and mystery
and outlandishness--oh, something Spanish. Perhaps you've felt it about
people that you know. Anyhow, they asked him about the climate, and
yellow fever and what the negroes were like and all that sort of thing.

"This Cubey, it appears is an island," Jeff would explain. Of
course, everybody knows how easily islands lend themselves to making
money,--"and for fruit, they say it comes up so fast you can't stop
it." And then he would pass into details about the Hash-enders and the
resurrectos and technical things like that till it was thought a wonder
how he could know it. Still, it was realized that a man with money has
got to know these things. Look at Morgan and Rockefeller and all the men
that make a pile. They know just as much as Jeff did about the countries
where they make it. It stands to reason.

Did I say that Jeff shaved in the same old way? Not quite. There was
something even dreamier about it now, and a sort of new element in the
way Jeff fell out of his monotone into lapses of thought that I, for
one, misunderstood. I thought that perhaps getting so much money,--well,
you know the way it acts on people in the larger cities. It seemed
to spoil one's idea of Jeff that copper and asbestos and banana lands
should form the goal of his thought when, if he knew it, the little shop
and the sunlight of Mariposa was so much better.

In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me his
perpetual interest in the great capitalists. He always had some item out
of the paper about them.

"I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for one
of them observatories," he would say.

And another day he would pause in the course of shaving, and almost
whisper: "Did you ever _see_ this Rockefeller?"

It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there was
another side to Jefferson's speculation that no one in Mariposa ever
knew, or will ever know now.

I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night. The
house,--I think I said it,--stood out behind the barber shop. You went
out of the back door of the shop, and through a grass plot with petunias
beside it, and the house stood at the end. You could see the light
of the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as you came
along. And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the evenings when
the shop got empty.

There was a round table that The Woman used to lay for supper, and after
supper