Mexican, his prompt punishment.

The old lady was especially pathetic as she glared at her insulter from
where she lay sprawled on the floor, and muttered, "Carramba, huh? I
dare you to come outside and say that to me!"

"Good work," applauded Baird when the scene was finished. "Now we're
getting into the swing of it. In about three days here we'll have
something that exhibitors can clean up on, see if we don't."

The three days passed in what for Merton Gill was a whirlwind of
dramatic intensity. If at times he was vaguely disquieted by a suspicion
that the piece was not wholly serious, he had only to remember the
intense seriousness of his own part and the always serious manner of
Baird in directing his actors. And indeed there were but few moments
when he was even faintly pricked by this suspicion. It seemed a bit
incongruous that Hoffmeyer, the delicatessen merchant, should arrive on
a bicycle, dressed in cowboy attire save for a badly dented derby hat,
and carrying a bag of golf clubs; and it was a little puzzling how
Hoffmeyer should have been ruined by his son's mad act, when it would
have been shown that the money was returned to him. But Baird explained
carefully that the old man had been ruined some other way, and was
demented, like the poor old mother who had gone over the hills after her
children had left the home nest. And assuredly in Merton's own action
he found nothing that was not deeply earnest as well as strikingly
dramatic. There was the tense moment when a faithful cowboy broke upon
the festivities with word that a New York detective was coming to search
for the man who had robbed the Hoffmeyer establishment. His friends
gathered loyally about Merton and swore he would never be taken from
them alive. He was induced to don a false mustache until the detective
had gone. It was a long, heavy black mustache with curling tips, and
in this disguise he stood aloof from his companions when the detective
entered.

The detective was the cross-eyed man, himself now disguised as Sherlock
Holmes, with a fore-and-aft cloth cap and drooping blond mustache.
He smoked a pipe as he examined those present. Merton was unable to
overlook this scene, as he had been directed to stand with his back
to the detective. Later it was shown that he observed in a mirror the
Mexican whom he had punished creeping forward to inform the detective of
his man's whereabouts. The coward's treachery cost him dearly. The hero,
still