oyo.

"Bob said he'd been wandering round crazy as a loon, seeing three big
lions with eyes like coals of fire stalking him night and day, and him
always trying to dodge 'em. He says at last they came nearer and nearer
until he stumbled and fell, and then he felt their hot breath on his
cheek, and he knew nothing more until he finally realized that some one
was trying to pour water down his throat and he kind of half come to
himself; and suddenly, he said, that awful gray desert, worse than any
hell a man ever feared, seemed all kind and tender like a mother, and
then, some way, it burst into bloom, and that bloom was the Black Pearl
bending over him. Oh, you ought to hear him tell it! Well--she got him
up on her horse and got him home, and her and her mother nursed him back
to health. And since that time Bob ain't never felt the same about the
desert. You couldn't drive him away now.

"When he was well enough to travel, he went to 'Frisco and ordered a
jeweler there to get him the handsomest string of matched emeralds that
money could buy. The fellow was a year matching them, had to make two
trips to the other side. They do say," Jimmy lowered his voice
cautiously, "that Bob's father was a rich man and left him a nice little
fortune, and that he blew every cent of it in on those stones. The
Pearl certainly likes jewels. All the rings and things that she wears
were given her by the boys."

"Umm-m-hum. Great story!" he nodded perfunctorily. "Guess I'll take a
walk." He strolled toward the door.

"Bet I know which way you're going," chuckled Jimmy, as he disappeared.

The unspoken surmise was perfectly correct. Hanson took his way slowly
and with apparent abstraction in the direction of the Gallito home, and
it was not until he was at the very gate that he paused and looked up
with a start of well simulated surprise.

The house stood beyond a garden of brilliant flowers, and in the shadow
of the long porch--a porch facing the desert and not the mountains--sat
Pearl, swinging back and forth in a rocking chair and talking
impartially to the blind boy, who sat on the step beneath her, and a
gorgeous crimson and green parrot, which walked back and forth in its
pigeon-toed fashion on the arm of her chair, muttering, occasionally
screaming, and sometimes inclining its head to be scratched.

"Good morning," called Hanson in his blithest, most assured fashion.
"Can I come in?"

"Sure," drawled the Pearl. "Hughie and I we