or Malviny ain't the woman to throw away twelve hundred dollars on any
of them small-potato despots! She says Mamie speaks French already
like them French Petes. I don't quite make out what she means here.
She met Don Caesar in Paris, and she says, 'I think Mamie is nearly off
with Don Caesar, who has followed her here. I don't care about her
dropping him TOO suddenly; the reason I'll tell you hereafter. I think
the man might be a dangerous enemy.' Now, what do you make of this? I
allus thought Mamie rather cottoned to him, and it was the old woman
who fought shy, thinkin' Mamie would do better. Now, I am agreeable
that my gal should marry any one she likes, whether it's a dook or a
poor man, as long as he's on the square. I was ready to take Don
Caesar; but now things seem to have shifted round. As to Don Caesar's
being a dangerous enemy if Mamie won't have him, that's a little too
high and mighty for me, and I wonder the old woman don't make him climb
down. What do you think?"

"Who is Don Caesar?" asked Slinn.

"The man what picked you up that day. I mean," continued Mulrady,
seeing the marks of evident ignorance on the old man's face,--"I mean a
sort of grave, genteel chap, suthin' between a parson and a
circus-rider. You might have seen him round the house talkin' to your
gals."

But Slinn's entire forgetfulness of Don Caesar was evidently unfeigned.
Whatever sudden accession of memory he had at the time of his attack,
the incident that caused it had no part in his recollection. With the
exception of these rare intervals of domestic confidences with his
crippled private secretary, Mulrady gave himself up to money-getting.
Without any especial faculty for it--an easy prey often to unscrupulous
financiers--his unfailing luck, however, carried him safely through,
until his very mistakes seemed to be simply insignificant means to a
large significant end and a part of his original plan. He sank another
shaft, at a great expense, with a view to following the lead he had
formerly found, against the opinions of the best mining engineers, and
struck the artesian spring he did NOT find at that time, with a volume
of water that enabled him not only to work his own mine, but to furnish
supplies to his less fortunate neighbors at a vast profit. A league of
tangled forest and canyon behind Rough-and-Ready, for which he had paid
Don Ramon's heirs an extravagant price in the presumption that it was
auriferous, fur