ts.

"You kin bet your whole pile on what this Mrs. Capting Baxter--ez used
to be French Inez of New Orleans--hez told ye. Ye kin take everything
she's unloaded. And it's only doin' the square thing to her to say, she
hain't done it out o' no cussedness, but just to satisfy herself, now
she's a married woman and past such foolishness. But that ain't neither
here nor there. The gist of the whole matter is that Spencer Tucker was
at the tienda the day after she sailed and after his boat capsized." He
then gave a detailed account of the interview, with the unnecessary but
truthful minutiae of his class, adding to the particulars already known
that the following week he visited the Summit House and was surprised
to find that Spencer had never been there, nor had he ever sailed from
Monterey.

"But why was this not told to me before?" said Mrs. Tucker, suddenly.
"Why not at the time? Why," she demanded almost fiercely, turning from
the one to the other, "has this been kept from me?"

"I'll tell ye why," said Patterson, sinking with crushed submission into
a chair. "When I found he wasn't where he ought to be, I got to lookin'
elsewhere. I knew the track of the hoss I lent him by a loose shoe. I
examined; and found he had turned off the high road somewhere beyond the
lagoon, jist as if he was makin' a bee line here."

"Well," said Mrs. Tucker, breathlessly.

"Well," said Patterson, with the resigned tone of an accustomed martyr,
"mebbe I'm a God-forsaken idiot, but I reckon he DID come yer. And mebbe
I'm that much of a habitooal lunatic, but thinking so, I calkilated
you'ld know it without tellin'."

With their eyes fixed upon her, Mrs. Tucker felt the quick blood rush
to her cheeks, although she knew not why. But they were apparently
satisfied with her ignorance, for Patterson resumed, yet more
gloomily:--

"Then if he wasn't hidin' here beknownst to you, he must have changed
his mind agin and got away by the embarcadero. The only thing wantin' to
prove that idea is to know how he got a boat, and what he did with the
hoss. And thar's one more idea, and ez that can't be proved," continued
Patterson, sinking his voice still lower, "mebbe it's accordin' to God's
laws."

Unsympathetic to her as the speaker had always been and still was, Mrs.
Tucker felt a vague chill creep over her that seemed to be the result of
his manner more than his words. "And that idea is . . . ?" she suggested
with pale lips.

"It's this! Fus