d man Bobo.

"He'll soon be along," they remarked. "He must be awful lonesome."

But the old gentleman kept them out of Hades for full five years.

He lived alone with his grand-daughter and a stable helper in the
tumble-down adobe just to the left of the San Lorenzo race track. The
girl cooked, baked, and washed for him. Twice a week she peddled fruit
and garden stuff in San Lorenzo. Of these sales her grandsire exacted
the most rigorous accounting, and occasionally, in recognition of her
services, would fling her a nickel. The old man himself rarely left
home, and might be seen at all hours hobbling around his garden and
corrals, keenly interested in his own belongings, halter-breaking his
colts, anxiously watching the growth of his lettuce, counting the
oranges, and beguiling the fruitful hours with delightful calculation.

"It's all profit," he has often said to me. "We buy nothin' an' we
sell every durned thing we raise."

Then he would chuckle and rub together his yellow, wrinkled hands.
Ajax said that whenever Mr. Bobo laughed it behooved other folk to
look grave.

"Mandy's dress costs something," I observed.

"Considerable,--I'd misremembered that. Her rig-out las' fall cost me
the vally o' three boxes o' apples--winter pearmains!"

"She will marry soon, Mr. Bobo."

"An' leave me?" he cried shrilly. "I'd like to see a man prowlin'
around my Mandy--I'd stimilate him. Besides, mister, Mandy ain't the
marryin' kind. She's homely as a mud fence, is Mandy. She ain't put up
right for huggin' and kissin'."

"But she is your heiress, Mr. Bobo."

"Heiress," he repeated with a cunning leer. "I'm poor, mister, poor.
The tax collector has eat me up--eat me up, I say, eat me up!"

He looked such an indigestible morsel, so obviously unfit for the maw
of even a tax collector, that I laughed and took my leave. He was
worth, I had reason to know, at least fifty thousand dollars.

* * * * *

"Say, Mandy, I like ye awful well! D'ye know it?"

The speaker, Mr. Rinaldo Roberts, trainer and driver of horses, was
sitting upon the top rail of the fence that divided the land of old
man Bobo from the property of the Race Track Association.

Mandy, freckled, long-legged, and tow-headed, balanced herself easily
upon one ill-shod foot and rubbed herself softly with the other. The
action to those who knew her ways denoted mental perplexity and
embarrassment. This assignation was bristling with peril