ours. If that girl stays with me another month I'll
make something out of her; but, Lord, why should I think she'll stay? They
never do. Mexicans must be born with an itch for travel."

"I notice," suggested Hard, "that in the haunts of civilization they are
cutting pies in sixes." Hard was a Bostonian--tall, spare, and muscular.
He came of a fine old Massachusetts family, and his gray eyes, surrounded
by a dozen kindly little wrinkles, his clean-cut mouth, wide but firm and
thin lipped, showed marks of breeding absent in the other men.

"Hush, don't tell her!" growled Adams. "A woman just naturally can't help
trying to follow the styles, and I can use more pie than a sixth, let me
tell you."

Mrs. Van, having attended to the distribution of the pie, sat down at the
foot of the table for a bit of conversation. She was a good-looking woman
with dark hair and eyes, and features which, though they were hard, were
not disagreeable. Her figure was restrained with much care from its
inclination to over fleshiness. Mrs. Van scorned the sort of woman who let
herself get fat and fought the enemy daily. I could not possibly tell you
her age, for no one but herself knew it. It might be thirty-five and on
the other hand it might easily be ten or fifteen years more.

She had led a roving life, beginning somewhere in the Middle West,
carrying on for a time in the East, where it involved a bit of stage life
to which she loved to refer. There had been a short spasm of matrimony,
not entirely satisfactory, the late Van Zandt having had his full share of
his sex's weaknesses, and a final career of keeping a boarding-house in
New York. After that she had drifted West and finally into Mexico. She had
been a veritable godsend to the Athens mining company which had undergone
the agonies of native cooking until the digestions of the American portion
of the working force were in a condition resembling half extinct craters.

"What I'm wonderin' is if Bob Street and his girl got married or not and
when they're coming home," she remarked as she sat down. One of Mrs. Van's
little peculiarities, saved probably from the wreck of her theatrical
career, was a tendency toward calling people by their first names when
they were not there to protect themselves and sometimes even when they
were.

"If they've got any sense at all they'll wait," said Scott, placidly.
"This is no time to be bringin' more women into the country."

"That's so," agreed Wil