nter takes a hurdle. The lift of her eyelash,
an imperceptibly significant gesture, a casual word spoken in
conversation, these Hanson met with an incredible quickness of
understanding. It was a game at which he was master, and which he had
played many times before, but never had his intuitions been so keen, his
always rapid comprehension been so stimulated.

Beneath the eye of another master of intrigue, Gallito, watchful as a
spider, they met and loved until, it seemed to Hanson, that the whole,
wide desert rang with their glorious laughter. And through it all
Francisco Gallito sat and smoked and sipped his cognac imperturbably;
apparently unruffled by defeat, a defeat--the Pearl with subtle
femininity saw to that--which was not without its elements of ignominy.

But now Bob Flick had returned and had sat late with Gallito the night
before, talking, although Mrs. Gallito, who tendered this information to
her daughter, had not been able to overhear any part of their
conversation, in spite of her truly persistent efforts to do so. These
circumstances, and results which would probably ensue when a definite
course of action had been decided upon, occupied the Pearl's thoughts as
she stood at the gate gazing out on the gray wastes spread before her in
the broad morning sunshine. Lolita was perched on the fence beside her,
swaying back and forth, muttering to herself and occasionally dipping
down perilously in a curious effort to see the garden upside down
through the fence palings.

Pearl turned at last from her contemplation of the subject which
absorbed her attention, and smiled as her glance fell upon the gaudy
tail, the only part of Lolita now visible, although, even then, the
horse-shoe frown, which showed faintly on her smooth forehead, a
facsimile of the one graven deep on her father's wrinkled brow, did not
disappear.

"They've got it in for us, Lolita--Rudolf and me." She laughed outright
now. Pearl's laughter was ever a disagreeable surprise; low, harsh,
unpleasantly vibrant, and in strange dissonance to her soft, contralto
voice. "Lay you any odds you say, Lolita, that it's poor old Bob that's
got to be the goat."

The parrot swung back to a normal position with surprising rapidity.
"Bob, Bob," she croaked. "Mi jasmin, Pearl, mi corazon," and she gazed
at her mistress with wrinkled, cynical eyes.

"Yes, Bob's got to do the telling." Pearl confided more to Lolita than
she ever did in her fellow beings. "Oh