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The Black Pearl

by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow · English · Gutenberg #17418 · 491,920 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Black Pearl

Author: Mrs. Wilson Woodrow


        
Release date: December 30, 2005 [eBook #17418]
                Most recently updated: December 13, 2020

Language: English

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THE BLACK PEARL

by

MRS. WILSON WOODROW

Author of "Sally Salt," "The New Missioner," Etc.

Illustrated







[Illustration: "'I'm feelin' particularly good right now.'" (Page 181)]





New York and London
D. Appleton and Company
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
D. Appleton and Company
Published August, 1912
Printed in the United States of America





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


     "'I'm feelin' particularly good right now'"--(Frontispiece)

     "I'll show you what I'll do'"                                   102

     "There stood the Black Pearl alone"                             244

     "Holding cautiously to a little branch, she bent over him"      302




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 her 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 ring and animals and 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 of 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."

[Illustration: "'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
ha

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