odily; and then, as if struck by
something in her words, he looked at her quickly. "Has your Pop told you
anything?" There was surprise in both glance and voice.

"Not a thing," she assured him, scornfully amused by the question, "but
there are some things that don't have to be told. Do you suppose I
haven't caught on to the way you've all been acting?"

Again he looked his surprise. "We all been acting?" he repeated.

"Yes. I've seen things and I've felt them. Oh, you might just as well
out with it, Bob. What is it all about?"

He stared unseeing down the sun-sifted dusk of the green lane. Here the
desert silence was like a benediction of peace, broken now and then by
the faint, shrill note of an insect, or the occasional soft, mournful
plaint of a dove.

"Pearl, you can laugh at me if you want to, and say I'm jealous. That's
true, I am. I can't help it; but this time it wasn't all that. I got to
size up men quick; that was my business for a good many years, and the
first minute I set eyes on Hanson I knew he wasn't straight. And then,
Hughie--"

"And so you stirred up Pop to watch him?" she broke in quick as a flash.

"No," he answered patiently, "no, but Hughie's feelings got so strong
about him that your Pop kind of woke up and got to studying him, and
then he saw what--what neither of you tried to hide," there was
bitterness in his tone, "and then he kind of remembered something he'd
heard up in Colina, and--"

"And so you've been up to Colina tracking round after a woman." Her
verbal strokes were swift and hard as a flail. And again Flick started
in surprise. His cheeks flushed faintly, his jaw set.

"What you mean, Pearl? Has he been having me trailed? I don't believe
it."

"No," she drawled, taking a malicious amusement in this unwonted
perturbation on his part, "he hasn't. You slipped away so quiet and easy
that you didn't stop to say good-by, even to me. Were you afraid I'd put
him on to it?"

She did not hesitate to plant her banderillos where they would sting
most, and Flick winced at this imputation which struck so near home.
"How did you know about the woman, then?" he asked quickly.

Pearl lifted her head and laughed aloud, and, at the unwonted sound
breaking the desert silence, three pairs of brilliant eyes gazing
through the screening mesquite branches vanished and the gray, shadowy
figures of three coyotes disappeared as noiselessly as they had come.

"How did I know about the woman?" S