understanding between father and daughter, and this apparent and
most uncharacteristic submission to his judgment on her part, based on a
common passion, acquisitiveness? He thought of Pearl's jewels. More than
once he had seen her lift her fingers and caress the gems on her hand,
just as the Spaniard sat and shook his buttons and nuggets of gold
together, pouring them from one palm to another, his frowning gaze fixed
on the ground before him.

"Yes, I'll write to Sweeney," continued Gallito. "It'll take a few days,
though, before I can get his answer." He looked at the other man
questioningly. "It might be a week in all. I don't want to keep you
here that time. I could write you."

"Nothing to do just now," said Rudolf easily. "Left things in good
hands, business running easily. Came down here to stay a while, needed a
vacation. And, Lord! This air makes a man feel like he never wanted to
leave."

To this Gallito made no comment and, as there was nothing further to
say, the subject was, for the time, dropped between them.

Hanson had made known his reasons, obvious reasons, for his presence in
Paloma, so, as he would have expressed it, he let it go at that and left
the observer to draw any conclusions he pleased as to his almost
constant presence at the Gallito home, and yet, after all, his visits
were only a little more frequent than those of a number of others, and
no more so at all than those of Bob Flick.

There were long evenings when Hughie played the piano, and when Pearl,
now and then, touched the guitar, when Mrs. Gallito indulged in her
querulous monotonous reminiscences, while Gallito and various men sat
and smoked cigarettes about the card table; but always, no matter who
came or went, there was Flick, silent, impassive, polite, but, as Hanson
realized with growing irritation, ever watchful.

Gallito sat down to his cards in the evening as regularly as he went to
bed exactly at twelve o'clock; and not cards alone. When he came
"inside" there were brought forth from various nooks of obscurity in his
dwelling other gambling devices, among them a faro layout, a keno
goose, and a roulette wheel.

Undoubtedly, the play ran high in the Gallito cabin, but although Hanson
sometimes sat in at this or that game, more often he sat talking to
Pearl in the soft shadow of the porch. To her he made no secret of his
infatuation, but it seemed to him that when with her they were ever more
constantly and more irritat