e. I've
been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in
comic opera companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a
mining-camp hotel where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went
on in another. I've been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a
professional medium, and I've been within one vote of being indicted
by a grand jury, and the money that bought that vote was put up by the
smartest and most famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a
gentleman who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies along
with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record."

Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.

"And now take Soulsby," she went on. "Of course I take it for granted
there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention. He
hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament. But there is also a
good deal that I do know. He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd
back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And
he's been a medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for
a long time he was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I
first saw him he was lecturing on female diseases--and he had HIS little
turn with a grand jury too. In fact, he was what you may call a regular
bad old rooster."

Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment--save for an
amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his
eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.

"Well, then," she resumed, "so much for us apart. Now about us together.
We liked each other from the start. We compared notes, and we found that
we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the
road, and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age. We
had a little money--enough to see us through a year or two. Soulsby had
always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had
never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a
bean-pod ripen. So we took a little place in a quiet country village
down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over
the place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started
in. We took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that
we couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but
as luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at
the local Methodist church, and w