amused scorn, as if debating whether she would enlighten him or not. "Well—" drawling aggravatingly, "I knew you and Pop had the knife ready for Ru—Mr. Hanson." Flick's mouth twisted again. "That wasn't very hard to see. So when you hit the trail, Bob, I gave him the chance to clear out. I did so, tipped him off, you know. Now I guess if he'd been wanted bad for anything that would—well, put him behind the bars, say, he'd have gotten out pretty quick. And, anyway, if he'd been wanted like that he wouldn't have stayed here so long, for they wouldn't have had any trouble in nailing a man as well known as him before, so, you see, I knew it wasn't any of the usual things. But," and here she stopped and, looking up into his face, spoke more emphatically, "I gave him the chance, too, to tell me all about himself and he didn't take it. Now, there isn't a man living that wouldn't have taken it—under the circumstances—" she spoke with a deliberately cruel emphasis, and Flick's shoulders contracted a little as the dart pricked him—"unless it was some mix-up about a woman."

"It's about a woman, all right," grimly.

"What about her?" Pearl's voice cut the air like the swift, downward stroke of a whip.

"She's his wife," returned Flick. "She's been living up near Colina. She owns a part of a mine there and has been managing it."

Pearl took this in silence; and they had walked a dozen yards or so before they spoke again.

"Well, what of it?" she said at last, carelessly, almost gaily. "Divorces are easy."

His expressionless face showed a cynical amusement, with just a hint of triumph in the lighting of his eye. He shook his head. "I talked to her," he said. "She's a good, decent woman, but she ain't quite straight in her head when it comes to Hanson. He lied to her right along about the others, even from the first; played fast and loose with her, and finally eloped with one of his burlesque head-liners. She took it. What else was there for her to do? But she spends about all of her time watching her fences to see that there's no divorce in question. He's done everything, tried to buy her off more than once, but it's no good. Every place he goes she follows him up sooner or later, and she writes him letters, too, every once in so often, offering to come back to him. And he can't get anything on her, for she lives as straight as a string. Oh, no, Pearl, Mr. Rudolf Hanson'll never marry again as long as that lady's living, or I miss my guess."

It was evidently with difficulty that Pearl had controlled herself, her brow had darkened and her upper lip had curled back from her white teeth in a particularly unpleasant and disfiguring fashion. Again they walked in one of those silences in which she was wont to entrench herself, and then she looked up at him with a faintly scornful smile. "Well, you've sure done your duty, Bob, and I guess you've got just about as much thanks as folks usually do for that."

He drew his hand across his brow and looked before him a little drearily. "I didn't expect anything else," he said simply. "I knew what I'd get. But whether you like it or not," and here he caught her shoulder, his eyes holding hers, "as I told you before, I always got to do what seems the best for you, no matter what's the cost."

Her face did not soften. She merely accepted this as she did all else that he had to give her, himself included.

They had reached the end of a long alley, and now they turned and retraced their steps, but they had traversed almost half of the distance they had come before Pearl spoke again. "Well, now you've told me, what else are you and Pop planning to do?"

He weighed his answer for a few moments. "I guess nothing," he said at last. "I guess we'll leave it to you to send him about his business."

She stopped in the path and looked at him; her blue cotton gown fell in long lines of grace about her slender figure. "If you and Pop want to know what I'm going to do," she said, "I'll tell you. I'm going to accept Rudolf's offer and go out on the road, that's what. You know by this time that I can take care of myself."

He pondered this seriously, but without a change in the expression of his face. "Would you go with him," he asked, "if Sweeney offers you as much or more money?"

"Sweeney won't offer me more money. I know Sweeney and his limits," significantly, "and you won't make up the balance of what Sweeney lacks, either, do you hear? Now you, and Pop, too, can just keep your hands off. I manage this affair myself."

Flick merely shrugged his shoulders, and they walked on without further speech on the matter. Presently Bob's keen eyes descried some one walking down the mesquite avenue toward them. "Why, it's Hughie!" he exclaimed.

Even as he spoke the boy stopped and listened intently. He stood motionless, waiting until they drew nearer, and then he lifted his head, which he had bent sidewise the better to hear their almost soundless footsteps.

Pearl, seeing that her interview with Flick was soon to be interrupted, stopped short in the path and laid one hand detainingly upon his arm. "Bob," she said, in her softest tone, "Bob, you and I have been pals for a good while; you aren't going against me now?"

He stopped, obedient to her touch, and looked at her unwillingly. He could always hold to his resolution in the face of her anger, but to withstand her when she chose to coax! That was another and more difficult matter. But if he met her gaze reluctantly there was no wavering in either his glance or his voice.

"I'm going to save you from Hanson, Pearl," he paused for the fraction of a second, "by any means I got to use."

She flashed one swift, violent glance of resentment, and then immediately controlled herself, as she could always do when she chose and when she was playing to win; so now she cast down her eyes and sighed.

The motes of the glancing sunbeams fell over her like a shower of gold, spangling the blue cotton frock until it appeared a more regal vesture than purple and ermine; her head was bent, her body drooped like a lily in the noonday heat, her whole attitude was soft, and forlorn and appealing, as if she, this wilful, untamed creature, subdued herself to accept a wounding decree, and bore it with all the pathos of unmurmuring resignation.

Flick's heart smote him, he longed to clasp her to his breast and give her everything she impossibly craved. And now it was he who sighed, and then clinched his hands as if to steel his resolution.

She heard the sigh: she saw from the quick movement of his hands, the sudden, involuntary straightening of the shoulders that the struggle was on, so she lifted her eyes half wistfully, half doubtingly to his and thus gazed a moment and then smiled her faintly crooked heart-shattering smile:

"You and I have been friends too long for us to begin to quarrel now, isn't that so, Bob?" Again she laid her hand on his arm.

He caught it in both of his and pressed it hard. "I guess you know we'll never quarrel, Pearl. I guess you know that, no matter what you say or do, it'll never make any difference to me."

"'Course I know it. And you're not going against me now, Bob, either, are you?" She lifted his hand, and with one of her rare, caressing gestures laid it against her cheek for a moment and, turning her face a little, lightly brushed his palm with her lips.

He shivered and quickly drew his hand away. There was silence between them for a few moments and then he sighed again and more heavily than ever. "Oh, Pearl," he cried, "what do you want to make things so hard for? Let that dog—" he checked himself hastily, seeing her expression. "I beg your pardon, you don't look at him that way. Let Hanson go. I know you about as well as anybody in the world, don't I?"

"Better," she nodded her head affirmatively, answering without hesitation.

"Well, won't you believe me when I tell you that you couldn't be happy with him. Won't you listen to me, Pearl?"

She looked at him a little slyly out of the corners of her eyes, a little one-sided, cynical smile on her lips. "We're always so dead sure what's going to make other people happy, ain't we, Bob? Always can see what's good for them so much better than they ever can see for themselves."

Flick looked away from her, down the long, shaded alley; once or twice he swallowed hard. "It ain't easy to say what I got to," a faint flush on his cheek, "'cause I hate to talk that-a-way to a lady, especially to you, Pearl; but I know you; and you can't be happy, you just naturally can't, with a man that's married for keeps to one woman, and that'll—God, Pearl! It hurts me to talk like this to you—that'll throw you over when he's tired of you just like he's thrown over several others."

She caught his arm and shook it violently, as if she scarcely knew what she did. "Throw me over! Me! the Black Pearl!" she cried hoarsely, and broke into a torrent of Spanish oaths. "Dios!" she paused at last, panting for breath, "you must be crazy to talk to me like that, Bob Flick."

"I told you how I hated it," he answered, with that sad, unaltered patience with which he always took her unspared blame, "but I had to do it. You got to know these things, Pearl, and it's better for me to tell you than for your Pop to try."

"He wouldn't have gotten very far," she muttered.

"That's just it. You'd both have got to scrapping and screaming at each other and nothing told."

"Better nothing told, as far as you are concerned," she flashed at him fiercely, and then lapsed into sullen silence.

"Hello! Hello!" Hughie's voice came to them from a side avenue or narrower path down which he had wandered.

"Hello, yourself," Flick answered. "We'll wait for you right here."

"Bob." Pearl's soft voice held no evidence of rancor. "Tell me something quick, before he reaches us. Tell me true, and I'll be good friends, honest, I will."

"You know I'll tell you anything I can."

"Then—then—is she—that woman in Colina—pretty? As pretty as I am?"

He smiled bitterly. "No one's as pretty as you, Pearl. No, she ain't pretty."

"Well, what does she look like?" impatiently.

"Nothing much. Why, I don't know, just looks like most every other woman you see."

"Oh, Bob, quick! Is she little or big? Is she kind of saucy and quick, or is she quiet and slow? Quick, now, Hughie's almost here."

"Why—why," he rubbed his hand across his brow, "she's kind of—kind of motherly."

Pearl threw back her head and laughed, then she took a few dancing steps up and down the road.

"It's Pearl and Bob," called Hughie. "I knew it a while back when I stopped to listen, and then I heard a bird note down yonder," with a wave of his hand toward the direction in which he had come, "and I wanted to hear it closer, so I didn't wait for you. I can always tell you two by the sound of your footsteps. Pearl walks in better rhythm than you do, Bob."

"Of course. What do you expect?" It was Flick who spoke. "What are you doing so far away from home, anyway, Hughie?"

The boy's wistful, delicate face clouded. "I had to go somewhere," he said. "That Hanson has been there all morning, and mother has been sitting with her head so close to his, talking, talking."

Pearl laughed a single note, like her father's. "Poor Rudolf!" she muttered, "the men are all jealous of him, even Hugh."

Fortunately, the boy did not hear her, although Bob Flick did, as she intended he should.

"I do love mother," Hugh added plaintively, "but I can't love the people she mostly likes, so I came as far away as I could, and here," his face was irradiated in one of its quick changes, "I've been walking up and down and hearing and seeing things; listening to the quail and the doves; and a while ago there was a humming-bird; and did you ever smell the desert as sweet as it is this morning?" He lifted his head and sniffed ecstatically. "I've been turning the whole morning into music. It's all gold and green and gay with little silver trumpets through it, and now and again the moan of the doves. I'm going to work it out as soon as we get home. That is," he shrugged his shoulders impatiently, "if that Hanson has gone. He stops all the music and the color." This was Hugh's invariable plaint when any one was about whom he disliked.

"Oh, forget him," cried Pearl. "Don't be a cross, Hughie." She spoke with a half impatient, half teasing tenderness. It was remarkable that she showed no resentment toward the boy for the difficulties in which she found herself entangled, although his intuitions and the almost superstitious respect which they were accorded in the Gallito household might be said to have caused the disturbing investigations into Hanson's past. That Pearl herself disregarded these intuitions in this case was to those about her the strongest proof of her infatuation; but she never dreamed of blaming the boy or harboring rancor against him for this mischief he had done. On the contrary, she accepted it fatalistically. He never could account himself for these instinctive likes and dislikes of his; therefore, they were to be accepted and borne with as something of him, and yet apart from him; and that was all there was to it.

"I'll tell you what to do, Hugh. You help me work out some new dances," she cried. "A lot has been coming to me. One shall be 'Night on the Desert.' We can get some great effects. Something really artistic for the big cities, not the old waltz things we have to do for the desert and mountain villages. We might try that 'Desert Morning' that you've just been planning to compose, and I've been thinking of another one—a Cactus Blossom Dance. Something like this." She began to dance.

"Tell me the steps, Pearl; tell me the steps," called the boy impatiently. "Oh, that's a great idea!" His face was flushed; and then suddenly it fell. "Oh!" he cried despairingly to Flick, "she always gets all sorts of ideas for new dances when she's in love—always. I never knew it fail."

He flung himself away pettishly, and started off alone. Hugh never had any difficulty about direction. In a locality with which he was familiar he would walk about with the utmost confidence. Occasionally he would stop, rap his leg sharply with one hand, listen a moment, and then, apparently satisfied, walk on. Those who pressed him for an explanation of this merely received the vague and unilluminating reply that he could feel the earth that way and tell from the sound of it, probably meaning the vibration, just where he was.

Pearl and Flick followed him in a more leisurely way, although no word was spoken between them until they reached home. Pearl's eyes scanned the house, but it was evident that Hanson had gone, for her mother sat in a rocking-chair before the window, her head tilted back, fast asleep.

"What do you suppose your Pop'll say to your signing up with Hanson?" asked Flick, as they passed through the gate.

"I suppose we'll have a row that'll make the house rock," she answered indifferently, dismissing him with a nod.

CHAPTER V

Hanson had learned of Flick's return to Paloma almost as soon as the Pearl, although from a different source; Jimmy, the bar-keeper, having informed him of the fact. He had sauntered into Chickasaw Pete's place as was his wont, soon after breakfast on the same morning that Pearl had walked in the mesquite alleys with Flick. This he selected as the most agreeable place in which he could while away the time until a suitable hour for either seeking Pearl, or else hastening to keep an appointment with her. And Jimmy, with the same instinct that a squirrel hides nuts, hoarded such chance bits of gossip as came his way and brought them out one by one for the delectation of those with whom he conversed.

"Hello, Paloma Morning Journal!" called Hanson as he entered the door, his large, genial presence radiating optimism and good cheer. "How many big black headlines this morning?"

Jimmy's smile made creases in his round, red cheeks above his white linen jacket. "Pretty shy of headlines," he chuckled. "Nothing but a few personals."

"No murders, no lynchings, nor merry cowboys on bucking broncos shooting up the town?" exclaimed Hanson, in affected dismay. "My! My! What is the West coming to? I'm afraid you ain't serving them the right kind of poison, Jimmy."

"It's so bad I won't touch it myself." Jimmy defended himself with professional pride. "Have some?"

"Not I. I got to be going, anyway."

Seeing that Hanson was about to follow this intention, Jimmy drew forth his first nut. "Bob Flick got back last night," he said, and then, abashed by the meagerness of this bit of information, attempted to enhance its value. "I'd like to know," leaning his elbow on the bar and his chin in his hand, "I'd like to know where he went and what he went for."

Hanson did not alter his lounging pose and yet, indefinably, his attitude became more tense, as if, in a quick riveting of attention, every sense had become alert. "He's doing a good mining business, ain't he?" he spoke carelessly. "I should think there would be a good many things that would take him out of Paloma."

"Oh, 'course," conceded Jimmy, "but don't you know how you kind of feel things sometimes. Well, you listen to me, there's something queer about this trip." He half closed his eyes and shook his head mysteriously.

"Come, now, Jimmy," Hanson's tone was bantering; he rapped on the bar in playful emphasis, but there was anxiety in his glance. "You're just trying to work up a little excitement. A show down now, a show down."

"Kid me all you please," chuckled Jimmy, with imperturbable good humor, "but, take it from me, something special's been doing. Bob's not one to talk about his or any one's else business, but if he's going off on any little trip he's likely to mention it. And, when he comes back, he'll tell you this or that he's seen or heard, just like other folks. But this time, not a word. Glum as an oyster. You just bet," Jimmy emphasized the statement with a series of nods, "that somethin's going on. Him and Gallito have had their heads too close. And that old fox is usually up to some mischief."

"What kind?" asked Hanson quickly.

"I don't know," answered Jimmy, and Hanson saw to his relief that the bar-keeper was sincere, and that he was to his own manifest regret as ignorant as he appeared. "But," he added shrewdly, "you been taking up a good deal of the Pearl's time and attention, and Bob ain't going to stand that from anybody very long."

"He ain't, ain't he?" the insolence of Hanson's tone was touched with triumph.

"No," said Jimmy simply, "he ain't; and so I kind of feel that this trip of his had something to do with you. And, say, Mr. Hanson," there was a touch of embarrassment in his voice, "you and me's been pretty good friends since you been here, and I thought I'd just give you the tip."

Hanson did not answer for a second, and then he looked up with one of his most open and genial smiles. "Thanks, Jimmy," he said heartily. "Always glad to get the straight tip. I've been so anxious since I've been here to sign up with the Black Pearl that maybe, considering Mr. Bob Flick, I haven't been very discreet in the way I've been chasing there." He leaned his elbow on the bar and assumed a more confidential manner. "But, say, it's funny the way every one speaks the same about Gallito. Hints everywhere, but no facts. What is it about him, anyway?" He either could not or did not conceal that he awaited a reply with eagerness.

"I wish I knew." Jimmy spoke with the utmost sincerity. "Folks whisper and shake their heads, but there's nothing to lay a finger on. I've tried to pump Mrs. Gallito more than once, but if she knows anything she keeps it dark. She's afraid of me, anyway. She always says: 'Oh, Jimmy, you're such a gossip!' Me!" He was really injured. "I guess if everybody did as little gossiping as I do this world would be a heap sight better place."

"Sure," agreed Hanson cordially; and this time his smile was genuinely expressive of his thankful and undisguised relief. By what seemed to him an almost incredible piece of good luck, considering the mutual predilection of Mrs. Gallito and Jimmy for gossip, his secret was still intact.

He straightened up involuntarily, and stood a moment deep in thought, his unseeing gaze fixed on a row of bottles on a shelf behind Jimmy. He picked up an apple which Jimmy had left on the bar and turned it around in his hands, apparently considering the effect of its scarlet stripes on a green surface. Then he threw back his shoulders and laughed aloud. "Bill Jones left a peckful of luscious apples in ye editorial sanctum to-day," he said gaily. "Come again, Bill," and laying the fruit down, turned away, Jimmy's delighted chuckles following him to the door and beyond.

Outside, he hesitated a moment, and then turned in the direction of the little railroad station. Seeing him, the weedy youth who acted as agent brought his chair, tilted back at an almost impossible angle, to the earth, took his feet down from a table, laid aside an old and battered magazine and expressed devout gratitude to heaven that any one should relieve what he was pleased to term his solitary confinement.

Hanson took the chair pushed toward him and for nearly an hour discussed events in the outside world, and the various phases of his profession in what the agent found a most entertaining manner. Finally he looked at his watch, murmured something about an engagement and rose to go. "Well," he said at parting, "I expect the next time I see you I'll be buying a ticket."

"Going to leave us soon?" asked the youth regretfully.

"Not to-day," smiled the manager, "but soon. Oh, by the way, now I think of it—is there a train goes straight from here to Colina?"

"Not straight. You got to change twice; once at the junction and once at the branch."

"And what kind of a place is there to stay at? Any hotel?"

"I don't know. Not much of one, I guess. Gallito would know. But he's got his own cabin, ain't he? That's so. Why don't you ask Bob Flick? He's just been up there. I sold him a ticket the other day, and he got back on the train yesterday evening. Thanks," taking the cigar Hanson offered. "So long."

With his suspicions thus definitely confirmed, Hanson wasted no time in following his inclinations and seeking the Pearl in her own home, but his delay had cost him a word with her, and he did not arrive at the Gallito house until after she and Bob Flick had left. This was the first untoward event in a successful morning, but he concealed his chagrin and, with his usual adaptability to circumstances, exerted himself to be agreeable to Mrs. Gallito, not without hope of gaining more or less valuable information.

Mrs. Gallito was in one of her sighing moods. In spite of all the methods of protection which she and Hughie had utilized the coyotes still continued to commit their depredations upon her chicken yard and daily to make way with her choicest "broilers" and "fryers." Also she had shipped several large consignments of sweet potatoes to the eastern markets and, instead of their being, as usual, snapped up by epicures at enormous prices, they had fallen, through competition with other shippers, almost to the price of the ordinary variety—desert sweet potatoes, too.

Life, she averred, was hard, almost a failure. Sometimes things went sort of smooth and you thought it wasn't so bad, and then everything went wrong.

"Oh, not everything," said Hanson, with a rather perfunctory attempt at consolation.

"Yes, sir, everything"—dolefully she creaked back and forth in her rocking-chair—"everything. Here's Gallito, the luckiest man at cards ever was, and he's been losing steady for three nights, and he's getting blacker and sourer and stiller every minute. Oh, if him and Pearl would only talk when things go wrong with 'em. It would seem so natural and—and—humanlike."

"Back in the old sawdust days," she continued reminiscently, "when things went wrong in the circus, everybody'd be screaming at each other, calling names and threatening, and often as not throwing anything that came handy. They'd get it all out of their systems that way, and there was nothing left to curdle. But to sit and glower and think and think! Oh, it's awful! Why, even Hughie, he'll talk and pound the piano like he was going to break the poor thing to pieces; but this Spanish way of Pearl and her father! Oh, my!" Mrs. Gallito shook her head and carefully wiped a tear from her eye, before it could make a disfiguring rivulet down the paint and powder on her cheek.

"It can't be so much fun, all things considered," conceded Hanson.

"Fun!" Mrs. Gallito merely looked at him. "When I think of what life used to be! Lots of work, but just as much excitement. Why, I was awful pretty, Mr. Hanson," a real flush rose on her faded cheek, "and I had lots of admiration, 'deed I did."

"You don't need to tell me that," said Hanson. "I guess I got eyes."

"And when I married Gallito," she went on, "I was awful happy. I guess I was soft, but I always wanted to love some one and be loved a whole lot, and I thought that was what was going to happen, but it didn't. I often wonder what he married me for. But," her voice was poignant with wistfulness, "I would have liked to have been loved, I would."

Hanson nodded understandingly and without speaking, this time, an expression of real sympathy in his eyes. She was weak and silly. She was dyed and painted and powdered almost to the point of being grotesque, and yet, in voicing the universal longing, she became real, and human, and touching.

They sat in silence for a few moments, Hanson giving Mrs. Gallito an opportunity to recover her self-control, while he devoted his attention to Lolita, who had sidled up to him and was gazing at him evilly, ready to nip him malevolently should he attempt the familiarity of scratching her head.

Mrs. Gallito, alive to the courtesies of the occasion, had succeeded in choking back her sobs, and now she endeavored to turn the conversation into less personal channels. "Bob Flick got back yesterday."

"Where's he been traveling?" asked the manager easily. "He can't have gone so very far, hasn't been gone long enough."

Mrs. Gallito leaned forward carefully. "He's been to Colina and, Mr. Hanson, I think his trip had something to do with you. Him and Gallito talked late last night. I tried my best to hear what they were saying," naïvely, "but I couldn't for a long while, and then Gallito said out loud: 'Who's going to tell her, you or me?'

"And Bob kind of waited a minute and then he said: 'Me. You'd only stir her up and make her obstinate. But, God!' he said, sighing awful heavy, 'I wish I didn't have to.'"

"I'll bet he does," muttered Hanson, and throwing back his head laughed aloud.

She looked at him doubtfully, as if surprised at his manner of receiving her information. "Is it funny?" she asked.

"Not for Bob," still vindictively amused.

"I suppose something's gone wrong with her contract with Sweeney, and he can hold her to it, or else have the law on her," ventured Mrs. Gallito. "That's all I can think of to stir them up so."

"I guess that must be it," agreed Hanson. "Eh, Lolita?"

"Here comes Gallito now." She leaned forward suddenly, shielding her eyes with her hand. "Yes, it's him, sure. Why, I thought he'd gone to the mines and wouldn't be back to-day."

Gallito was riding slowly toward the house, his head bent, his frowning gaze fixed before him. Nevertheless, he had seen his wife's guest, and, after taking his horse back to the stable, he made his appearance on the porch. He shook hands with Hanson with his usual punctilious courtesy, and then, turning to Mrs. Gallito, remarked without ceremony:

"Mr. Hanson and I have business matters to discuss and you have duties within; but first bring the small table, the cognac and some glasses."

His wife wasted no time in doing his bidding, setting forth the articles required with a timid and practiced celerity. But even after the brandy had been tasted and praised by Hanson, and his appreciation of it accepted with a grave Spanish bow by Gallito, the latter had made no move to open the conversation, but had insisted upon his guest trying his cigarettes and giving an opinion upon their merits.

Again Hanson was complaisant, extolling them as worthy to accompany the cognac, and after that a silence fell between them. Gallito sat puffing his cigarette, watching with half closed eyes the smoke wreaths curl upward, while Hanson waited patiently, smoking his cigarette in turn with an admirable show of indifference.

"The old fox!" thought he scornfully. "Does he hope to bluff me into giving myself away?"

Finally Gallito spoke, directly and to the point, surprising the other man, in spite of himself, by a most unexpected lack of diplomatic subterfuge and subtlety.

"I received a letter from Sweeney yesterday," he drew it slowly from his pocket, "and he doubles his offer to my daughter, making her salary, practically, what you are willing to pay her. Now, Mr. Hanson, your offer is very fine. I appreciate it; my daughter appreciates it; but she cannot accept it. She treated Sweeney badly, very badly. She is an untaught child, headstrong, wilful," his brow darkened, "but she must learn that a contract is a contract." He took another sip of cognac. "She will go back to Sweeney."

He slightly shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands as if to say: "I deprecate this for your sake, but the question is definitely settled; I beg you, therefore, to advance no useless counter-arguments."

But Hanson ignored this unspoken request. "I'm sorry you feel that way about it," he said, "but your daughter is of age. I guess I'll wait and see what she has to say about this." He spoke pleasantly, almost carelessly, no hint of a threat in his tone, at least.

Gallito looked at him from under his brows in surprise, then he laughed, one single, menacing note. "My daughter will say what I have said."

"I'm not so sure," returned Hanson, and had some difficulty in restraining himself from speaking violently. Then he forced the issue.

"Look here, Gallito," he cried, "what's all this about, anyway? I came down here to the desert anxious to secure the Black Pearl as a new attraction for my vaudeville houses. I see her and I know that she's all to the good. So, banking on my own judgment, I make her an offer that's more than generous, just because I've the courage of my convictions and am willing to back my enthusiasms. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose," he snapped his fingers lightly, "but I'm always ready to take the chances.

"Well—what happens? In the first place, instead of jumping at my offer, like any sensible man would—I'm talking plain now, Gallito—you got to drag Sweeney into the game, which, look at it any way you please, wasn't particularly square. Pah!" scornfully, pitching his cigarette with a single muscular sweep of the arm into the heart of the garden, "you don't know it or you wouldn't have been talking to me like you have, but I've got Sweeney pigeon-holed, know all his resources, and know positively that he can't come up to my offer. I tell you what, Gallito, it's cards on the table now, and," he tapped the table between them with his knuckles, "I'm politely requesting you to draw your nigger from the woodpile."

Gallito's glance was like the stab of a poignard. "But this is strange talk." He drew back haughtily. "I do not have to make explanations. I have my daughter's interests at heart."

"Yes, I know," interrupted Hanson, "but the black man, the black man. Out with him."

Gallito's face had grown livid, his mouth had tightened until it was drawn and pinched. "Have it, then," he growled. "Sweeney's straight. Sweeney hasn't left one wife in Colina while he eloped with one of his head-liners. He's not in one scrape after another with a woman, until he's a joke in the coast newspapers, and every woman he features in his shows has got a black smirch on her—"

"By God, you've got your nerve," cried Hanson violently, interrupting him.

Gallito made a deprecating motion with his hands, as if to say: "Don't mention it, I beg of you," and then carefully selected another cigarette from the box between them. "My nerve is something that rarely deserts me, Mr. Hanson," he replied, "but I wish to finish what I was saying. My daughter has a future. She will not only be a great dancer, but she has the making of a great actress in her, too. And Dios!" he still maintained his cold restraint, but now, in spite of himself, his tones vibrated with passion, "just at the beginning of her career, to be made cheap by you, or any like you—"

He lifted his hooded hawk's eyes and looked at Hanson, who in turn looked boldly back at him with something indefinable yet unmistakable, something that was not only defiance, but also a threat in the blaze of his angry eyes.

And Gallito caught it and raised his brows ever so slightly, pondering surprisedly for a moment, and then resolutely putting the matter aside for the present. But Hanson continued to gaze across the table at him.

"Read me my pedigree, ain't you?" he snarled. "All right. Now just let me tell you something, Gallito. I take my answer from your daughter, and from no one else. Understand?"

"No," returned Gallito, "I do not understand."

Hanson controlled himself with difficulty. For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to tell Gallito that the latter's connivance in the escape of the notorious Crop-eared José was known to him; also, he was perfectly cognizant of the present whereabouts of that much-desired person, and that he, Hanson, had but to step to the telegraph office and send a wire to Los Angeles, and not only José, but Gallito would be in custody before night. An admirable method for securing Gallito's consent to his daughter's acceptance of this professional engagement which Hanson offered. But, carefully considered, it had its flaws, and Hanson was not the man to overlook them. Indeed, he sat there in a baffled and furious silence, going over them mentally and viewing them from every possible angle.

In the first place, it was extremely doubtful if, after communicating his knowledge to Gallito, he would ever be permitted to reach the telegraph station, and, in the second place, he would, he was convinced, have not only Gallito, but the, to him, more formidable Bob Flick to deal with. Therefore, and most reluctantly, he decided to keep his information and his threats to himself for the present and, certainly, until he was better able to enforce the latter.

But, as he told himself, twisting his shoulders irritably, there was something about this old Spaniard which got on his nerves. A quality of composed patience, as if he, at least, never doubted the successful outcome of his plans; a rock-like imperturbability against which violence or vituperation shattered itself and fell harmless.

"Look here, Gallito," again he adopted a conciliatory manner, leaning his elbows on the table, as if prepared for a long discussion, after first helping himself to another glass of cognac and a fresh cigarette, "what's the use of a row, anyway? Now, why can't we come to some agreement. What you say about your daughter's abilities is all true, every word of it. That's the reason I'm so keen to get her. I know, and I'm frank enough to confess it, that out here in the desert, with not much to think about, on a vacation, and all, why—I kind of lost my head about her. She's a beautiful woman, Gallito, no need to tell you that. But you know, and I know, that a man can always shut down on that sort of thing if he's got to. My reputation ain't what it ought to be, no one knows that better than I, or feels it more; but, honest to God, Gallito, I ain't as black as I've been painted. No man is, probably. Now, what I got to say is this—"

"No need to say it, Mr. Hanson," interrupted Gallito, who had been twisting his mouth wryly during these remarks.

Again Hanson concealed his rising anger, although the color rose in his cheeks. "Now just let me talk a minute, Gallito." He spread out his hands placatingly. "The proposition I'm going to make you is this: Miss Gallito tells me that her mother traveled with her when she was younger, and even now, when she can spare the time from her farming, she goes out on the road with the young lady. Now, why not have a purely business arrangement. Let Miss Pearl sign up with me, and then we'll coax her mother to go with her. I should think that would satisfy you. It ought to satisfy any one, for a girl's mother to go with her."

"Of course," the Spaniard bowed with stately courtesy, but not before had his smile been so sardonic. "As you say, every one should be satisfied with such an arrangement and, let me say, it is one that would greatly please me, but as I told you before, Mr. Hanson, it cannot be. My daughter must keep her contract with Sweeney."

At white heat, Hanson rose and pushed back his chair. "Hell!" he cried. "What am I up against, anyway! Give some people the earth and it wouldn't suit 'em. But you can take this from me, Gallito," he leaned forward and pounded his fist on the table, "I don't take my answer from you. We'll see what the Black Pearl has got to say. The Black Pearl smirched by going out with me!" He laughed aloud.

He fell back frightened as Gallito half rose from his chair, and then, to his unbounded surprise, the Spaniard sat down again and softly rubbed his hands together. Hanson had a fleeting and most disturbing impression of the old man gloating over some secret and pleasant prospect.

Lolita had balanced herself on the edge of the table and Gallito bent forward and scratched her head, making little clucking noises in his throat the while: "Our guest is a great poker player, Lolita, he understands how to make a bluff, but," again that single grating note of a laugh, "assure him, my Lolita, that he will be cold-decked."

Again Hanson was almost betrayed into making his threat then and there. He leaned forward and shook his forefinger under the Spaniard's eyes, his face was purple, but just in time he remembered himself, closed his mouth and drew back.

"Bob, Bob," croaked Lolita, "mi jasmin Pearl, mi corazon."

"A most intelligent bird, you see, Mr. Hanson," observed Gallito, with saturnine politeness.

Hanson turned away impatiently. "I will see your daughter this afternoon," he said.

Gallito had begun to roll a fresh cigarette, but now, checking himself abruptly, he threw a long comprehensive glance at the cloudless brazen sky, and then, squinting his eyes, studied for a second or two the equally brazen desert.

"I think not, Mr. Hanson," he said, with assured finality in his voice. "I do not think you will see my daughter to-day. What? Going so soon? Another glass of cognac? No. Adios, then. Adios."

CHAPTER VI

Hanson walked away, more disturbed in mind by his interview with Gallito than he would have thought possible an hour or two earlier. Something in the finality of the Spaniard's voice when making those last predictions, his evidently sincere belief that his daughter would not appear under Hanson's management, had impressed the latter in spite of himself, causing him seriously to question the extent of his influence over Pearl, a weakness which he had not previously permitted himself.

He strove with all the force of his optimistic will to throw off the depression which deepened with each moment, assuring himself that he was tired, that all morning he had played a part, every faculty on the alert; and that this growing dissatisfaction and unrest were only the evidence of a natural reaction.

He attempted to buttress his hope with mental argument, logical, even final, but singularly unconvincing where Pearl was concerned, as anything logical and final must ever be. He tried to recall in detail stories he had heard of her avarice and her coquetries; he thought of her jewels, her name, her wiles. Who was she to object to past peccadillos on his part? Then, uncomforted, he sought to reassure himself with the remembrance of her love for him, ardent and beautiful as the sun on the desert, but her image rose on the dark of his mind like a flame, veering and capricious, or as the wind, lingering, caressing, yet ever fleeing.

He was tormented by the remembrance also of strange phases of her which he divined but could not analyze. Again, he would in fancy look deep into her dark eyes, demanding that his imagination revive for him those moments when his heart had thrilled to the liquid languor of her gaze, and instead he saw only the world-weariness of that sphynx glance which seemed to brood on uncounted centuries, and far back in her eyes, illusive and brief as the faint, half seen shadow on a mirror, he discerned mockery and disdain.

He took off his hat, baring his brow to the air, and drew long breaths, unpleasantly conscious of an increasing heaviness and sultriness in the air, according well with the oppression of his thoughts. When he arrived at the San Gorgonio, he was glad to take refuge in his room and there, to relieve the tension of nerves strung almost unbearably high, he walked back and forth and, after his fashion, swore volubly and unintermittently.

At last, having exhausted his vocabulary as well as his breath, he turned to the window, struck by some impending change in the atmosphere which had now revealed itself by a slight obscuring of the light in the room. He looked out curiously, half fearfully, dimly but rebelliously aware that the world, his human world of personal desires and activities, as well as all external nature was threatened by vast, unseen, menacing forces. The great, gray desert lay in crouching stillness, a silence which filled the soul of man with horror. The sun, crimson as blood, hung in a sky over which seemed to have been drawn a veil of golden mist.

"Must be something doing," muttered Hanson, and even as he spoke his eye was taken by a movement on the horizon line, a billowing as if the desert were rising like the sea. And truly it did. It lifted in waves that mounted almost to the sky and swept forward with a savage eagerness as if to bear down upon and engulf and obliterate the little oasis of a village with its green productive fields, and reduce it again to the wastes of desolation from which it had been so painfully redeemed by man.

For nearly three days the storm lasted, raging by day and by night. The trees bowed to earth and lifted themselves to bow again with the sound of many waters in their leaves; and in the voice of the wind every savage, primeval menace alternated with every wail of human grief and anguish which has echoed through the ages. All desolation in the heart of man, "I am without refuge!" shrieked in its high cries, and, as if failing to find adequate expression in these, it summoned its chorus of demons and rang with the despairing fury of all damned and discordant things, until one bowed and covered the ears and muttered a prayer.

And the sand! It sifted constantly through doors and windows, and seemed to fall in a fine continuous shower from the very roof. It covered everything with a white rime; it sifted into the hair, the eyes; breathing was difficult, the air was so chokingly full of it.

The rooms, too, were ever paced by the restless feet of the wind, curtains swayed as if shaken by ghostly fingers; rugs and carpets rose and fell upon the floor, and, whether one sat alone or with others, the air seemed full of stealing presences, sad, and sometimes terrible; and of immemorial whispers that would not be stilled.

The desert knows no time, its past and present are one, a thousand years is as a single day, and when it chooses to find its voice all yesterdays and all to-morrows blend.

Some day, when grief and horror shall be abandoned by man as utterly as his dreams of cave-life; when his remembrances of wrestling with the forces of nature or commerce shall seem as remote as his warfare with beasts, and tribes as savage as beasts; when he lifts his dull eyes and dares to dream only joy and beauty, then he will know that the gray cries of the wind are but the emphasis to the singing of the sunlight, that the black storm-clouds are but the contrast Beauty offers to deepen and heighten the effect of her more ethereal hues, blue and rose and pearl.

Hanson had stood the storm badly; inactivity was always a hardship to him, also he was unused to such discomfort as he had to endure; and his depression and unrest induced by the suspense he suffered in continually wondering how Pearl would take Bob Flick's news were greatly increased by the fact that he could get no word to her, nor receive any from her.

But on the third night the storm stilled and in the morning the desert showed herself sparkling like an enchantress, exhibiting all of her marvelous illusions of color and wrapped in a golden garment of sunshine. She smiled with all the allurement of a radiant and beautiful woman.

Early in the morning, just as Hanson was preparing to send a note to Pearl, he received one from her, asking him to meet her again within an hour or two, amid the palms. She did not suggest his riding thither with her. The note was brief, a mere line, and, study it as he would, he found nothing in it to indicate what her attitude was toward him, therefore it did not allay his nervousness in the least as to how she would meet him. But with the passage of the storm his nerves had recovered their normal tone, and with the brilliance and freshness of the morning much of his optimism had returned.

He reached the approach to the foothills where the palms lifted their stately and magnificent height, long before Pearl, and there, walking restlessly back and forth, he watched the road with straining eyes. And then he saw her, at first a mere speck in the distance; then she became more and more distinct, for she rode fast. She waved her hand to him as she came nearer and his heart rose in a great bound. Slackening the speed of her horse, she leaped from the saddle while it was still going, ran by its side, throwing the bridle over her arm, stopped, laughing and breathless, and cast herself into Hanson's waiting arms.

"Pearl, Pearl," he cried, in a low voice, holding her close against him and kissing her upturned face again and again. "Oh, Pearl, it's been a thousand years in hell since I saw you last."

She laughed and, gazing eagerly into her care-free eyes and unreproachful face, his heart rose again in a great sigh of relief. "That's the way a tenderfoot always feels about a sand-storm," she said. "Well, we sure gave you some nice theatrical effects, didn't we? It's the biggest I've seen for many a long day. But you were bound to see something like that before you went away." She spoke with a fatalism approaching Bob Flick's. "The desert never lets you go and forget her." Her eyes dreamed a moment.

"She's like you in that, Pearl. My heavens! I wish you could see yourself this morning. Beautiful ain't the word."

"Am I beautiful, Rudolf?" She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him with a soft, childlike expression, as if longing for his praise.

"I guess you know it," he said adoringly, stroking her shining black hair, "but if you weren't, if you were as ugly as sin, it wouldn't make any difference, you'd get us all just the same. All women like you got to do is to look at a man and he'll follow you like a sheep. I don't know what it is, magnetism or something."

"But I'm glad I'm not as ugly as sin," she murmured, in smiling content. "And I'm glad you're not, too." She reached up her arm and touched his hair caressingly. "I love that little touch of reddish gold in your hair, and, yes, just that sprinkling of gray, and I love your blue eyes. I can't bear dark men. I am so dark myself."

"You sure are, Pearl, thank the Lord! I never was very poetic, but I never see one of these desert nights sparkling with their big stars, twice as big as natural, that I don't think of you."

She smiled, delighted at his praise.

"But, goodness!" he went on, "when ain't I thinking of you? I tell you, you been on my mind steady these last few days. Your Pop was so dead sure when I talked to him that you'd have nothing more to do with me that it got to worrying me, and I thought maybe you'd hold it against me that I hadn't told you about—about my being already tied up." He scanned her face as if fearful of seeing it cloud and change.

It did. The laughter faded from her eyes, her brow darkened. "I wish you had told me," she said, "then I'd been a little better prepared for Pop and Bob; but I guess they got as good as they gave."

"I know I ought to have told you, Pearl," he said miserably, "and I meant to, honey, but"—gathering her more closely in his arms—"I just couldn't spoil those first few days; and, anyway, you drove everything but you out of my head. I just determined every time it came into my mind to tell you, that I wasn't going to spoil Paradise with any recollections of hell. Maybe I was all wrong, but that was the way I felt."

"No, you were all right, Rudolf," she wound her arms about his neck. "When the storm came it broke swift and sudden like the sand storm, and we didn't live it all over beforehand, getting ready for it, and deciding how we'd meet it when it came, and all that. We just enjoyed ourselves. Lived and loved up to the moment when it broke, and that was the best way."

"Gee! was there ever a woman like you!" lifting his glad, gay gaze to the sky. "Why, Pearl, it most frightens me when I think how happy me and you are going to be together."

"Are we?" nestling closer to him. "How?"

"How?" he repeated. "Why, we're going to be together first and last; ain't that enough? It is for me. But"—with drooping head and affectedly humble and dejected mien—"it couldn't be expected to be enough for you, could it?"

"Hardly," she looked up at him through her long lashes.

"Well, since that ain't enough for you," still with affected resignation, "let me tell you this: You're going to dance to bigger crowds and higher class ones than you ever saw before, because you're going to be advertised proper, see?" And then, sketching out plans with his former bold, optimistic confidence, "We're going to travel on the other side and travel in style, too, a big touring automobile. I guess you can show those foreign managers something new in the dancing line. How would you like to see your name all over London and Paris? The Black Pearl! Eh?"

She slipped away from him and took a few buoyant dancing steps. "Fine!" she laughed. "It sure sounds good to me." Floating nearer to him, she pinched his arm. "Ain't you the spellbinder!"

He caught her with one arm. "Oh, Pearl," his voice falling to seriousness, "you don't know how happy you make me. Honest, I've been so plum scared these last few days, I been almost crazy. I didn't know, you see, just how much influence your Pop and Flick might have over you, and I got locoed for fear you wouldn't see me and give me a chance to explain."

"Pop and Bob Flick kindly took the bother of explaining things off your shoulders, didn't they?" with a short, vindictive laugh.

"Darn 'em," bitterly. "I don't want to say anything about your Pop, but Flick's a sneaking coyote, and sooner or later he'll pay for snooping into my business. Oh, I've cursed myself more than once for letting him tell you, but I never loved a woman before, Pearl, and I couldn't take the chances, honest I couldn't. I hadn't the nerve." There was a passionate sincerity in his voice.

"They've been telling me you've loved many a woman." Her eyes gloomed and she slashed her skirt savagely with the riding crop she held.

"You know," he whispered, "you know. I've been a fool. There have been many others, Pearl, I ain't going to deceive you, but—there's never been but one."

She softened and smiled at him, then her face darkened again. "But there's one that stands in the way—yet," she said gloomily.

"In the way? What do you mean?" uncomprehendingly.

"Why, that woman up in Colina? Don't she stand between you and me, now, for a while?"

"Not much, she don't," emphatically, "not her!"

A light flared in Pearl's eyes. "I knew Pop and Bob were up to some of their tricks! They been doing their best to ram it home that she'll die before she lets you get a divorce."

"You bet she will," muttered Hanson, with concentrated bitterness, and stifled some maledictions under his breath. "I've tried every way, turned every trick known to sharp lawyers for the last six years, trying to get free; but she's got money, you see, and she can keep her eye on me, so, in one way or another, she's balked me every time."

Pearl threw herself from him and looked at him with wild eyes. "Then how are you going to get free now?" she cried. "What are your plans? Why is she going to come around now, if she never has before?"

"She ain't, honey, the devil take her!" He caught her back in his arms and held her as if he would never release her. "But what difference does that make to us?" he pleaded ardently. "We're going to let the whole lot of them go hang and live our lives as we choose."

"Then Pop and Bob were right; and I never believed them, not for a moment. I thought you were too smart to stay caught in a trap like that. I thought you were so quick and keen to plan and were so full of ideas that you could get around any situation." Again she flung herself away from him and, with her face turned from him, stood looking out over the desert.

He bent toward her and, throwing his arms about her, again endeavored to draw her back into his embrace, but she resisted.

"Pearl," he cried roughly, "what do you mean? You don't mean to say that you got any foolish ideas about it making any difference whether a preacher says a few words over us or not? Why, you can't feel that way. You've seen too much of life, and your folks have always been show people. They didn't hold any such ideas. Anyway, you got brains to think for yourself. What joke you playing on me, honey? Oh, don't hold me off like that, lift your head and look at me. I know you're going to laugh in about a minute and then I'll know it's all a joke." Again he tried to put his arm about her and again she threw him off.

"Let me alone," she cried harshly. "I'm thinking. Let me alone."

"Pearl," he besought wildly; his face had suddenly grown flabby and white, his voice was broken with his desperate pleading. "Honey, you don't want time to think. Why, there's nothing to think about. We're going off on the train this afternoon to be happy together, and we don't give a cent for anything else. We'd be married if we could. My Lord! I should say so! But since we can't, we'll make the best of it."

He paused and looked at her, but there was something inflexible in her attitude, some almost threatening aloofness that made him hesitate to clasp her as he longed to do for fear he should meet another and final rebuff. He waited a moment or two, but, as she did not speak, he began again.

"I know you're joking, Pearl, but it's awful hard on me"—he wiped the sweat from his brow. "You haven't got any such fool ideas. Of course you haven't. They're for dead ones, old maid country school teachers, and preachers and things like that, hypocrites that have got to make their living by playing the respectable game. But we're not that kind, Pearl, we're alive, and we're not afraid. We're going to be happier than two people ever were in this world. Pearl, speak to me. I don't wonder that your mother complains about the way you shut yourself up and never say a word. Speak to me. Tell me what you're thinking."

"I'm thinking a lot of things," she answered, but without turning her head to look at him, "and I ain't through yet. Now I've got to studying on this matter, I'm a-going to think it out here and now."

"But what is there to think about?" in a sort of exasperated despair. "Oh, Pearl, how can you be so cruel! I know you ain't got any of the fool ideas of the dead ones I was talking about. You couldn't have; not with Isobel Montmorenci for a grandmother, and Queenie Madrew for a mother, and the same kind on your Pop's side of the house. You didn't have any Sunday-school bringing up and I know it. Then what you playing with me like a cat does with a mouse for? It ain't fair, Pearl, it ain't fair."

She turned and faced him now with an impatient gesture of the hands. Some expression on her face, the set of her mouth, the horse-shoe frown on her forehead gave her a fleeting resemblance to her father, a resemblance that momentarily chilled his blood.

"For goodness' sake keep quiet a minute," she cried irritably. "You gave me a jolt a while ago, telling me you couldn't get free, and I want a minute or two to take it in."

"But you don't think hard of me for that," he implored. "Oh, Pearl—" but she had again turned to her contemplation of the desert, and realizing that further speech might bring her swift anger upon him he walked hastily away.

Several yards from her he paused and again wiped his brow. "Oh, God!" he muttered, lifting his face to the sky, "what does a man know about women, anyway?"

As for Pearl, she scarcely knew that he had ceased to speak to her. She had been thinking, as she averred, thinking back over the years. She had been dancing professionally ever since she had been a child. As a slim, tall, young girl, still in skirts to her shoe tops, her mother had traveled with her, and, although this evidence of chaperonage irked her, she had with her quick intelligence early seen its value. All about her she saw the struggling flotsam of feminine youth, living easily, luxuriously to-day, careless of any less prosperous morrows, and, when those swift, inevitable morrows came, she had seen the girlish, exotic queens of an hour, haggard, stripped of their transient splendor, uncomprehending, almost helpless.

She saw readily enough that it was not only her superior talents and training, the hard work and hard study which she gave to her profession which set her above the butterflies and apart from them, but her mother's constant presence during those early years was of almost equal value.

All this she realized at an age when strong impressions are indelibly retained. Her value, the tremendous value of an unsmirched virtue, a woman's greatest asset in a world of desire and barter, became to her a possession she cherished above her jewels, above the money she could earn and save and the greater sums she dreamed of earning or winning by any means—all means but one.

Her observations of the women about her who gave all for so little, her meditations upon them, and the conclusions she drew from their maimed lives only emphasized the resisting force of her nature. She was not born to be a leaf in the current, whirled by the force of waters into a safe haven or an engulfing whirlpool as chance might decide; she must dominate the currents.

And with the temptations of her youth, and her ardent emotional temperament, would also come the remembrance of those haggard girls with their pinched blue lips, the suffering in their eyes, their delicate faces aged and yellowed and lined and spoiled, weeping with shaking sobs, telling her pitiful stories, and begging her for money, for a word with the management. And, when they had gone, she had turned to her looking-glass and gazed at herself with conscious pride and delight. Contempt, not pity, stirred her heart for the draggled butterflies whose gauzy irridescence was but for a moment; and before her mirror she constantly renewed her vows that never would she barter her bloom, her freshness, her exquisite grace for what those girls had to show.

She had seen a great French actress roll across the desert in her private car, to meet in every city the adulation of thousands and it had stimulated her ambition enormously. She was by nature as insatiable as the horse-leech's daughter; she would take all—love, money, jewels in return for her barren coquetries. The fact that she was "straight," as she phrased it, gave her sufficient excuse for her arrogant domination.

Unfortunately for Hanson, there was no particular temptation in what he could offer in the way of professional advancement. She was perfectly cognizant of her own ability, aware that its resources were scarcely developed. Already her field widened continually. She was in perpetual demand with her public, and therefore with her managers.

But she loved Hanson. In all of the love affairs in which she had been involved she had never really cared before, and now only her strong will kept this attraction from proving overmastering. And here came the struggle. The right or the wrong of the matter, the morals of it, did not touch her. It was the clash of differing desires, a clash between passion and this secret, long-cherished pride of virtue.

"Honey, honey," he was back at her side again; his voice was hoarse and ragged, but for that very reason it moved her. All at once the primitive woman, loving, yielding, glad and proud to yield, stirred in her, rose and dominated her hard ambition. She lifted her head a little and, still with it turned from him, looked at the pagan glory of the day. Her eyes closed with the delight of that moment. She felt her resistance breaking down, the weakening and softening of her resolutions. Was she at last to know the splendor of loving and giving?

"Ain't you played with me long enough, Pearl?" his voice was in her ear, a broken, husky whisper. "What's the use? Why, of course," grasping at his usual self-confidence, "I'm a fool to get scared this way. You've showed me that you care, you have, honey; and I guess," with a nervous laugh, "the Black Pearl hasn't got any damn fool scruples such as I've been frightening myself out of my skin by attributing to her."

Imperceptibly, almost, her whole body stiffened. Her soft, relaxed, yielding attitude was gone. But she remained silent, the same ominous, brooding silence that the desert had held before the storm, had Hanson but noticed. He did not. He was still pleading: "Why all the time you been keeping me on the anxious seat, I been telling myself that the Black Pearl—"

"Yes, the Black Pearl," she interrupted him with her low, unpleasant laugh. "Don't you care a little that I got that name, Rudolf?"

"Care!" He wound his arms about her now and buried his face in the great waves of her inky, shining hair, wildly kissing the nape of her neck; but with a deft twist of her lithe body she slipped almost away from him, although his arms still held her. "Care? Of course I care. But what's that got to do with it when I love you like I do? Pearl, if you were a good deal blacker than you're painted it wouldn't make any difference to me."

He strove to draw her nearer to him, but again she slipped away, this time escaping the circle of his eager arms. For the first time her face was turned toward him, but her eyes were cast down, her long lashes sweeping her cheeks. "But I must be pretty bad to get called the Black Pearl," she said in that same low voice; all of its sliding, drawling inflections were gone; it was strangely tense.

"I guess so, damn it!" he cried; "but I'm past caring, Pearl. I got a hunger and thirst for you, honey, such as men die of out there in the desert. Before God, I don't care anything about your past or your present, if you'll only love me for a while."

With that low, harsh laugh of hers that sounded in his ears afterward like the first muttering menace of the sand wind over the desert, the storm broke. Her eyes had an odd green glitter, her face was white, a dusky white, and her upper lip was drawn back from her teeth at each corner of the mouth.

"You fool!" Her voice was a muffled scream. "Oh, you fool! Sweeney could have told you better, any man on the desert could have told you better. The Black Pearl! Why, I've been called the Black Pearl since I was a baby, almost. It's my hair and my skin and my eyes."

"'I'll show you what I'll do.'"

He didn't believe her, but he saw his blunder at once; cursed himself for it, and, mad to retrieve himself, began incoherent explanations and excuses. "Of course," he stammered, "of course, I—I—was just fooling, you know. But, well, what does it matter, anyway? Oh, Pearl, girl! Don't look at me like that. Don't!"

"I'll do worse than look at you, if you come any nearer me," she threatened. "Do you think I ride all over the desert where I've a mind to without protection? I guess not." She lifted her skirt with a quick movement and drew a long knife, keen as a stiletto, from her boot.

Hanson went a little whiter, but he was no coward. "Come on then, finish it for me," he said. "Your eyes are doing it anyway. Oh, Pearl!" he fell again to desperate pleading, "you won't turn me down just for a mistake?"

"Me, the Black Pearl, held cheap!" she muttered and raised her stag-like head superbly, "and by you! You that pick up women and drop them when you're tired of them. Me, the Black Pearl." She turned quickly and ran to her waiting horse, loosening the tether with quick, nervous fingers. Hanson followed her.

"Pearl, you ain't going to leave me?"

But she was already in the saddle.

He caught at her bridle and held her so. "Pearl, I made a mistake"—he was talking wildly, rapidly—"but you ain't going to throw me down just for that—you can't. Think how happy we've been this last week—think how we've loved each other. Why, you can't turn me down, just for one break, you can't."

"Can't I?" she said, her teeth still showing in that unpleasant way. "Can't I? Well—if you don't get out of my way I'll show you what I'll do. Slash you across your lying face." Her arm was already uplifted, riding crop in hand. "Let me go!" Her voice was so low that he hardly heard it, but full of a thousand threats. Then, swerving her horse quickly to one side, she jerked the bridle from his slack fingers and was off across the desert.

CHAPTER VII

It was about an hour after Pearl had ridden away to meet Hanson among the palms that Bob Flick joined Mr. Gallito, who sat, as usual, upon the porch of his home, smoking innumerable cigarrettes. He was his composed and imperturbable self, exhibiting outwardly, at least, no trace of anxiety, but Flick looked worn, almost haggard.

Gallito had just told him of Pearl's early departure and also of the fact that she had left no word intimating when she might return or in what direction she was riding; but when Flick expressed regret that this had been permitted, he merely lifted his shaggy brows. "What is done is done," he said. "She slipped away before either Hugh or myself knew that she was gone, and what could we or you, for that matter, have done to prevent her?"

"I wish I'd been here," muttered Flick uneasily. "I'd have done something." But his tone did not bear out the confidence of his words.

"I am too old and, I hope, too wise," returned the Spaniard, "to attempt to tame the whirlwind. But cheer up, my friend. Although she rode off to meet this Hanson, without a doubt, still, the day is not over."

"You know what she is when her head is set," murmured Flick.

"I! Have I not cause?" exclaimed Gallito, a depth of meaning in his tone. "Who so much? But, nevertheless, she has not gone for good. She would not leave without some of her clothes, especially her dancing dresses and slippers, if she went with him. And her jewels, oh, certainly, not without her jewels!" he smiled wisely. "There are, as you know, certain ornaments about which she has her superstitions; she will not dance without her emeralds. Oh, no, console yourself, as I do. She has not gone for good."

But Flick was not so easily reassured. "I almost wish she had," he said gloomily. "If she don't go to-day, she will to-morrow or next day."

"In that case they will not go far," returned Gallito and rubbed his hands. His reply had been quick and sharp as the beat of a hammer on an anvil; but now he spoke more softly: "But will she go at all, my friend? You, like myself, have ever played for high stakes. Then you know and I know that this is a world where a man may never look ahead and calculate and say, 'because there is this combination of circumstances, these results will certainly follow,'" he emphasized his words by tapping on the table with his long, gnarled forefinger. "The wise man never predicts, because he is always aware of that interfering something which we call the unexpected." He blew great wreaths of smoke from his mouth and watched them float out on the sun-gilded air. "We know that my daughter is as obstinate as a pig and as wilful as a burro, therefore we conclude that she will follow her mad heart and go with this fellow. But there we take no account of the unexpected, eh, Lolita!" welcoming the parrot who waddled out of the open door and came clucking and muttering across the porch toward the two men.

Flick stirred uneasily. He was in no mood to stand Gallito's philosophizing, and the Spaniard, seeing it, smiled as he scratched Lolita's head. "Two people can not be thrown much together and not show to each other what is in them," he continued. "You know that my daughter is proud," he lifted his own head haughtily here, "and you know that above everything her pride lies in the fact that no man can scorn her. But this that Hanson does not believe."

This roused Flick to a sudden interest, some light came into his heavy eyes, a dull flush rose on his cheek. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"This: Yesterday morning when that hound sat there and talked to me there was something I said which made him forget himself in anger, and he said: 'Me! The Black Pearl smirched by me!'"

"He said that?" Flick's tones had never been more drawlingly soft, but there was a quality in them, an electric and ominous vibration, which boded ill for Hanson.

Gallito nodded. "It is in his mind. It is his thought about her. If he said it to me when he forgot himself he will surely say it to her."

"And you let him say it, Gallito? You let him go away safe after saying it?" Flick looked at him amazed.

"I think far ahead," replied the older man. "It is the custom of a lifetime. To act on the moment is to continually regret. Do you think I want my daughter's tears and reproaches for the rest of my life? No, I wish to spend my old age free of women and their mischief. This Hanson must talk, talk, talk. Therefore, if you give him rope enough he will hang himself before any woman's eyes."

"But when?" asked Flick, and that vibration still lingered in his voice. "I am not so patient as you, Gallito."

The Spaniard made no reply to this and silence fell between them for a few minutes.

"Oh!" said Flick, as if suddenly remembering something, something in which he was not particularly interested, but which would serve as a topic of conversation during these tense moments of waiting; "Nitschkan is up at Colina, and Mrs. Thomas."

"Nitschkan!" A faintly humorous smile crept from Gallito's mouth up to his eyes.

He was genuinely interested if Flick was not. "What is she doing there?"

"She came up to look after those prospects of hers, nurse them along a little, I guess, and to hunt and fish some, I guess, particularly hunt and fish. She says she's going to take a bear-skin or so back with her."

"She sure will, if she says so," returned Gallito confidently.

"Of course, she got wise to José right away." Flick spoke rather anxiously.

"Of course, being Nitschkan." Gallito's tone was quite composed and equable. "Well, she's safe, and she'll keep him in order if anybody can." Again that grimly humorous smile played about his mouth. "Why did she bring Mrs. Thomas?"

Flick laughed. "To keep her in order, too. Mrs. Thomas is big and pretty, with no mind of her own, and she got tangled up in some fool love affair that her friends didn't approve of, so when Nitschkan started off on this last gipsy expedition of hers they sent Mrs. Thomas with her."

Gallito was about to answer and then, suddenly, he seemed to stiffen, his hand, which was conveying a match to his cigarette, remained motionless, the flame of the match flared up and then went out in a gust of wind. "Look, Bob, look," he said, in a low voice. "What do you see out there?"

Flick's eyes, keener even than his, swept the desert. "By George!" he whispered huskily; "it's her, her alone, and coming like the wind."

"I hope," cried Gallito and gnawed his lip, "that she has done nothing that will get us into trouble."

"I hope to God she has," said Flick. "The desert'll take care that she gets into no trouble. It'll be as silent as the grave. Just another case of a reckless tenderfoot getting lost out there in the sand, that's all."

It was indeed Pearl, and, as Flick had said, coming like the wind. She pulled her horse up as she neared the gate and, when she reached it, stopped him abruptly, slipped down from the saddle, threw the bridle over the fence paling and ran toward the two men on the porch. Her face had changed but little since she had left Hanson among the palms. Even her wild ride had failed to bring back its color, and the curl of her upper lip still revealed her teeth.

She stood for a moment before them, slashing her skirt with her riding crop, then she cast it from her and sank down on the porch as if suddenly exhausted. Bob Flick quickly poured out a glass of her father's cognac and held it to her lips. She took a sip of it and it seemed to revive her.

"He thought that I," her voice was hoarse and labored, "he thought that I was like those other women that he has picked up and got tired of and left, Selma Le Grand, and Fanny Estrel, and others. I wonder where he thinks that I've been living that I wouldn't know about them. Fanny Estrel! I went to see her once in vaudeville, and, before I'd hardly got my seat, someone next me began to whisper that she used to be one of Hanson's head-liners and that he was crazy about her once. And there she was, old, and fat and tired, playing in an ingénue sketch in a cheap house!" She laughed harshly. "That's what he was offering me," with a flare of passion, "and I was too green to know it!"

"And he, where is he?" asked her father, speaking more quickly than was his wont and eyeing her closely.

"Out there, I suppose, I don't care. Oh, no," meeting his eye and catching his unspoken question. "He's safe enough; don't worry."

"Shall I make him shoot, Pearl?" asked Flick softly. "He won't have much chance with me, you know. I'll get him in Pete's place and pick a quarrel. He'll understand. You won't be in it."

"No, you won't, Bob, although I can see how you're wanting to," she said decisively. "The Black Pearl!" she broke out presently. "My name's an awful good advertisement. It gives me a reputation for being worse than I am." She laughed cynically. "But he believed it." Her whole face darkened again.

"He needn't go away believing it, Pearl." Once more Flick spoke softly, persuasively, and once more her father looked at her hopefully.

She looked quickly from one to the other as if about to accede, and then, dropping her head on her arms crossed on her knees, she fell into wild and tempestuous weeping. "No," she cried, "no, promise me you won't, Bob. Oh, Oh, Oh!" she wailed and rocked back and forth. "What shall I do? What shall I do?"

At last she lifted her heavy eyes and looked at the two men. "I want to go away from here, quick," she said, "quick."

"With Sweeney," said her father, well pleased.

"No." She threw out her hands as if putting the thought from her with abhorrence. "No, I can't dance and I won't. I never want to dance again. I never will dance again," passionately.

"But that is a feeling which will soon pass away, my daughter," urged her father.

"No, no," she wailed. "And anyway, I would never be safe from Ru—from him, that way. He would follow me about and try to meet me. He would. I know he would."

Gallito drew back and looked at her with uplifted head. "Afraid! You?" he asked in surprise.

"No," she flashed at him scornfully, lifting her head, but again she dropped it brokenly on her arms. "I'm afraid of myself," she cried, suffering causing her to break down those barriers of self-repression which she usually erected between herself and everyone about her. "I'm afraid of myself, because I love him. Yes, I do. I love him just as much as ever—and I hate him, hate him, hate him." She hissed the words. Once more she sobbed wildly and then she broke into speech again. "Oh, I want to go somewhere and hide; somewhere where he'll never find me, where I'll be safe from him."

"What's the matter with Colina?" said Bob Flick suddenly. "He'll never come there. A good reason why!"

Pearl became perfectly still. It was evident that the suggestion had reached her, and that she was thinking it over. Her father, too, considered the matter. "Excellent," he cried; "excellent."

And Pearl looked up eagerly. "But when can we go, when?" she cried and stretched out an imploring hand to touch his knee. "To-morrow? No, to-day. You said yesterday, father, that you would be going back at once. Oh, to-day! The afternoon train—" She looked eagerly from one man to another.

"Yes, to-day," agreed Bob Flick. "You can go as well to-day as to-morrow, Gallito."

The Spaniard had been thinking with thrust-out jaw and narrowed eyes, now he threw out his hands and lifted his brows. "Have it so, then," he said. "The train leaves this afternoon. Go, Pearl, and pack your things. I promised Hughie that he should go back with me, but he had better wait a few days until his mother can get her sister to stay with her. You had better tell him, Pearl."

After she had gone into the house the two men sat in silence for a few minutes and then Flick lifted his relieved face to the sky. "If there's any God up there," he said, "I'm thanking him for that unexpected you were talking about, Gallito."

"Ah, that unexpected!" returned Gallito. "It is more comforting than many religions. More than once when I have been in a tight place I have relied on it and not vainly. You will go with us this afternoon, Bob?"

Flick hesitated a moment. "I can't," he said. "I've got a lot to do at the mines here, but I can come up soon if you think it will be all right."

The old man smiled in his most saturnine fashion and sighed dismally. "I will make a special offering to the church if you come often," he said. "I can see black days ahead of us. She does not like the mountains."

"Oh, she'll not stay long," Flick consoled him. "The summer, perhaps; but she will be ready to sign up with Sweeney before fall. She can't stay off the stage longer than that. You'll see."

Gallito sighed again and pessimistically shook his head. He was far from anxious to assume the responsibility of restoring his daughter's spirits, and had hoped that Flick would relieve him of that duty, but, since that was not to be, he accepted the situation with what philosophy and fortitude he could muster and hurried the feminine preparations for departure so successfully that he and Pearl actually got away on the afternoon train.

This fact was communicated to Hanson by Jimmy early that evening. Hanson had returned to the San Gorgonio before noon and had remained in his room until nightfall. As the day wore on and he recovered in some measure his self-control, he began to view the situation in a different light from that in which it had first appeared to him, although, in strict adherence to fact, he could not be said to have viewed it in any light at all in that first hour or two. It was all dense darkness to him, a black despair not unmingled with anger and a sense of injury. But as he sat alone in his room with its windows looking out over the desert, his naturally confident and optimistic spirit gradually asserted itself. Again and again, and each time more positively, he assured himself that all was not lost yet by any means. He had been unfortunate enough, yes, and fool enough, to make a bad break; a break that he, with all of his experience, should have known better than to make to any woman. Yet he felt that, even admitting that, he could not justly blame himself. The Pearl had not only surprised but frightened him by the way she had taken a fact which he thought she fully understood—that marriage was out of the question for him. He was so crazy about her that he had lost his head, that was the long and short of the matter, and had made a fool of himself and hash of the situation; but temporarily, only temporarily. For, and to this belief he clung more and more hopefully, the Pearl was too deeply in love with him definitely to close the affair between them for just one break. He would not, could not believe that. It was true enough that he had aroused her passionate and violent anger, but the more violent the anger the sooner it will evaporate, and strange and complex as the Pearl was, she was yet a woman; and no woman on earth could long hold resentment against the man she loved. She had, he was able to convince himself, regretted her mad action in first threatening and then riding away from him long before she had reached home; and, without doubt, it was only that high and haughty pride of hers which kept her from returning to him before she had traversed half the distance. But the course of action he had decided upon was sure to win. He would give her a few hours to get over her anger, to regret it and to reproach herself for causing him pain, and then he would give her a little more time to long and ache for him to return to her. He would wait until evening, and then he would go boldly to the Gallito house and, no matter what efforts were made to frustrate their meeting, he would see her alone. Ah, and she would fly to him, if he knew her aright. All the opposition in the world could not keep them apart, it would only strengthen her determination. And then, how he would beg her forgiveness, how he would plead his love, with passionate and irresistible eloquence; and, if he knew the heart of woman, she would yield.

But when the moment came for acting upon this decision he found that it took a certain amount of courage, considerable, in fact, to face not only a woman who had left him in hot anger that morning, but a gnarled and thorny father and also the soft-spoken Bob Flick; and he decided to stop at Pete's place and brace up his courage with a drink.

Jimmy could hardly wait to serve him. He was like a busy and important bird, hopping about on a bough and, literally, he twittered with excitement.

"Well," he exclaimed, "where you been keeping yourself, and why wasn't you down to see 'em off?"

A cold chill ran over Hanson. His impulse was to cry, "Who? What do you mean?" But with an effort he resisted the inclination. Resolutely, he held himself in check, and, although the hand with which he lifted the glass to his lips trembled a little, he drank off the whisky before he spoke.

"Couldn't make it," he said. "Who went beside—" he paused inviting Jimmy's further confidence.

"Just Pearl and her father," returned Jimmy volubly. "I guess that was the reason Bob went to Colina last week to kind of arrange for Pearl going up to make a visit to the old man. But shucks!" he broke off, "what am I telling you this for, when you know more than I do?" His bright, beady eyes rested on Hanson's with pleased and eager anticipation as he awaited further revelations.

"Nothing more to tell," replied the other disappointedly. "It's all just as you say. Well, I got to go up and see Mrs. Gallito. I'm off myself early to-morrow morning. See you before that though. So long."

He walked away, feeling dazed for the moment and beaten. Not at once did he turn his steps in the direction of the Gallito home, but continued to tramp up and down the road, and presently, as the cool, fresh air restored his spirit, he was able to think clearly again. His world was in chaos, but, even so, he still held some winning cards. He had no intention, he gritted his teeth as he made this vow, of dropping out of the game. He meant to play it to a finish. Those cards! He ran over his hand mentally. There was that commanding trump—his knowledge, his unsuspected knowledge of the whereabouts of Crop-eared José. Then his next biggest trump—and here his heart lifted with a thrill—was the fact that Pearl loved him. Yes, in spite of her anger, in spite of the fact that she had rushed off to Colina, where she knew he could not follow her, she loved him; and his desire for her was but increased by the dangers and difficulties with which she surrounded herself. But he must keep in touch with her, and the question as to how this might best be accomplished rose in his mind. Mrs. Gallito was the almost immediate answer, and he determined, no matter what objections might be raised, to communicate with Pearl through that available source. Of one thing was he convinced and that was that not for long would Pearl linger in the gloomy mountains which he knew she abhorred. She belonged to the desert or to the world of men and admiration, the world of light and color and music. He couldn't see her in the mountains, he shivered a little at the thought of her among them; the cold, silent, austere mountains, so alien to this flower of the cactus.

His first poignant disappointment over, and his plan of action decided upon, he wasted no time in seeking Mrs. Gallito. He found her, to his satisfaction, quite alone, Hughie having, as she told him, gone to spend the evening with some friends. She had, before his arrival, been reading the Sunday supplement of an eastern newspaper, gazing with longing eyes at the portraits of the daughters of fashion and intently studying some of the elaborate and intricate coiffures presented, in the hope that she might achieve the same effects.

"Why, Mr. Hanson!" she cried in surprise at the sight of him. "I thought you'd gone sure, and Oh, mercy!" putting her hands to her head, "I ain't on my puffs."

"I wouldn't ever have known it," said Hanson truthfully. "The fact is I'm not noticing anything much, Mrs. Gallito, I got a lot on my mind." He sighed unfeignedly and she noticed that he looked both tired and worried. "And say, I wish you'd sit down and talk to me a little."

She still stood looking at him hesitatingly, a distressed expression on her face. "I—I don't know as I'd better," she faltered. "Gallito, he said, the very last thing he said, was that if you come around—Oh, Mr. Hanson," she sat down weakly in her chair and began to cry. "I thought you was just about the nicest man I'd met for many a day, and here I find you're a dreadful scamp. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I guess all men are alike!"

Hanson bent forward earnestly. He had an end to gain and he meant to gain it. "Now look here, Mrs. Gallito," he said. "You don't want to condemn me unheard. You're not that kind of a lady. I knew that the first minute I set eyes on you. Now understand I'm not trying to persuade you that I'm any better than I am, but I just want you to believe that I'm not quite so black as I'm painted, not as black as your husband and Bob Flick want to paint me, anyway."

She twisted a fold of her dress, already half-persuaded and yet still a little doubtful. "But you never gave us a hint that you were married," she ventured timidly.

"Honest to God, I forget it myself," he asserted devoutly. "How can a man be always thinking to tell everyone he meets that he's still in a legal tie-up, when the only way he can remember it himself is by coming across his marriage certificate, now and then? Why, it's a good ten years since me and that woman parted. You don't call that married?"

His positive personality exerted its usual influence over Mrs. Gallito. "'Course not," she agreed, although she still sat with downcast eyes and pleated her dress.

"I'm a pretty lonely man," pathos in his voice, "and I'd kind of gotten into the way of putting home and happiness and all like that away from me; and then I came here and saw Pearl," he was sincere enough now, "and honest, Mrs. Gallito, it was all up with me then, right from the first minute, and I was so plumb crazy about her that I guess I lost my head. I knew all the time that I ought to tell you and her just how I was fixed, I knew it, but, someways, try as I would, I couldn't. I didn't have the nerve, so I just waited and let the cards fall as they would. Maybe I was a fool and a coward. The way things have turned out, it sure looks like I was, but I just couldn't help it."

"I guess you ain't any different from most men," she answered, weakly sympathetic, "but you see Pearl has her notions, and they're mighty strong ones. It's the way she's been brought up," this with some pride. "You see, me and her pop started out with the idea that we wasn't going to have the Pearl live one of those hand to mouth lives that we'd seen girls in the circus that didn't have much training or much ability live. We saw right from the first that she was awful smart and awful pretty, and her Pop he had the knack of making money and holding on to it. Well, when he saw that she had her head set on the stage and we couldn't keep her off it, it's in her blood, you see, why her Pop says: 'Well, there's one thing, till she's of age, legal, on or off the stage, she's going to have a mother's care and a father showing up every now and then unexpected.' He's got awful Spanish ideas, you know. 'I don't want her kept innocent,' he says. 'My Lord, no. It's the innocent ones that have got to pay, and pay big in a world of bad knowledge where ignorance is not forgave and is punished worse than any crime. Let her see the seamy side,' he says, 'she's no fool. Let her see what those who thinks to live easy and gives themselves away easy gets.'

"And Pearl saw right off. You see, she ain't so soft-hearted like me," again she wiped the furtive tear from her eye. "Pearl's hard. She ain't no conscience about some things. She'll lead a man on and on, when she don't care beans for him, and take all he'll give her, not money, you know, but awful handsome presents. I've seen her let some poor boy that was crazy about her blow in all the dust that he'd saved for a year. Oh, yes, she's like her father in more'n one way, both awful ambitious and terrible fond of making money. Why," she added naïvely, "I've seen Pearl look at a bank note like I never saw her look at a love letter."

"Well, she won't make much money up in those mountains, not dancing, anyway," he laughed briefly and unmirthfully.

"It surprised me a lot, her going," admitted Mrs. Gallito; "she hates the mountains."

"Then she won't stay long," put in Hanson quickly.

Mrs. Gallito was uncertain about this. "But," she confided presently, "she took on awful to her father and Bob Flick. I didn't dare come out, but I heard her through the door there. 'Where can I go,' she cried, 'where he won't come?' And she kept on saying she'd got to go somewhere where you would never find her, because she didn't dare trust herself, and she cried right out: 'I love him, I love him.'"

With these words, the confirmation of his hope, Hanson's blithe self-confidence returned. He threw back his head and straightened his shoulders, the light of an exultant purpose flashing in the steel of his eye. "Pleasant for Bob!" he remarked in vindictive satisfaction; but as he had still an end to gain, he did not permit his mind to gloat long upon the agreeable picture Mrs. Gallito's words had suggested.

"Now, just let me talk a minute, Mrs. Gallito," leaning forward and speaking in his most persuasive manner. "This whole thing is a misunderstanding, that's all. Pearl didn't understand what I was trying to say to her, and she lost her temper and wouldn't let me finish. Now taking all the blame to myself for everything, admitting that I haven't acted right in any particular, still I haven't had a square deal. You've got the sand and the fairness to admit that, Mrs. Gallito, and I may say in passing that you're the only one that has, and you've got to admit that I haven't had a square deal; not from the Pearl, God bless her, and certainly not from her Pop and that Flick," his eyes flashed viciously.

Mrs. Gallito filled up his waiting pause with a murmur of confused but sympathetic assent.

"I'm telling you now what I'd told them if they'd given me a chance, and it's this," emphasizing his words by striking the palm of one hand with the forefinger of the other, "I'm going back to Los Angeles and I'm going to move heaven and earth to get free; but in the meantime, Mrs. Gallito, I got to hear from her, I've got to keep in touch with her, and I believe you've got too much heart and too much common sense not to help me."

She drew back with feeble, inarticulate murmurs of fright and protest. "I wouldn't dare," she began.

"Wait a moment," said Hanson soothingly. "I'm not suggesting anything that could get you into trouble. Mercy, no! All I want you to do is this, just write me now and then and let me know how things are going, and maybe, once in a while, slip a letter of mine in one of yours to Pearl; but," as she gasped a little and opened her eyes widely, "not till you're sure it's quite safe."

"Well," she agreed, still in evident perturbation of mind, "maybe—"

"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.

It was dark when they reached Colina, but a station wagon awaited them and in this they drove through the village, a straggling settlement, the narrow plateau permitting only two streets, both of them continuations of the mountain roads, and surrounded by high mountains. Scattering lights showed here and there from lamps shining through cabin windows, but the silence, differing in kind if not in degree from the desert silence, was only broken at this hour of the night by the desolate, mocking bark of the coyotes.

Clear of the village, the horses turned and began to mount the hill which led to Gallito's isolated cabin. Their progress was necessarily slow, for the road was rough and full of deep ruts. The velvety blackness of a mountain night was all about them and even the late spring air seemed icy cold. Pearl had begun to shiver in spite of her wraps when the light from a cabin window gleamed across the road and the driver pulled up his horses.

"Somebody's waiting for you," said the driver.

"Yes, Saint Harry," answered Gallito. "He's getting supper for us."

The door, however, was not opened for them and it was not until the driver had turned his horses down the hill that they heard a bolt withdrawn. Then Gallito pushed in and Pearl followed, stepping wearily across the threshold.

The room, a large one for a mountain cabin, was warm and clean; some logs burned brightly on the hearth; a table set for supper was placed within the radius of that glow and a man was bending over a stove at one side of the fireplace, while two women, who had evidently been seated on the other side of the fire, rose and stood smiling a welcome. The air was full of appetizing odors mingled with the fragrance of coffee.

As they entered the man turned with a quick movement. He was an odd-looking creature, brown as a nut, with glinting, changing, glancing eyes which can see what seem to be immeasurable distances to those possessed of ordinary sight. He had a curiously crooked face, one eye was higher than the other and his nose was not in the middle, but set on one side; its sharp, inquisitive point almost at right angles with the bridge. He had the wide, mobile mouth of the born comedian, and his chin was as much to the right as his nose was to the left. He was extremely light and slender in figure and his movements were like quicksilver. His hair was black and straight and long, especially over the ears, and he had long, slender, delicate hands, which one noticed at once for their uncommon flexibility and deftness.

"Supper ready?" asked Gallito, without other greeting.

"Now," replied the other man. He began lifting the food he had been preparing from the pans, arranging it on various dishes and slipping them upon the table with a rapidity and noiselessness which suggested sleight of hand.

Gallito gave a brief nod and advanced toward the two women, bowing low with Spanish courtesy. A smile, a blending of pleasure and amusement, softened his grim mouth and keen eyes as he shook hands with one, whom he introduced to his daughter as Mrs. Nitschkan. About medium height, she was a powerfully built creature, her open flannel shirt disclosing the great muscles of her neck and chest. Rings of short, curly brown hair covered her round head; and small, twinkling blue eyes shone oddly bright in her deeply tanned face, while her frequent smile displayed small, milk-white teeth. A short, weather-stained skirt showed her miner's boots and a man's coat was thrown over her shoulders. A bold, freebooting Amazon she appeared, standing there in the fire-glow, and one to whom hardihood was a birth-right.

The other woman towered above her and even above Gallito. She was a colossal Venus, with a face pink and white as a may-blossom. Tremulous smiles played about her soft, babyish mouth and a joyous excitement shone in her wide, blue eyes. Upon her head was a small, lop-sided bonnet, from which depended a rusty crêpe veil of which she seemed inordinately conscious, and at the throat of her black gown was a large, pink bow.

"Make you acquainted with Mis' Thomas, Miss Gallito," said Mrs. Nitschkan heartily. "Marthy's one of my oldest friends an' one of my newest converts. She's all right if she could let the boys alone, an' not be always tangled up in some flirtation that her friends has got to sit up nights scheming to get her out of. That pink bow an' that crêpe veil shows she ain't got the right idea of her responsibilities as a widow. So I brought her up to my little cabin, just a quarter of a mile through the trees there, hopin' I'd get her mind turned on more sensible things than men. Gosh a'mighty! She's got a chance to shoot bear here."

"I don't think you got any call to introduce me to the Black Pearl that-a-way, Sadie." Mrs. Thomas's eyes filled with ready tears. "It ain't manners. I wouldn't have come with her, Miss Gallito, but I got to see pretty plain that the gentleman," here she blushed and bridled, "that was courting me was awful anxious to get hold of the money and the cabin that my last husband, in his grave 'most six months now, left me." She wiped the tears from her eyes on the back of her hand, a movement hampered somewhat by the fact that her handkerchief had been fashioned into a bag to hold some chocolate creams and was tied tightly to her thumb.

"That's what you get for cavorting around with a spindle-shanked, knock-kneed, mush-brained jack-rabbit of a man," muttered Mrs. Nitschkan scornfully.

But this thrust was ignored by Mrs. Thomas. The color had risen on her cheeks and there was a light in her eyes. Shyly, yet gleefully, she drew a letter from her pocket. "I got a letter from him to-day with an awful cute motto in it. Look!" She showed it proudly to Pearl, José and Gallito. "It's on cream-tinted paper, with a red and blue border, an'," simpering consciously, "it says in black and gold letters, 'A Little Widow Is a Dangerous Thing.'"

The little group seemed for the moment too stunned to speak. Mrs. Nitschkan was the first to recover herself. "Gosh a'mighty!" she murmured in an awed whisper, and allowed her glance to travel slowly over Mrs. Thomas's well-cushioned, six feet of womanhood, "A—little—widow!" huskily.

Gallito seized the opportunity here to direct Pearl's attention to the bandit, who had been nudging him and whispering to him for the last moment or so.

"Pearl, this is—" he hesitated a moment, "José."

Mrs. Nitschkan looked up at him in quick astonishment. "Gosh a'mighty," she cried, "ain't that kind o' reckless?"

But José nodded a quick, cynical approval and, with a sudden turn, executed a deep bow to the Pearl, one hand on the heart, expressing gallantry, fealty, the humblest admiration; all these sincere and yet permeated with a subtle and volatile mockery.

"Better so, Francisco," he said in a voice which scarcely betrayed an accent, and indeed this was not strange considering that he spoke the patois of many people, being a born linguist. His father had been a Frenchman, a Gascon, but his mother was a daughter of Seville. "But you have not said all." He drew himself up with haughty and self-conscious pride and, with a sweeping gesture of his long fingers, lifted the hair from his ears and stood thus, leering like Pan.

"Crop-eared José!" cried Pearl, falling back a pace or two and looking from her father to the two women in wide-eyed astonishment. "Why, they are still looking for him. Are you not afraid?" She looked from one to the other as if asking the question of all. She was not shocked, nor, to tell the truth, particularly surprised after the first moment of wonder. She had been used to strange company all her life, and ever since her childhood, on her brief visits to her father's cabin, she had been accustomed to his cronies, lean, brown, scarred pirates and picaroons, full of strange Spanish oaths.

"You will not mention this in letters to your mother," ordered Gallito, glooming at her with fierce eyes. "You know her. Caramba! If she should guess, the world would know it."

"Lord, yes!" agreed Pearl uninterestedly. "You needn't be afraid of me," to José, "I don't tell what I know."

"That is true," commended Gallito, motioning her at the same time to the table.

It seems a pity to record that such a supper was set before a woman suffering from a wound of the heart. Women at all times are held to be lacking in that epicurean appreciation of good food which man justly extols; but when a woman's whole being is absorbed in a disappointment in love, nectar and ambrosia are as sawdust to her.

On the outer rim of that circle which knew him but slightly, or merely knew of him, the causes of the charmed life which José bore were a matter of frequent speculation, also continual wonder was expressed that his friends would sometimes take incredible risks in effecting the escape of this rogue after one of his reckless escapades. But José had certain positive qualities, had these gossips but known it, which endeared him to his companions; although among them could never be numbered gratitude, a lively appreciation of benefits received or a tried and true affection.

Certainly a dog-like fidelity was not among José's virtues. He would lift the purse of his best friend or his rescuer from a desperate impasse, provided it were sufficiently heavy. A favor of a nature to put him under obligations for a lifetime he forgot as soon as it was accepted. He caricatured a benefactor to his face, nor ever dreamed of sparing friend or foe his light, pointed jibes which excoriated the surface of the smoothest vanity.

No, the only virtues which could be accredited to José, and these were sufficient, were an unfailing lightness of heart, the facile and fascinating gift of yarn-spinning—for he was a born raconteur, with a varied experience to draw upon—a readiness for high play, at which he lost and won with the same gay and unruffled humor, and an incomparable and heaven-bestowed gift of cookery.

To-night the very sight of the supper set before him softened Gallito's harsh face. Brook trout, freshly caught that afternoon from the rushing mountain stream not far away from the cabin, and smoking hot from the frying pan; an omelette, golden brown and buttercup yellow, of a fluff, a fragrance, with savories hidden beneath its surface, a conserve of fruits, luscious, amber and subtly biting, the coffee of dreams and a bottle of red wine, smooth as honey.

"I hope you don't think that we're the kind of wolves that's always gatherin' round wherever there's a snack of food," murmured Mrs. Thomas softly as she took a seat beside Pearl. "We got our own cabin just a piece up in the woods, but José, he kind of wanted to make a celebration of your coming up."

Pearl did not answer, but slipped languidly out of her cloak, untwisted her heavy veil, removed her hat, José's eyes as well as Mrs. Thomas's following her the while with unmixed admiration, and sat down.

José immediately began to roll cigarettes and smoke them while he ate.

"Well, what is the news?" asked Gallito, as he, at least, began his evening meal with every evidence of appreciation; "good fishing, good hunting, good prospecting, eh, Mrs. Nitschkan?"

The gipsy, for she was one by birth as well as by inclination, nodded and showed her teeth in a satisfied smile. "So good that it looks like we'd be kep' here even longer than I expected when we come." She drew some bits of quartz from her pocket and threw them out on the table before him. "Some specimens I chipped off in my new prospect," she said, her eyes upon him.

"So," he said, examining them with interest, "your luck, Mrs. Nitschkan, as usual. Where—? Excuse me," a dark flush rose on his parchment skin at this breach of mining-camp etiquette which he had almost committed.

For a few moments they talked exclusively of the mining interests of the locality. It is this feverish, inexhaustible topic that is almost exclusively dwelt upon in mining camps, all other topics seeming tame and commonplace beside this fascinating subject, presided over by the golden fairy of fortune and involving her. To-day she tempts and eludes, she tantalizes and mocks and flies her thousands of wooers who follow her to the rocks, seeking her with back-breaking toil and dreaming ever of her by day and by night. Variable and cruel, deaf to all beseeching, she picks out her favorites by some rule of caprice which none but herself understands.

Supper over, Gallito ensconced his two feminine visitors in easy chairs and took one himself, while José, with noiseless deftness, cleared away the remains of food. Pearl had wandered to the window and, drawing the curtain aside, stood gazing out into the featureless, black expanse of the night.

"Quite a few things has happened since I saw you last, Gallito," said Mrs. Nitschkan conversationally, filling a short and stubby black pipe with loose tobacco from the pocket of her coat. "For one, I got converted."

"Ah!" returned Gallito with his unvarying courtesy, although his raised eyebrows showed some perplexity, "to—to—a religion?"

"'Course." Mrs. Nitschkan leaned forward, her arms upon her knees. "This world's the limit, Gallito, and queer things is going to happen whether you're looking for 'em or not. About a year ago Jack and the boys went off on a long prospectin' spell, the girls you know are all married and have homes of their own, an' there was me left free as air with a dandy spell of laziness right in front of me ready to be catched up 'twixt my thumb and forefinger and put in my pipe and smoked, and I hadn't even the spirit to grab it."

"Why didn't you think about getting yourself some new clothes, like any other woman would?" asked José, eyeing her curiously.

"What I got's good enough for me," she returned shortly.

"You should have gave your place a nice cleaning and cooked a little for a change, Sadie," said Mrs. Thomas softly and virtuously.

"Such things look worse'n dying to me," replied the gipsy. "And," turning again to Gallito, "the taste goin' out of my tea and coffee wasn't the worst. It went out of my pipe, too. Gosh a'mighty, Gallito! I'll never forget the night I sat beside my dyin' fire and felt that I didn't even take no interest in winnin' their money from the boys; and then suddenly most like a voice from outside somep'n in me says: 'What's the matter with you, Sadie Nitschkan, is that you're a reapin' the harvest you've sowed, gipsyin' and junketin', fightin' and gamblin' with no thought of the serious side of life?'"

"And what is the serious side of life, Nitschkan?" asked José, sipping delicately his glass of wine as if to taste to the full its ambrosial flavors, like the epicure he was. "I have not yet discovered it."

"You will soon." There was meaning in the gipsy's tone and in the glance she bestowed upon him. "It's doin' good. I tell you boys when I realized that I'd probably have to change myself within and without and be like some of the pious folks I'd seen, it give me a gone feeling in the pit of my stomach. But you can't keep me down, and after I'd saw I was a sinner and repented 'cause I was so bad, I saw that the whole trouble was this, I'd tried everything else, but I hadn't never tried doin' good."

"No, Sadie, you sure hadn't made duty the watch-word of your life," agreed Mrs. Thomas.

Mrs. Nitschkan ignored this. "Now doin' good, for I know you don't know what that means, José, is seein' the right path and makin' other folks walk in it whether they're a mind to or not. Well I cert'ny gave the sinners of Zenith a run for their money."

She smoked a moment or two in silence, sunk in agreeable remembrance. She had been true to her word and, having decided to reform as much of the community as in her estimation needed that trial as by fire, she had plunged into her self-appointed task with lusty enthusiasm. As soon as her conversion and the outlet she had chosen for her superabundant energy were noised abroad, there was an immediate and noticeable change in the entire deportment of the camp. Those long grown careless drew forth their old morals and manners, brushed the moths from them, burnished the rust and wore them with undeniable self-consciousness, but without ostentation.

Upon these lukewarm and conforming souls Mrs. Nitschkan cast a darkling eye. It was the recalcitrant, the defiant, the professing sinner upon whom she concentrated her energies.

"So you see, Gallito," rousing herself from pleasant contemplation of past triumphs, "it wasn't only a chance to hunt and prospect that brought me. I heard from Bob Flick that José was still here and I see a duty before me."

"She could not keep away from me," José rolled his eyes sentimentally. "You see beneath that rough old jacket of her husband's which she wears there beats a heart."

"I got some'p'n else that can beat and that's a fist." She stretched out her arm and drew it back, gazing with pride at her great, swelling muscles.

"But never me, who will tidy your cabin and cook half your meals for you." He smiled ingratiatingly at Mrs. Thomas, who grew deeply pink under his admiring smile. "Why do you not convert Saint Harry?"

"Harry's all right," she said. "You need convertin', he don't. I got an idea that he's been right through the fiery furnace like them Bible boys in their asbestos coats, he's smelted."

"Harry got my telegram?" asked Gallito, speaking in a low tone, after first glancing toward Pearl, "and you have made a room ready for her?"

"Clean as a convent cell," said José, with his upcurling, mordant smile. "The wind has roared through it all day and swept away every trace of tobacco and my thoughts."

"That is well," replied Gallito with a sardonic twist of the mouth, "and where do you sleep to-night?"

"In Saint Harry's cabin."

"So," Gallito nodded as if content. "That will be best."

"Best for both," agreed José, a flicker of mirth on his face. "My constant companionship is good for Harry. It is not well to think you have shown the Devil the door, kicked him down the hill and forgotten him; and that he has taken his beating, learned his lesson and gone forever. It is then that the Devil is dangerous. It is better, Gallito, believe me, to remain on good terms with him, to humor him and to pass the time of day. Humility is a great virtue and you should be willing to learn something even of the Devil, not set yourself up on a high, cold, sharp mountain peak, where you keep his fingers itching from morning to night to throw you off. I have observed these things through the years of my life, and the middle course is ever the safest. Give to the church, observe her laws as a true and obedient son, in so far as possible, and only so far. Let her get her foot on your neck and she will demand such sacrifices!" He lifted his hands and rolled his eyes upward, "but the Devil is more reasonable; treat him civilly, be a good comrade to him and he will let you alone. But Saint Harry does not understand that. Saint Harry on his ice peak, and the Devil straddling around trying to find a foothold so that he can climb up to Harry and seize him with those itching fingers. Ho, ho!" José's laughter rang loud and shrill.

Pearl, hearing it, turned from the window with a disturbed frown and began to walk up and down the far end of the room, and Mrs. Nitschkan frowned ominously. "That's enough of your talk, José," she said peremptorily. "It sounds like blasphemin' to me, talkin' about the Devil that light way. Remember one of the reasons I come here. Gallito, you'd better lay out the cards and let's get down to our game. What's the limit?"

"Does Mrs. Thomas play as high as you?" asked Gallito.

"I don't care much for a tame game," said Mrs. Thomas modestly, with lowered lids. "They're too many long, sad winters in the mountains when gentl—, I mean friends, can't cross the trails to see you, an' you got to fill up your heart with cards and religion and things like that."

José had paused to watch, with a keen appreciation, the grace of Pearl's movements. "Caramba!" he muttered. "How sprang that flower of Spain from such a gnarled old tree as you, Gallito? Dios! But she is salado!"

Gallito frowned a little, which did not in the least disconcert José, and, rising, he moved a small table forward, opened it and then going to a cupboard in the wall drew from it a short, squat bottle, four glasses and a pack of cards. "Your room is just beyond this," he said, turning to Pearl. "José says that you will find everything ready for you. You must be tired. You had better go to bed."

Pearl twitched her shoulders impatiently. "I am not sleepy," she said sullenly. She threw herself in the chair that Gallito had vacated and lay there watching the fire with somber, wild eyes.

José threw another log on the fire and then the two men and two women sat down to their cards. A clock ticked steadily, monotonously, on the mantel-piece, but whether an hour or ten minutes passed while she sat there watching the brilliant, soaring flame of the pine logs Pearl could not have told, when suddenly the stillness of the night was broken by the sound of someone whistling along the road. It seemed a long way off at first, but gradually came nearer and nearer, tuneful and clear as the song of a bobolink.

"Saint Harry, by all the saints or devils!" cried José with a burst of his shrill laughter. "Ah, Francisco, the devil is a shrewd fellow; when he can't manage a job himself, he always gets a woman to help him." His glancing, twinkling eyes sought Pearl, who had barely turned her head as her father rose to open the door for the newcomer, exclaiming with some show of cordiality:

"Ah, Seagreave, come in, come in."

"Thanks," said an agreeable voice. "I got home late and found that José had made preparations to lighten my loneliness. Then I saw the light in your window and thought I would come down. You see I suspected pleasant company."

He advanced into the room and then, seeing Pearl, who had twisted about in her chair and was gazing at him with the first show of interest she had yet exhibited, he paused and looked rather hesitatingly at Gallito.

"We have a guest," said José softly and in Spanish.

"My daughter has returned with me," said Gallito. "Pearl, this is Mr. Seagreave."

"Saint Harry," said José more softly still.

Mr. Seagreave bowed, although one who knew him well might have seen that his astonishment increased rather than abated at the sight of Pearl. As for her, she merely nodded and let her lashes lie the more wearily and indifferently upon her cheek.

"Really, I wouldn't have intruded," said Seagreave in his pleasant English voice. "I had an idea from your telegram, Gallito, that Hughie was coming with you. Sha'n't I go?"

For answer Gallito pushed forward a chair and threw another log upon the fire. "My daughter is tired," he said. "She will soon retire; but when a man has been from home for a fortnight, and in the desert!" he raised his brows expressively, "Pah! He wishes to hear of everything which has happened during his absence and particularly, Mr. Seagreave, do I wish to talk to you about that lower drift. José tells me that you have examined it."

Thus urged, Seagreave sat down. He was tall and slight and fair, so very fair that his age was difficult to guess. His hair, with a silvery sheen on it, swept in a wing across his forehead, and he had a habit of pushing it back from his brow; his eyes were of a vivid blue, peculiarly luminous, and his features, which were regular, showed a fine finish of modeling. His age, as has been said, was a matter of conjecture, but judging from his appearance he might have been anywhere from twenty to forty.

"Don't let me interrupt your game," he said. "It is early yet, and if Miss Gallito isn't too tired, and if she will let me, I will talk to her while you play."

José smiled to himself and picked up the cards. The game went on. Seagreave, receiving no encouragement from Pearl, made no attempt at conversation, until at last, stirred by some impulse of curiosity, she lifted her eyes. It was this question of age she wished to decide. In that first, quick glance of hers she had taken it for granted that he was twenty, but in a second stolen look she had noted certain lines about the mouth and eyes which added years to his blonde youthfulness. Then her quick ear had caught José's "Saint Harry," and to her, who knew many men, those lines about mouth and eyes did not suggest a past of saintship.

Her surreptitious glance encountered that of Seagreave, for he, too, had withdrawn his eyes from the fire for a moment to let his puzzled gaze rest upon her. He had known vaguely that Gallito had a daughter, and he remembered in the same indefinite way that some one had told him that she was an actress, but, even so, he could not reconcile this—his mind sought a simile to express her—this exotic, with Gallito, these two mountain women, a mountain cabin, and an equally unpretentious home in the desert. She lay listlessly in her chair, a long and slender shape in a dull black gown which fell about her in those statuesque folds which all drapery assumed immediately she donned it; beneath it showed her feet in black satin slippers and the gleam of the satin seemed repeated in her blue-black hair. Her cheek was unwontedly pale. A monotone she appeared, half-within and half-without the zone of the firelight; but the individuality of her could not be thus subdued. It found expression in the concentration of light and color focused in the splendid rings which sparkled on the long, brown fingers of both her hands.

Her narrow eyes met his sombrously. On either side it was a glance of curiosity, of scrutiny. She, as usual, made no effort to begin a conversation, and he, searching for a polite commonplace, said presently:

"Have you ever been in Colina before?"

"Often, but not in the last two years," she answered tonelessly, "not since you've been here, I guess. I hate the mountains."

"I have been here nearly two years," he vouchsafed, "and I feel as if I would never go away. But you live in the desert, don't you?"

"Sometimes, that is, when I'm not out on the road. The desert is the place. You can breathe there, you can live there," there was a passionate vibration in her voice, "but these old, cold mountains make you feel all the time as if they were going to fall on you and crush you."

"Do they make you feel that way?" He pulled his chair nearer to her so that his back was turned to the two men, and José, who saw everything, smiled faintly, mordaciously. "How strange!" It was not a conventional expression, he seemed really to find it strange, unbelievably so.

"And you, how do they make you feel?" she asked wearily, a touch of scorn in her glance.

A light seemed to glow over his face. "Ah, I do not know that I can tell you," he said, and she was conscious of some immediate change in him, which she apprehended but could never have defined. It was as if he had withdrawn mentally to incalculable distances.

Pearl did not notice his evasion; she was not interested in his view of the mountains. What she instinctively resented, even in her dulled state, was his impersonal attitude toward herself. She was not used to it from any man. She did not understand it. She wondered, without any particular interest in the matter, but still following her instinctive and customary mode of thought, if he had not noticed that she was beautiful. Was he so stupid that he did not think her so? But there was no hint in his manner or look in his eyes of an intention on his part of playing the inevitable game, even a remembrance of it seemed as lacking as desire. The game of challenge and elusion on her part, of perpetual and ever more ardent advance on his. He was interested, she knew that, but, as she felt with a surge of surprise, not in the way she had always encountered and had learned to expect.

"Isn't it strange," she realized that he was speaking again, "that I haven't been drawn to the desert, because so many have had to turn to it? I have only seen it from traveling across it, and then it repelled me, perhaps it frightened me." He seemed to consider this.

For the moment Pearl forgot the inevitable game. "Frightened you!" she cried. "It is the mountains that frighten me; but the desert is always different. It—" she struggled for expression, "it is always you."

Something in this seemed to strike him. "Perhaps I have that to learn." Again he meditated a few moments, then looked up with a smile. "You must tell me all that you find in the desert and I will tell you all that I find in the mountains. It will be jolly to talk to a woman again." He spoke with a satisfaction thoroughly genuine.

She glanced at him suspiciously. She was uncertain how to meet this frank acceptance of comradeship, free yet from the intrusion of sex. "Maybe," she acquiesced a little doubtfully. Then she drew her brows together. "I don't want to learn anything about the mountains," she cried, all the heaviness and the dumb revolt of her spirit finding a voice. "And I don't want ever to go back to the desert again; and I don't even want to dance," looking at him in a sort of wild wonder as if this were unbelievable, "not even to dance."

He realized that she was suffering from some grief against which she struggled, and which she refused to accept. "You will not feel so always," he said. "It is because you are unhappy now."

There was consolation in his sincerity, in his sympathy, in his entire belief in what he was saying, and it was with difficulty that she repressed an outburst of her sullen sorrow. "Yes," her mouth worked, "I am unhappy, and I won't be, I won't be. I never was before. It is all in here, like a dead weight, a drag, a cold hand clutching me." She pressed both hands to her heart. Then she drew back as if furious at having so far revealed herself.

"That heals." He leaned forward to speak. "I am telling you the truth! That heals and is forgotten. I know that that is so."

"I know who you are," she said suddenly. "I have been trying to think ever since I heard him," she nodded toward José, bent over his cards, "say 'Saint Harry.' I remember now. I have heard Hughie often speak of you. They say that you are good, that if any one is sick you nurse him, and that if any one is broke you help him. They all come to you."

"Yes, 'Saint Harry'!" he laughed. "Oh, it's funny, but let them call me any name they please as long as it amuses them. What difference does it make? I am glad Hughie is coming up, I want some music. He puts the mountains into music for me."

"And for me." She smiled and then sighed bitterly, gazing drearily into the fire, now a bed of glowing embers. Then latent and feminine curiosity stirred in her thoughts and voiced itself. "Why are you here?" she said. "Why does a man like you stay here?"

His elbow rested on the arm of his chair, his chin in his hand, his gaze too upon the fading embers. "I don't know," he said in a low voice, "I had to come."

"Where from?" she still followed her instinct of curiosity.

"From the husks"—he turned his head and smiled at her—"from a far country where I had wasted my substance in riotous living."

She frowned a little. She was not used to this type of man, nor had she met any one who used hyperbole in conversation. At first she fancied that he might be chaffing her, but she was too intelligent to harbor that idea, so convincing was his innate sincerity; but nevertheless, she meant to go cautiously.

Again she questioned him: "From what far country?"

He had fallen to musing again, and it is doubtful if he heard her. He saw before him immense, primeval forests, black, shadowy; vast, sluggish rivers, above which hung a thick and fever-laden air; trees from whose topmost branches swung gorgeous, ephemeral flowers; and then long stretches of yellow beach, where a brazen ocean tumbled and hissed. Then many cities, squalid and splendid, colorful and fantastic as the erection of a dream, and through all these he saw himself ever passing, appearing and reappearing, and ever scattering his substance, not the substance of money alone; that was still left him; but the substance of youth, of early promise, of illusion and hopes.

Pearl waited a long time, it seemed to her, for him to speak. At last she broke the silence. "And then?" she said.

He roused from his preoccupations and brushed back the wing of hair from his brow. "I realized that I was living, had always lived on husks, and that was what caused the restless fever in my blood, my heart was always restless; and then I began to dream down there in the tropics, really dream at night of these mountains just as you see them here, and in the day time I thought of them and longed for them, as a man whose throat is dry with thirst longs for cool water. Then, presently, I began to have brief, fleeting visions of them by day. And gradually the longing for the hills became so intense that I started out in search of them. I traveled about a good bit, and then drifted here. The place suited me, so I stayed."

She looked at him puzzled and half-fearfully, wondering if he was quite sane. "And will you stay here always?" she asked.

"Oh, as to that, I can't say. Perhaps. I hope so. Life is full here."

"Full!" she interrupted him. "And life! You call this life?" She laughed in harsh scorn.

"Don't you?" He looked at her with those blue, clear eyes that seemed to see through her and around her and beyond her.

"I!" Her glance was full of resentful passion; tightly she closed her lips; but there was something about him which seemed to force her to reveal herself and, presently, she began again. "I am like a coyote with a broken paw. It goes off by itself and hides until it can limp around. But life, real life, is all out there." She threw out her hands as indicating the world beyond the mountains. "If you call this life, you've never lived."

He ignored this, smiling faintly.

"What is real life to you?" he asked.

So compelling was his manner, for no one could shock Seagreave and no one could force him to condemn, that she almost said, "To love and be loved." But she resisted her impulse to voice this. "Until a little while before I came here, life meant to dance. I know, though, what it is to get tired of the very things you think you love the most. After I've stayed a while in the desert, I've just got to see the lights of the city streets, to smell the stage, and to dance to the big audiences; but after a bit, the buildings and the people begin to crowd on me and push me and I feel as if I couldn't breathe, then I've just got to get back to the desert again."

"Dancing is your expression," he said. "All of life is love and expression." And now there was a falling note in his voice which her ear was quick to catch. Almost she cried:

"Love! And yet you live here alone!"

"Yes," he went on, "we must have both. They are as necessary to us as breath. Without them—" he stopped, evidently embarrassed, as if suddenly aware that he had been talking more to himself than to her and that in thus forgetting her, he had been more self-revealing than he would have wished.

She shook her head, plainly puzzled. "But you are young," she said, and stole another glance at him, adding a little shyly, "at least not very old, and I feel, I am sure that you too have a broken paw, but when that is well you will go back to your own country, to cities again. You couldn't stand it here always."

He looked at her, an enigmatic smile on his lips. "Couldn't I?" he said. Glancing again at her as he rose, he saw that she seemed weary, her lashes lay long on her pale cheek. "Oh," with a touch of compunction in his tone, "I have, as usual, talked far too much. You are tired and we must go. José," lifting his voice, "as soon as you finish that game."

"The Devil is indeed at your elbow," cried José, flinging down his cards, "and prompts all you say. We have just this moment finished a game and Gallito is the winner."

Gallito smiled with bleak geniality. "Has José been wise?" he asked, rising and replenishing the dying fire.

"Fairly so," Seagreave smiled, "as far as he knows how to be. He has been up to some of his antics, though. They are beginning to say that this hillside is haunted."

While Gallito talked to Seagreave and Mrs. Nitschkan and José argued over certain rules of the game they had been playing, Mrs. Thomas sidled up to Pearl and stood looking at her with the absorbed unconsciousness of an admiring child.

"I s'pose," she began, swaying back and forth bashfully and touching the pink bow at her throat, "that it does look kind of queer to any one that's so up on the styles as you are to see me wearing a pink bow at my neck and a crêpe veil down my back?"

Pearl looked up in wearied surprise. "It does seem queer," she said indifferently.

"'Course I know it ain't just citified," Mrs. Thomas hastened to affirm; "but the veil and the bow together's got a meaning that I think is real sweet." She waited a moment, almost pathetically anxious for Pearl to see the symbolism of her two incongruous adornments, but her listener was too genuinely bored and also too self-absorbed to make the attempt. "It's this," said Mrs. Thomas, determined to explain. "The pink bow kind o' shows that I'm in the world again and," bridling coquettishly, "open to offers, while this crêpe veil shows that I ain't forgot poor Seth in his grave and can afford to mourn for him right."

But Pearl had not waited to hear all of these explanations. Without a word to the rest of the parting guests, and with a mere inclination of the head toward Seagreave, she had slipped away.

Alone in her small, bare room, undressing by the light of a single candle, the brief interest and curiosity which Seagreave had aroused in her faded from her mind. For hours she lay sleepless upon her bed, listening to the rushing mountain stream not far from the cabin, its arrowy plunge and dash over the rocks softened by distance to a low, perpetual purr, and hearing the mountain wind sigh through the pines about the cabin: but not always did her great, dark eyes stare into the blackness; sometimes she buried her head in the pillow and moaned, and at last she wept, permitting herself the flood of tears that she had held in check all day. "Rudolf, Rudolf," was the name upon her lips.

CHAPTER IX

Within a few days Hughie came up to Colina, and through the long, chilly evenings near the peaks the little, isolated group met in Gallito's cabin. It was understood in the village that Gallito did not care to have his seclusion invaded, and this unspoken desire was universally respected; indeed, it was not questioned. In the solitary places are many eccentrics; they have escaped the melting pot of the city, and in the freedom of the desert and the mountains have achieved an unfettered and unquestioned individuality.

Those who had business dealings with the old Spaniard knew that he was to be found in places more easy of access than his lonely cabin among the rocks and trees; at the mine, for instance, of which he was foreman, the Mont d'Or; or, on an occasional Friday evening, in the village saloon, where he mingled with the miners, engaging in the eternal and interminable discussions of local mining affairs. He also kept a horse in the village, a fiery, blooded creature, which he exercised every few days, taking long rides over the various mountain trails. He was universally respected, as his judgment of mines was known to be sound, and his ventures unusually lucky; but no one was ever rash enough to encroach upon the reserve which he invariably maintained.

So, with small fear of embarrassing interruptions, although Gallito saw that all prudence was observed and every precaution taken, he and José, Mrs. Nitschkan and Mrs. Thomas sat over their cards, while Hughie played upon the piano and Harry Seagreave listened, with his eyes closed, to the music. He sometimes brought Pearl a cluster of the exquisite wild flowers which now covered the mountains, but he rarely made any but the briefest attempts at conversation with her, and after the first evening she showed no disposition to have him do so.

Instead of rousing from the depression which had overfallen her, she seemed, for a time, to sink the more deeply into it. Silent, listless, almost sullen, she passed her days. There was but little incentive for her to go down into the village, and she took small interest in the miners' wives who dwelt there. For a time she was curious to see Mrs. Hanson, but, learning through Hughie that that lady lived up near her mine on a mountainside two miles out of the village, and only occasionally, and at irregular intervals, visited the camp, Pearl realized the difficulties in the way of catching a glimpse of her and contented herself with Bob Flick's description of her.

Her mother wrote to her about once a week, brief, ill-spelled letters, always with an ardent inclosure from Hanson, and Pearl would lie out on the hillside during the long summer days reading, and re-reading them, and at night she slept with them next her heart. For the first few months Hanson was content to write to her and to extract what comfort he could from her notes to her mother. These he invested with cryptic and hidden meanings endeavoring to find a veiled message for himself in every line. But presently, growing impatient, he began to beg her for a word, only a word, but sent directly from her to him; yet, although the summer had waned to autumn, she remained obdurate, her will and her pride still stronger than her love.

Sometimes in the evening Hugh would beg her to dance, but she always refused. The desire for that spontaneous and natural form of expression was gone from her; and once when Hugh had persisted in urging her, she had left the room, nor appeared again all evening, so that it became a custom not to mention her dancing to her.

"Gosh a'mighty!" cried Mrs. Nitschkan robustly, looking up from a book of flies over which she had been poring, "think of getting a man on the brain like that."

José, who had been putting away the supper dishes, assisted by Mrs. Thomas, who had regarded the opportunity as propitious for certain elephantine coquetries, stopped to regard the gypsy with that peering mixture of amusement and curiosity which she ever evoked in him.

"But, Nitschkan," he asked, "were you never crazy about a man?"

"Marthy Thomas knows more about such goin's on than me," she returned equably; "but since you ask me, I was crazy once about Jack, and another awful pretty girl had him. But that wasn't all." She slapped her knee in joyous and triumphant remembrance, and the cabin echoed with her laughter.

"Ah!" José hastily put away his last dish and sat cross-legged on the hearth at her feet, looking up into her face with impish interest. "How did you manage him or her?"

"You can't manage a her no more'n you can manage a cat," bluntly. "You can't make a cat useful, and you can't make it mind; but," significantly, "you can manage a dog and train him, too. I had to learn that girl that'd corraled Jack that a pretty face and ruffled petticoats may catch a man, but they can't always hold him."

"What can hold 'em?" interrupted Mrs. Thomas, sighing heavily. "Not always vittles, and cert'ny not a loving heart."

Mrs. Nitschkan snapped her book impatiently. "Now, Marthy, don't you stir me up with that talk of yours, like men was the only prize packages in life. I can't see what these home-body women love to fool 'emselves so for. You're just like my Celora, Marthy. 'Mommie,' she says to me once, 'I wonder when the right man'll come along and learn me to love him?' Well, I happened to be makin' a dog whip jus' when she spoke, and I says, 'Celora, if you give me much of that talk I'll give you a hidin', big as you are. You got your man all picked out right now, and you mean to marry him whether he thinks so or not, and he can't get away from you no more'n a cat can from a mouse.'"

"No more than I can from you," José sprang to his feet with light agility and, leaning forward, made as if about to imprint a kiss upon her forehead.

But he had reckoned without his host. Mrs. Nitschkan's arm shot out before he saw it, and he was sent staggering halfway across the room. "A poor, perishin' brother tried that on me once," she remarked casually. "It was in Willy Barker's drug store over to Mt. Tabor. Celora was with me—she was about four—and I just set her down on the counter and said, 'Now, Celora, set good and quiet and watch Mommie go for the masher real pretty.'"

"I don't see why you got to be so rough on the boys, Sadie," deplored Mrs. Thomas, rocking slowly back and forth in a large chair. "'Course we know they're devils and all, but if it wasn't for their goin's on, trying to snatch a kiss now and then, life would seem awful tame for us poor, patient women. And even the worst of 'em's better'n none at all. Look at me! I had the luck to get a cross-grained, cranky one, as you know. Poor Seth!" She drew a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her eyes. "But you got to admit, Sadie, that even he was white enough to up and die before I got too old for other gentlemen to take notice of me."

"What'd you want 'em to take notice of you for?" asks Mrs. Nitschkan abstractedly, her mind on her flies.

"It's easy enough for you to talk that way," Mrs. Thomas spoke with some heat. "You got the what-you-may-callems—accomplishments—that gets their notice. You're apt to skin 'em at cards, you can easy out-shoot 'em, and there ain't a lady miner in the mountains that can pass off a salted property as cute as you."

"What's the use of livin' in a world of tenderfoots if you don't use 'em?" growled Mrs. Nitschkan.

"'Course. And don't think I'm blaming you, Sadie; I ain't." Mrs. Thomas spoke more gently. "All I'm sayin' is that you can't understand the women that's born feeling the need of a strong right arm to lean on, and has nothing but a nice complexion and a loving heart to offer. The game's a hard one for them, 'cause there're so many others in the field. It ain't always a complexion; sometimes it's a head of hair, or eyes, but whatever it is, competition's keen. I leave it to you, Mr. José, if a lady can say to a gentleman the first time she meets him, 'I got a dandy temper,' or 'I can bake a pie that'll coax the coyotes down from the hills.' No, you got to let the hair or complexion do its work first and sort o' insinuate the rest as acquaintance grows."

"There's a man comin' up here to-morrow, Marthy, but he won't know whether you got a strand of hair or a tooth in your head; he'll never see you."

"Maybe he can't help it—not if I stand right in his way," said Mrs. Thomas, with a coy glance from under her lashes at José.

"Oh, yes, he can," returned Mrs. Nitschkan. "No matter who's in the way he can't see but one person, and that's that sulky Pearl; for it's good old Bob Flick, one of the best ever."

Two or three times Bob Flick had come up and remained several days, and on these occasions Pearl had roused somewhat from her indifference to life. On his last visit, late in September, he had succeeded in persuading her to ride again, and had sent down to the desert for a horse for her. She would not admit at first that she enjoyed being in the saddle again, but to his unexpressed satisfaction it was obvious that she did.

The crystalline, amber air was like wine; the mountains were a mosaic of color; the trees burned red and yellow, glowing torches of autumn, and accentuating all their ephemeral and regal splendor; among them, yet never of them, were the green austere pines marching in their serried ranks, on, on up the hillsides to timber line.

One day, as Pearl and Flick rode among the hills, a flood of sunlight falling about them, crimson and yellow leaves blowing on the wind, she expressed, for the first time, an interest in the desert and a desire to see it again.

"I'll have to go back sometime, Bob, I suppose," she said, "if it's only to see Lolita."

"I nearly brought her up with me," he said. "I thought maybe she'd stand it all right for a day or two; then I got afraid she'd sicken right away in this rare air, and I didn't dare."

"I guess so," sighed Pearl; "but, goodness! I'd sure like to see her again. I'd most give anything to hear her say, 'mi jasmin, Pearl, mi corazon.'"

"We understand each other, you and me and Lolita," returned Flick. "We all got the South in us, I reckon that's why."

"Maybe," she answered. "Yes, I'd like to see Lolita and mother. She won't leave her chickens and melons and sweet potatoes and all long enough to come up here, and, oh, there's times when I feel like I'd most give my eyes to see the desert again; but I couldn't stand it yet, Bob, not yet."

A shade had fallen over her face as she spoke and, to divert her, he began to speak of José. "Doesn't he make you laugh?" he asked. "He keeps everybody else on the broad grin."

"Men," she said scornfully. "I think he works a charm on you that you all put yourselves in danger for a thing like that. Sometimes he makes me laugh—a little; but if I had my way I would waste no time in putting him in prison where he belongs. What is it you see in him?"

"I don't believe women do like José much," reflected Flick.

"Except Nitschkan," replied Pearl. "She says she's trying to reform him and save his soul; but it mostly consists in getting him to do all the odd jobs she can think of, and Mrs. Thomas is trying to flirt with him."

"I guess you don't like him, because you don't see him as he is," ruminated Bob Flick. "He's not afraid of anything; he'll take chances, just without thinking of them, that I don't believe another man on earth would. He's always good-natured and amusing, and look how he can cook, Pearl," turning in his saddle, "just think of that! Why, he could take a piece of sole leather and make it taste like venison."

But even this list of perfections failed to arouse any enthusiasm for José in Pearl, or to convince her that the proper place for him was not within the sheltering walls of a prison.

"Well, if you don't care much for José, how about Seagreave?" There was a touch of anxiety in his glance as he asked this question. The jealousy which he could never succeed in overcoming, and yet of which he was continually ashamed, bit like acid into his heart as he thought of Seagreave's fair youthfulness; the charm of his long, clear, blue eyes; the winning sweetness of his nature.

Pearl drew her brows together a little, her eyes gloomed through her long, silky, black lashes. "I don't like queer people," she said petulantly. "He always seems to be mooning about something, and most of the time he acts like you weren't on the earth." An expression of surprise and resentment grew upon her face and darkened it. Then, with a gesture of annoyance, she threw up her head, dismissing the subject from her mind. A vision of Hanson rose before her and her heart turned to the memory of his ruddy good looks, his gay, bold eyes, his magnetic vitality.

"Say, Bob," she began, a little hesitatingly, "does that Mrs. Hanson still live around here?"

He nodded. "I got a letter from her the other day. She wanted me to attend to a little mining business down in the desert. She's pretty shrewd in business, too."

"Why couldn't she attend to her own business?" asked Pearl sharply. "What's she bothering you, a stranger, for?"

"Because her father died not long ago and she inherited some property and she's got to go East to see about it. I shouldn't wonder if she's already started."

She repressed a sudden start and looked quickly at him, but he was gazing out over the ranges and did not see her, which, she reflected, was an excellent thing, considering the wild and daring idea which had flashed across her mind. If Hanson but knew that his wife had left Colina no power on earth could prevent him from immediately journeying thither. Should she mention the fact in a letter to her mother? She debated this for a day or two, the temptation to do so was almost overmastering, but her pride finally triumphed in the struggle, and she left the matter on the knees of the gods.

Yet, in the depths of her wild heart, she knew that he would come, that he must long have awaited just such an opportunity, and she had no doubt that he kept himself informed of the movements of the woman who bore his name. Her spirits rose in the contemplation of glorious moments when she should live to the full again, when she should feel herself to be as a quickened and soaring flame of passion and intrigue. And what an opportunity! Her father was down at the Mont d'Or all day. Hughie, of course, was about most of the time, but she would not meet Hanson in the cabin, but out in the golden October weather among the pines. Bob Flick was returning to the desert the next day, so she had nothing to fear from him.

Several days, almost a week, passed, and then a letter from Hanson, telling her of Mrs. Hanson's departure, and assuring her that he meant to come to Colina, that he would not stop to consider any risks he might be taking, and that he was equally indifferent to her possible prohibition. He was coming, coming on the morning train the next Thursday, and this was Saturday.

She drew a long breath and pressed the letter to her heart. She would never yield to him, never; not so long as that barrier to a marriage between himself and herself—Mrs. Hanson—remained a legal wall between them, but, oh! if she was to live, she must see him now and again, at long, long intervals; but nevertheless occasionally.

The listless melancholy of months fell from her, and those about her, noting the change, laid it to Bob Flick's influence and to the fact that she was almost continually in the saddle; also Hughie and Gallito congratulated themselves that she was speedily forgetting Hanson. Her whole demeanor had changed, she even condescended to banter José, and she took his jibes in good part; and in the evenings when José and Gallito, Mrs. Nitschkan and Mrs. Thomas, had sat down to the silence of their cards, and Hughie played softly on the piano in a dim corner, she talked to Seagreave; in fact, their conversations became more prolonged every evening.

One morning, a few days before Hanson arrived, she had chosen to stroll up the mountainside, instead of riding as usual. Absorbed in her glowing anticipations, she had walked almost above timber line, then, presently, just as she realized that she was growing tired, the trail had led her to an ideal and natural resting place, a little chamber of ease. It was an open space where the pine needles lay thick upon the ground, so thick that Pearl's feet sank deeply into them as she entered. All about it were gnarled and stunted pine trees, bent and twisted by the high mountain winds, until they appeared as strange, Japanese silhouettes against the deep, blue sky. It was delightfully warm here, where the sun fell so broadly, and Pearl threw herself down upon the pine needles. The wind sighed softly through the forest, barely penetrating her retreat, and finally, under the spell of the soft and dreamy atmosphere, she fell asleep. After a time she wakened, and slowly opening her eyes saw to her surprise that Seagreave was sitting a few feet away from her. He held a book in his hand, but he was not reading, neither was he looking at her, but out through a break in the trees at innumerable blue ranges, floating, unsubstantial as mist in a flood of sunshine.

She sat up, and he, hearing her move, turned quickly and met her eyes.

"I came here to read," he said, in smiling explanation. "I often come, and, seeing you here and asleep, I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind if I stayed and kept away the bears and mountain lions."

She was still a little dazed. "Why, why," rubbing her eyes, "I must have been asleep. It is so pleasant here."

He turned quickly. "You find it pleasant?" he said, "then the mountains must be beginning to exert their spell upon you."

"I don't know," she answered slowly; "I don't hate them like I used to; but I'll never really care for them. I love the desert."

"You must tell me what you find in the desert," he said. She looked out broodingly at the ranges, the strange sphynx look in her eyes, but she did not answer him. At last she withdrew her gaze from the hills and glanced rather contemptuously at the book in his hands. "Don't you ever work?" she asked abruptly. "You're a man."

"Sometimes I work down in the mines, if I want to," he replied carelessly; "but I rarely want to. Sometimes, too, I write a little."

"But don't you want to work all the time with your hands or your head, like other men do?" she persisted.

"No," he returned. "To what profit would it be?" There was just a trace of bitterness in his voice.

"But you are strong and a man," she spoke now with unveiled scorn. "You wouldn't be content always to sit up in a mountain cabin by the fire like an old woman."

"Wouldn't I?" he asked. "Why not?" The bitterness was more apparent now, and a shadow had fallen over his face. Pearl realized that, for the moment, at least, he had forgotten her presence, and in truth, his mind had traveled back over the years and he was living over again the experience which had made him a wanderer on the earth and finally a recluse in the lonely and isolated mountains.

It was a more or less conventional story. All events which penetrate deeply into human experience are. They are vital and living, because universal; therefore we call them conventional. Seagreave had been left an orphan at an early age, and as he inherited wealth and was born of a line of gentlemen and scholars who had given the world much of service in their day, his material environment offered him no obstacles to be overcome. There were no barriers between him and any normal desires and ambitions, nothing to excite his emulation with suggestions that there were forbidden and therefore infinitely desirable gardens in which he might wander a welcome guest. But life sets a premium on hard knocks. It is usually the bantling which is cast upon the rocks who wins most of the prizes, having acquired in a hard school powers of resistance and endurance.

Seagreave's pleasant experiences continued through youth into manhood. When quite young he became engaged to a charming girl about his own age whom his guardians considered eminently suitable. Among many friendships, he had one so congenial that he fancied no circumstance could arise which could strain or break this tie.

And then, on the very eve of his marriage, his sweetheart had eloped with this friend of his boyhood, and he had not only this wound of the heart to endure, but also the consciousness that he was pilloried as a blind fool by all of his acquaintances.

Consequently he had, in his first young bitterness and heartbreak, taken a sort of gloomy satisfaction in living remote from his fellow beings and burying himself in the wilds, ever strengthening his capacity to do without the ordered and cultivated life of which he had been a part, and which had seemed essential to his well-being; and he had no disillusionizing past experiences to teach him the philosophy that time assuages all griefs, and that it is the part of common sense to take life as you find it.

Gradually his new manner of living, of wandering whither he would without ties or responsibilities, became a habit to him. He lost interest in the world of achievement as well as in the world of manners, but so insidious was this change, this shifting of the point of view, that he had never fully realized it until now when, in some way, some indefinite, goading and not altogether pleasant way, Pearl was bringing a faint realization of his acquired habit of mind home to him.

As Pearl watched him and wondered what remembrance it was that clouded his face, her interest in him increased. "I wonder—" she said, and hesitated.

Her words recalled him to himself immediately; with a little gesture of impatience as if annoyed at his own weakness, he put from him these morbid memories of the past. "You wonder—what?" he asked.

She flushed slightly at the thought that he might think her guilty of an intrusive curiosity, but she could not stop now. She must know more. Her craving intelligence demanded some explanation. "José," she said doubtfully and almost involuntarily.

A smile of pure amusement rippled about his mouth. "Yes," he said, "José. What about him?"

Speech came readily enough to her now. "You know what José is," accusingly. "You know the big reward that is offered for him, and yet you keep him in your cabin and treat him almost like a brother."

"Quite like a brother," he said; "why not? Who would have the heart to put Pan in prison? Do you think shutting José up behind bars would make him any better? At any rate, he is safe to do no mischief here, and he is happy. Would you want us to give him up?"

"I!" She looked at him in surprise and shook her head. "But then we are different, my father and me. He likes bad company, and I guess I take after him. But you, they call you Saint Harry, you are respectable."

"Not I," he said earnestly; "you must not accuse me of such things. Look yonder at that long mountain trail, leading up to the peaks. There are mile-stones in it. So it is in life. When we have stopped trying to make people measure up to our standard we have passed one; when we have gone beyond forgiveness and learned that there is never anything to forgive we have passed another, and when we have ceased from all condemnation we have progressed a little farther."

She made no response to this. In that sunwarmed silence the wind whispered softly through the pines, a sound like the monotonous, musical murmur of distant seas. "But you will forget all that," she said suddenly. "You will go back to the world. I know."

He smiled invincibly. "How do you know?"

She tapped her breast lightly with her jewel-encrusted hand. "From myself. Oh, how I have hated life since I came here, but now I love it again, I want it." She threw wide her arms and smiled radiantly, but not at him, rather at the vision of life her imagination conjured. "I want to dance, dance, dance, I want to live."

"And you will dance for us here in the mountains before you go away?" he asked, with interest. "Good dancing is very rare and very beautiful. There are very few great dancers."

"Yes, only a few," she said briefly. He could not know that she was one of them, of course, but nevertheless it piqued her vanity that he did not divine it or take it for granted. She resolved then and there to show him how she could dance, and as she decided this, a subtle, wicked smile crept about her lips. Since he was so sure that he would never return to the world, the world should come to him.

"But you haven't said yet that you would dance for us," he said.

"Yes," the same smile still lingering in her eyes and on her lips, "yes, I will. The camp have sent half a dozen invitations for me to do so, through Hughie. They have a dance once a week in the town hall, don't they? When is the next one?"

"I think I heard Hughie say next Thursday night. He always helps out the orchestra when he is here, doesn't he?"

Next Thursday night! Her eyes widened. That was the evening of the day that Rudolf was coming. Perhaps—perhaps, he would stay over and see her, it was not much of a risk he would be taking in doing so. Her father would not go down to see her dance, he would prefer to sit over his cards with José, and no one else knew Hanson. Oh, what a prospect! She almost clapped her hands with joy.

The wind sent a shower of pine needles over them, and Seagreave looked up, scanning the sky with a keen glance. "It will soon be time for the snow to fly," he said.

She looked at him incredulously. "Why, it is mild as summer."

"Yes, but this is October, and October in the mountains. Perhaps in only a few days now the ground will all be covered with snow."

"I hope I shall be away before that time," shivering a little.

"But think what you will miss. Think how beautiful it will be; all still, just a great, white silence; the snow with its wonderful shadows, and sometimes, when the air is very clear, I seem to hear the chiming of great bells."

She shivered again and rose. "I don't believe I'd like it," she said. "I think it would frighten me."

He walked down the hill with her to Gallito's cabin, but on their way they spoke little. Her mind was full of Hanson's coming, and of the revelation of dancing which she meant to show him and, incidentally, Saint Harry. It was not until later in the day that she remembered how impersonal, according to her standards, her conversation with Seagreave had been. Not once, either by word or look had he told her that she was beautiful and to be desired. A new experience for her; never before had she encountered such an attitude in any man. It must be, therefore, that there was some other woman in his life; but where? Certainly not here in Colina or she would have heard of it, and he had been in the mountains two years without leaving them. Surely he, too, must have known unhappiness in love. At intervals during the day she built up various hypotheses explaining the circumstances of his grief, and she also let her imagination dwell upon the woman, picturing her appearance and wondering about her disposition.

That evening at supper she arranged with Hugh that she was to accept the standing invitation of the camp, and that she would dance for them the following Thursday evening, and with an entire return of enthusiasm talked music and different steps to him until José and Mrs. Thomas, rendered more expeditious even than usual by their interest in the topic, had cleared away all traces of the meal and moved the table back against the wall. Then Hugh began to play.

"Wait a minute," Pearl cried to him, "until I get my dancing slippers and my manton de Manila." She vanished through the doorway leading to her room and reappeared presently, a fan in her hand and a gorgeous fringed, silken shawl thrown about her; it was white and embroidered in flowers of all colors. "Ready," she called over her shoulder to Hugh.

Then she also began, but not at once to dance; instead, she executed a series of postures; almost without apparent transition she melted from one pose to another of plastic grace, her body the mere, boneless, obedient servant of her directing will.

These she followed with some wonderfully rapid exercises. Sometimes she stood perfectly still and one saw only the marvelous play of her body muscles, plainly visible, as no corsets had ever fettered her unmatched lines. Again, holding the body motionless, she moved only the arms, now with a slow and alluring rhythm, and again with incredible rapidity, showing to the full the flexibility and liquidity of the wrist movements for which she was later to be so famous. Then holding the body and arms quite still she danced only with her legs, and then arms, legs, body married in a faultless rhythm, she whirled like a cyclone about the room.

Her father and José sat and smoked and watched her every movement with keen, critical eyes. Were they not Spaniards who had danced all through their childhood and youth, as naturally as they breathed? About Gallito's mouth played the bleak smile which in him betokened content, while José could barely wait for her to finish her preliminary exercises before he besought her to let him join her. Even Mrs. Nitschkan laid down some fishing tackle with which she was engrossed and Mrs. Thomas looked on admiringly and half jealously.

"Dios," cried José plaintively, "Hughie's music invites me, even if the Señorita does not."

Pearl smiled complaisantly upon him. "The Jota!" she said, and immediately he joined her, making no bad second. Together they danced until Seagreave came down from his cabin, and then, flushed and laughing, she flung herself into a chair and refused to go on, although he begged her to do so.

"Say, Sadie," breathed Mrs. Thomas, "don't you believe I could learn to do that?"

"No," returned her friend, looking up from an earnest contemplation of various hooks, "I don't believe that no woman that's been married and had children and sorrows and buried a husband and is as heavy as a hippopotamus, and stumbles and interferes with both feet like Mis' Evans's old horse, Whitey, can learn something where the trick of it is keepin' up in the air most of the time."

"You needn't hurt a person's feelings by being so harsh." Mrs. Thomas's eyes filled with tears. "Oh, jus' take in Mr. Seagreave," she whispered; "I haven't seen him look at a lady that way yet."

"Cert'ny not at you. He ain't seem' no miner's wives," returned Mrs. Nitschkan cruelly.

"Father," cried Pearl joyously to Gallito, "I have lost nothing. I am not even tired, nor stiff. If anything, I am better than ever. Isn't it so? No," as Seagreave still continued to urge José and her to dance, "no," she lifted her narrow, glittering eyes to his, all the old challenge in them again, the pale coffee stains beneath them had deepened, her cheeks held the flush of a crimson rose, "not until Thursday night, then I shall dance the desert for you, and not alone the desert," she flashed her man-compelling, provocative smile straight into his eyes, "I shall bring the world to you, and then you will find how tired you are of these old mountains."

He smiled at her serenely, remotely, as one of the high gods might have smiled upon a lovely, earthly Bacchante. What had the vain and fleeting world to offer him who had so long ignored it?

Then, while Hugh still continued to play, Seagreave followed her to a shadowy seat near a window, whither she had withdrawn to be out of the warmth of the fire, and together they sat there talking until the moon dropped behind the mountain.

José, having finished his game of cards with Gallito and the two women, who had now left the table and were examining Pearl's manton de Manila, sent his twinkling, darting glance in their direction. "Caramba!" he cried softly, "but she has the sal Andaluz, she can dance! I have seen many, but not such another." And then he crossed his arms and bent his body over them and rocked back and forth in soundless and apparently inexhaustible mirth in which Gallito finally joined him.

"I don't know what you are laughing at, José," he said; "but it is very funny."

"I laugh that the Devil has chosen you as an instrument, my Francisco," he said.

"Because I give you shelter?" asked Gallito, lighting another cigarette.

"Because the Devil schemes always how he can lure Saint Harry from his ice peak. He has not succeeded with cards, nor with wine, nor even with me, for I have tried to tempt him to plan with me those little robberies which for amusement I dream of, here in these damnable solitudes. But before he was a saint he had a wild heart, had Harry. You have but to look at him to know that. Have you forgotten that he has not always lived in these mountains? Do you not recall that he was middle-weight champion of Cape Colony, that he was a scout all through the Boer war? That he also saw service in India and has certain decorations to show for it? Saint Harry! ha, ha, ha!

"The one thing he could not resist was any kind of a mad adventure, all the chances against him and all the hounds on top of him, and he pitting his wits against them and scheming to outwit them. A petticoat could never hold him. Oh, yes," in answer to Gallito's upraised brows, "there have been one or two, here and there, but they meant little to him, as any one might see. But, as you know and I know, Gallito, the Devil often wins by persistence; he never gives up. So, although Saint Harry's case is a puzzling one, the Devil is not discouraged. He looks about him and says, 'My friend, Gallito, my old and tried friend, has a daughter, beautiful as a flower, graceful as a fountain. I will bring her here and then Saint Harry will scramble off his ice peak fast enough.'"

"Your foolish wits run away with you," growled Gallito.

"My legs must run away with me now," said José, rising and stretching his arms and yawning. "But tell me first why was your daughter sad when she first came here?"

"Because she had fallen in love with a damned rascal," said Gallito bitterly, "after the manner of women."

"After the manner of women," José nodded, and whispered behind his hand, so that the two mountain ladies might not overhear him. "Believe it or not, many have loved me. But women like extremes, too; if they love rascals, they also adore saints. They see the saint standing there in his niche, so calm, so peaceful and composed, entirely forgetful of them, and this they cannot endure. Their brains are on fire; they spend their time scheming and planning how they can claw him down from his pedestal. They burn candles and pray to all the saints in Paradise to help them, and they offer hostages to the Devil, too. They do not really know the difference between devil and angel or between good and bad; but they cannot bear it that the saint is indifferent to them. That is something that drives them mad. Ah, it is a strong saint that can stand firm in his niche against their wiles."

"It is an experience that you will never suffer from, José."

"But who can say?" exclaimed José, and speaking with gravity. "Some day I shall devote myself to good works and to making my peace with the church, and who knows, I may yet be a saint. But one thing I am sure of, I shall never leave my niche for a woman."

"You know nothing, José."

"I know that I will never waste my cooking on a woman. I will enter a monastery of fat monks first and cook for them. They will appreciate it. But to return to Saint Harry and your daughter now—"

"Come," said Gallito harshly, pushing back his chair, "it is time you went home. The ladies," indicating Mrs. Nitschkan and Mrs. Thomas, who had been getting on their capes and hoods, "are waiting for you to escort them."

CHAPTER X

As the day drew near upon which Pearl expected to meet Hanson again all things seemed, as if by some special arrangement with the Fates, to accommodate themselves to her plans. She had intended to ask Seagreave for the use of his private parlor among the pines, intimating that she desired to retire thither to practice some new steps, and, lo! the night before, after discussing weather probabilities with her father and José, he had decided to spend the greater part of the day in the village laying in a full stock of winter provisions.

Hughie also would be in the village, making arrangements for the event of the evening and seeing that the piano was properly installed and tuned. Gallito would of course be at the Mont d'Or, and as for José, he had announced his intention of assisting Mrs. Thomas in the making of some delicate and elaborate cakes, difficult of composition and of which Pearl was especially fond, and also of constructing certain delicious pastries. No one could think of José as merely cooking; the results of his genius justified the use of such high-sounding words as "composing" or "constructing." Thus, his morning would be fully occupied.

Propitious Fates! Her pathway was smoothed before her; yet, alas! such is the perversity of the human mind, that as the morning dawned, as the minutes ticked themselves away on the clock, as the hour drew near when she should again meet Hanson, after all these months of separation, her spirit grew heavier instead of lighter. There was a return of listlessness and an indifference to his coming which constantly increased. She even felt indifferent to her own appearance.

At last, reluctantly, she threw a lace scarf about her head and, wrapping a long, crimson cloak about her, she left the cottage and took her way slowly up the hill.

As it was yet far too early for her rendezvous she turned aside from the main road and followed the narrow mountain trail which led to the cabin occupied by Mrs. Nitschkan and Mrs. Thomas. The gypsy, in her usual careless, almost masculine attire, stood in the door of her cabin gazing out at the mountains in all their mellow and triumphant glory, the evanescent glory of late autumn. A pick and fishing rod lay across the door sill and a lean, flea-bitten dog dozed at her feet. Her arms were akimbo and a pipe was thrust between her teeth.

Her quick ear caught the sound of Pearl's approach and suddenly her blue, twinkling gaze dropped from the hills to the trail which led to her door. Seeing who her visitor was, a smile of blended curiosity and welcome crossed her face. "Howdy, Pearl," she called jovially, "come and set a spell." She removed the pick and fishing rod and dragged the dog out of the way. Through the open doorway Mrs. Thomas and José might be seen in the room beyond, bending over a table, evidently deeply engrossed in the composition of some cakes.

"I can only stay a minute; I got a notion to walk this morning." There was a cool deviltry in the slanting gaze with which she surveyed the other woman.

"Seagreave, I'll bet," returned Mrs. Nitschkan frankly. "It ain't in either you or Marthy Thomas to let a man alone. What possesses you, anyway?"

Pearl continued to regard her with that subtle, burning, mocking look. "Your kind can never know," she taunted.

"Mebbe," said Mrs. Nitschkan laconically, "but you're different from Marthy. She's just mush. She'll be thinkin' now that she's cracked about José. If it wasn't him it would be your father, and if there wasn't no man up here at all, she'd hoist that crêpe veil on her head, stick a red or blue bow at her neck and go swingin' down to camp, tryin' to persuade herself an' me that all she went for was a package of tea or some bacon. But you're different, always a yellin' about bein' free and yet always a tryin' to get tangled up."

Again Pearl laughed wickedly. "You tramp woman! Why would you rather hunt bear or mountain lions than shoot squirrels? Because there's danger in it." She laughed mirthlessly. "I guess it's for the same reason that I got to hunt the biggest game there is—man, and he hunts me."

Mrs. Nitschkan relighted her pipe. "Bob Flick's your best bet," she remarked impersonally.

"Talk about guns and fishing rods and dogs, something you know about," said Pearl scornfully, touching the dozing dog lightly with her foot. He growled angrily, resenting the liberty.

"You better leave Flip alone," cautioned Mrs. Nitschkan; "he's liable to bite anybody but me. Always be kind to dumb animals, 'specially cross dogs. And, say, Pearl, I been running the cards this morning. It was such a dandy day that I didn't know whether I'd do some assessment work or spend the day fishin'; the cards decided in favor of fishin'. I had to get some light so's I could tell how to go ahead. How any one can get along without a pack of cards! It's sure a lamp to the feet. If you wait a minute I'll run 'em for you."

She vanished inside and returned immediately with a board and a well-worn pack of cards. These she shuffled and, after Pearl had cut them several times, she began to lay them out in neat rows on the board on her knee, uttering a strange, crooning sound the while and studying each card as it fell with the most absorbed interest.

"Um-mmm!" with a heavy sigh and shaking her head forebodingly. "You better go home, girl, as fast as you can and shut yourself up in the cabin all day. Did you ever see anything like that?" pointing to the cards. "Trouble, trouble, nothin' but trouble. If it ain't actual murder an' death, it's too near it to be any joke. Look how them spades turns up every whipstitch. How can folks doubt!"

But the cards of evil omen lying there on the board before had roused all of Pearl's inherent superstition and stirred her swift anger against Mrs. Nitschkan. "Parrot-croaker!" she exclaimed angrily, and followed this with a string of Spanish oaths and expletives. "Trouble is over for me."

Mrs. Nitschkan was on her feet in a minute. The board and the cards fell unheeded to the ground. Her small, quick eyes began to roll ominously and show red, and her relaxed figure became immediately tense and alert as that of a panther on guard.

"Trouble's just beginnin' for you," her voice was a mere guttural growl. "A little more sass from you, you double-j'inted jumpin'-jack dancer, and I'll jerk you to the edge of that cliff yonder and throw you down. I'm feelin' particularly good right now," rolling up her sleeves and showing the great knots of swelling muscles on her arms. "Get out of my way."

With one big sweep of her arm she brushed her companion aside as if she had been a fly; but with incredible rapidity Pearl recovered herself and sprang directly before her.

"Then get me out," she taunted, "try it, try it. I'd slip through your fingers like oil. It's no good to flash your over-sized man-muscles on me; I'm made of whip-cord and whalebone. Do you get that?"

Mrs. Nitschkan's courage sprang from a sense of trained and responsive muscles and of tremendous physical strength, but at the sound of that cool voice, those mocking, unwavering eyes, there swept over her an awe of the slighter woman's far higher courage. It was an almost superstitious fear and respect which chilled the hot blood of her passion, the instinctive obedience of the flesh to the indomitable spirit. Reluctantly, against her will and in spite of her anger, the fighting gipsy paid deference to the steel-like, unflinching quality of the Pearl, when, rising above her slender physique, she faced unafraid the brute strength which threatened her, and dominated the situation by sheer consciousness of power.

The gypsy, chilled and subdued, confused by forces she could not understand, fell back a step or two and Pearl seized this opportunity to slip away, calling a careless good-by over her shoulder.

But the depression which had touched her from the time she wakened now lay heavier on her spirit. Her mind reverted to the cards of ill omen and she shivered with a faint chill of apprehension. And as she walked on it seemed to her that the atmosphere was in tune with her mood.

The air was soft, and yet sharp enough to quicken the color in her cheeks, but still indefinably wistful. The song of the wind among the pines, that mountain wind which never ceases to blow, had a sort of sighing pensiveness in its falling cadences. The deep, blue sky dreamed over the russet tree tops and the yellow leaves filled the forest with their flying gold.

And the spirit of the year seemed to have entered into Pearl. She was as wistful as the day, as pensive as the sighing wind. She arrived early at her destination. The sun lay warm in her little bower of encircling pines and she sat down on a fallen log to await Hanson's coming. He could not take her by surprise for, through a little opening in the trees, she could see the trail, it was in plain view.

Sitting down then to wait, she rested her elbow on her knee and her chin in the palm of her hand. It seemed as if the power of anticipation were gone from her. She wondered dully at her own languor, not only of body, but of mind. In a few moments she would see again the man whom she had passionately loved, and in parting from whom she had not dreamed it to be within human possibility so to suffer, and yet, at the prospect of meeting him again, her heart throbbed not one beat faster. She could not even look forward to dancing that night with any excitement or pleasure. She wondered what Seagreave would think of her when he saw her; she would be a vision far more brilliant than any spirit of the autumn woods, and she would wear her emeralds again, the emeralds for which Bob Flick had squandered a fortune. She put up her hand and touched them where they hung about her neck, concealed under her gown, for she wore them night and day, never allowing them to leave her person. Good old Bob! Seagreave had said there were only a few great dancers. Well, she would show him. She could dance; no matter how critical he was, he would have to admit that. And then her heart seemed suddenly to run down with a queer, cold little thrill.

There was Hanson ascending the trail. He was only a few feet away, and even as she jumped to her feet he saw her and waved his hand. He paused a moment for breath and then hurried on.

"Pearl!" he cried, and caught her in his arms, covering her face with kisses and crushing her against his heart. It seemed hours to her, but it was really only a moment before she pushed him from her, slipped from his arms, and stood panting and flushed before him.

"Pearl, O Pearl!" he cried again, and would once more have caught her deftly to him, but again she slipped from him. "Sit down," she cried petulantly, motioning to the fallen log. "You're out of breath, you've had a long climb." She herself sat down and he followed her example, encircling her with his arms; a tiny frown showed itself in her forehead and she bent slightly forward as if to evade his clasp, folding her arms about her knees.

"Gee! You bet it was a climb," he said, wiping his brow and still breathing a little hard. "But I'd have climbed right on up to heaven if you'd been there waiting for me. Lord, Pearl! if I'd had to wait much longer to see you it would have finished me, I do believe. Oh, sweetheart, you're lovelier than ever, and you're not going to punish either of us any more, I can tell you that. You're coming down with me and we're going to live, Pearl, live, just as I told you we would, down there in the palms in the desert. Now I'm telling you again among the pines, and this time you're going to listen and come. I guess we've both of us pretty well found out that it's no use our trying to live apart any longer."

Her crimson cloak had fallen from her shoulders, and Hanson, holding her hand in his, had pushed up her sleeve and was kissing her arm, as he talked, up as far as her elbow and down again to the tips of her fingers. She did not even attempt to draw her hand away, she was still in that state of apathy, where all her senses seemed dulled; and so she let him babble on, murmuring his adoration and his rose-colored dreams of the future.

"By George!" he exclaimed, in sheer, sincere amazement. "To think of you, the Black Pearl, spending all these months up here in these dead old mountains without even a moving-picture show to look at. You got an awful will, girl."

She gazed with somber eyes beyond him. Life, did he say "life"? That was what she asked, what she demanded, life as glorious and as rich in color as a full-blown rose. And only a little while ago she had dreamed that she could find it with him, that that was what he offered to her. She remembered the question that Harry Seagreave had asked her. "What does life mean to you?" Ah, since that first night in the mountains life seemed to have expanded into infinite horizons before her widening vision. She dreamed over them, forgetful for the moment of the man beside her, until he, turning in the full tide of his talk, pressed his lips ardently, passionately to hers.

Taken by surprise, she uttered one of her fluent Spanish oaths and, springing to her feet, stood with her body slightly bent forward, her hands on her hips, gazing at him with her narrow, gleaming eyes. Her apathy was gone, she was alive now to her finger tips.

He rose, too. "Honey, what is it?" he questioned dazedly. "What's got you now?"

"Don't touch me," she said tensely. "Don't dare to touch me."

He looked at her unbelievingly and then fell back a pace or two. "My Lord! What's the matter with you?" he cried.

"I don't know," she muttered wildly. Her eyes still measured him, his bold, obvious good looks, his ruddy self-complacency, his habitual and shallow geniality, the satisfied vanity of a mouth steadily becoming looser; the depiction of years of self-indulgence in the little veins on his highly colored cheeks; the sagging lines of his well-set-up figure, ever taking on more flesh.

So she saw him, not perhaps as he was, but in the light of her own harsh and unmodified criticism, and mercilessly she reflected upon him all the scorn she felt for herself. She did not consider or even remember that with what strength of affection he possessed he had loved her; that, after his constitution he had given her of his best, all he had to give, in fact; that for her he had more than once faced danger, and just to see her again was even now facing it, fearlessly.

He had grown to expect from her an infinite variety of moods, but something in her pose, her expression, frightened him now. "Honey, what are you driving at?" he asked, a little tremulously, and stretched out his hand to lay it on her shoulder.

But again an oath whipped from her lips, her glance darkened. She drew back from him with the horse-shoe frown showing plainly on her forehead.

He looked at her, his whole face broken up, his mouth trembling, something like tears in his eyes. "Why, Pearl," he faltered, "ain't you glad to see me? Why, here I been waiting all these damned, dreary months, never thinking of any one but you, never even looking at another woman, just dreaming of the moment when I could put my arms around you again and know that you loved me and were mine."

A hard and bitter smile showed on her mouth. "Yours! Loved you!" she cried. "My God! You!"

Her unmistakable, unconcealed scorn was like a dagger thrust in the heart, and that stab of pain stirred his anger and restored him to himself. His face went almost purple, his cold eyes blazed. "Say," he cried roughly, "what are you driving at, anyway? Come down to cases now." He caught her by the wrist. "What did you let me come up here for? Just to make a monkey of me? Have you been treasuring spite against me all these months, and is this your way of getting even?"

She dragged her hand away from him and stepped back. "I let you come, if you want to know it, because I thought I was in love with you. Lord, think of it!" she laughed drearily. "I haven't fooled you any worse than I have myself."

He rubbed his hand across his eyes. "It ain't true," he said loudly, positively, defiantly.

"Hush," she exclaimed, darting forward. "What was that?" There was a sound as if some one had trod the underbrush not many feet away. She listened intently a moment, a wild fear at her heart that Seagreave might have returned unexpectedly. It was probably some animal, for there was no further sound. "Oh," she cried, in involuntary relief, "it must have been José!"

A gleam came into his eyes, a light of triumph as at the remembrance of some potent weapon of which he had been carelessly forgetful. "And who is José?" he asked.

She lifted her startled gaze to his, the question recalled to her her own unthinking speech. "Oh, one of the miners," she said indifferently.

He knew her too well to fancy that he could trap her into any new admissions, and he had no wish to arouse her suspicions. Therefore he dropped the subject, especially as he felt fully answered.

He leaned against a tree and, drawing a cigar from his pocket, lighted it, although the hand with which he did so trembled. "I guess some explanations are in order between you and me," he said. "I guess it's about time that you began to get it into your head that you can't make a fool of me all the time. I'm ready and willing to admit that there was some excuse for you down in the desert. I made a bad break there, which I'm freely conceding was no way to treat a lady. But that don't explain or excuse the way you've treated me this morning," he laughed bitterly. "There's no way to explain it unless living here in the mountains has gone to your head or unless there's another man. Is there?" his eyes pierced her. "Is there?"

She looked back at him with a hard, inscrutable smile, but she did not answer.

Another man! He couldn't, wouldn't believe it. Why, it was only yesterday that they two had met and loved in the desert. Again he fell to pleading. "Oh, Pearl, be like what you were again. Don't stand off from me that way, honey. It ain't in you to be so cruel and hard. Come back to me, here in my arms. Have your spells; treat me like you please; but come back to me. Oh, honey, come."

She looked beyond him, not at him, and then ground a little heap of freshly fallen pine needles beneath her heel.

"What's the use?" she said curtly. "It's over. We can quit right here, Rudolf. I'm done with you, for good."

His outstretched arms fell by his side, his jaw set. "I guess that's right," he said viciously. "Any bigger fool than me could see that; and I'm not going to waste any more time crawling around on my hands and knees after you; I can tell you that. But you can't fool me on the other man proposition."

"I'm not trying to," she interjected cruelly.

"Who is he?" his voice was ragged and uneven. "Not Flick, I'll bet my hat. He's been your dog too long for you to fling him anything but a bone. You'll never tell me, though."

"Not I," she answered indifferently.

"Then I'll just satisfy myself—to-night."

She started and frowned. "You're not staying for that," harshly. "It's not safe."

"Oh, yes, I am staying for that, just to satisfy a little curiosity I've got, and I guess I'll find it safe enough. I guess you've been playing with kids so far in your career, Miss Pearl Gallito; but you'll find that the old man's not quite so easy disposed of as you think. I've got an idea that you'll be down on your knees trying to make terms with him before we're precisely 'quit' as you've just said."

"Bah!" she said. "Wind, wind. You can't frighten me with threats. Stay and watch me dance all you please. That's the only way you'll ever see me again—from the audience." Without any appearance of haste, she lifted her scarf from the pine branch on which she had thrown it and twisted it slowly about her head, then picking up her crimson cape from the ground, she shook the pine needles from it, wrapped it about her, and without another word to him, without even a look, took her way down the trail.

She did not believe that he meant what he said, she did not believe that he meant to stay and see her dance that evening. The thought that he would do so had annoyed her at first, but as she walked downward through the wine-like amber air, she realized that she did not particularly care. Her whole being seemed absorbed in the revelation which had come to her in the first moment of her meeting with Hanson—her love for Seagreave. In this new, exclusive emotion, the recent interview and all that had led up to it became to her a mere unpleasant episode, upon which her indifferent imagination refused to dwell. She wanted to be alone, that she might fully realize this stupendous change in her feelings and in her entire outlook upon life. As she thought upon it she saw that it was no sudden miracle, wrought in the twinkling of an eye, but an alteration of standards and emotion so gradual that she had not been aware of it.

Back in the cabin she luxuriated, exulted in the fact that she would be alone all day. She piled high the fire with logs, and threw herself in an easy chair. Thus she could dream undisturbed, could lie watching the leaping flames and vision for herself again that fair, regular, serene face, that tall, strong, slender figure. She counted the hours until she should see him again, until she should dance for him, for it was for him, him alone, that she would dance.

Thus she passed the greater part of the day, and even resented the intrusion upon her thoughts when her father returned a little earlier than usual from the mine.