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