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