que country, but bad for the
nerves."

She turned as the man on her right spoke to her, and apparently was
deaf to the sigh with which Harrington Chase drained his wine-glass.
She had piqued his curiosity, aroused his interest and disturbed by
just a pin-prick his pachydermatous equanimity; she would not raise
again before the draw.

Later, Winnie found his way to her side in the music-room.

"Chase has been telling us over the liqueurs that you've had some
exciting experiences down in Mexico. That's where you learned to play
poker, isn't it? Jove, I envy you!"

"Poker isn't so difficult!" she laughed. "If you'd stop betting your
head off on two pairs, Mr. North, you wouldn't find it so expensive."

"Oh, you know I don't mean that! I was thinking of your adventures.
Father told me he found you living with some old friends on a big
fruit-growing estate near a small town, and I supposed it had been all
rather lonely and humdrum, until that quiet little game a few weeks ago
made me realize that you must have seen a bit of the strenuous side
down there. That would be the life for me!"

She glanced at his round, innocuous face, with the downy mustache and
ruminative eyes, and smiled irrepressibly. Then her own face grew
grave.

"I wonder! You see, Mr. North, it isn't all like a movie; there's an
element of uncertainty that keeps a man quick on the trigger. I was
living with friends at the Casa de Limas, as your father told you. But
if he had arrived on a certain night just a week or so before, he would
have found me barricaded in a--a great hall in town, with men shot to
pieces and dying like flies all around me, and three hundred butchering
rebels from the hills battering in the door."

"Great guns!" exclaimed Winnie. "Fancy your living through that! What
happened--did your friends manage to beat them off?"

"No, the government troops came; the Carranzistas. But they were only
just in time."

"Phew! No wonder you spoke of the movies! It sounds like a melodrama,
doesn't it?"

"It was a tragedy." Willa's voice was very low. "We would all have
been wiped out, if it had not been for one man. He was with us when
the raiders came, but he fought his way through them, took one of their
own horses and rode to the barracks for the troops; ten miles each way,
and he made the whole trip in an hour, wounded as he was. He reached
us just as the door went down, and I'll never forget him cutting his
way thr