" said my brother. "Mrs. Panel has always seemed
to me the most sensible woman----"

"Lady, _if_ you please."

"I beg pardon--the most sensible lady of my acquaintance, and the most
contented with the little home you've made for her."

"She helped make it. O' course, it's nateral, you bein' so young an'
innercent, that you should think you know more about Mis' Panel's
inside than I do, but take it from me that she's pined in secret for
what I'm a-goin' ter give her before I turn up my toes."

With that he rode away on his old pinto horse, smiling softly and
nodding his grizzled head.

Later, he travelled to San Francisco, where he interviewed presidents
of banks and other magnates. All and sundry were civil to Uncle Jap,
but they refused to look for a needle in a haystack. Uncle Jap
confessed, later, that he was beginning to get "cold feet," as he
expressed it, when he happened to meet an out-of-elbows individual who
claimed positively that he could discover water, gold, or oil, with no
tools or instruments other than a hazel twig. Uncle Jap, who forgot to
ask why this silver-tongued vagabond had failed to discover gold for
himself, returned in triumph to his ranch, bringing with him the
wizard, pledged to consecrate his gifts to the "locating" of the lake
of oil. In return for his services Uncle Jap agreed to pay him fifty
dollars a week, board and lodging included. When he told us of the
bargain he had made, his face shone with satisfaction and confidence.
He chuckled, as he added slyly--

"I peeked in to some o' them high-toned joolery stores on Montgomery
and Kearney Streets. Yas, I did. An' I priced what they call a ti-
airy, sort o' di'mond crown. They run up into the thousands o'
dollars. Think o' Mis' Panel in a _ti_-airy, boys; but shush-h-h-
h! Not a word to her--eh?"

We pledged ourselves to secrecy, but when Uncle Jap's back was turned,
Ajax cursed the wizard as the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims
cursed the jackdaw. When we saw Mrs. Panel, she seemed to be thinner
and more angular, but her lips were firmly compressed, as if she
feared that something better left unsaid might leak from them. An old
sunbonnet flapped about her red, wrinkled face, her hands, red and
wrinkled also, trembled when we inquired after the wizard and his
works.

"He's located the lake," she replied. Suppressed wrath boiled over, as
she added fiercely: "I wish 'twas a lake o' fire an' brimstone, an' him
a-bilin' in the mi