ssessed, he could not but be
particularly startled and surprised at her supreme self-possession and
audacity. After a little further desultory conversation, Mr. Bangs told
him that the Agency had all the necessary information regarding their
early career, and of their subsequent history up to the time when they
left Terre Haute, and probably a great deal after that time, and asked
Hosford if he would be willing to go over the whole matter, giving the
outlines of their troubles, what brought them about, and what had been
their result.

He was the same old Dick Hosford--abrupt, kind, generous, with perhaps
some of the old "forty-niner" roughness worn off and a toning-down of
his whole nature, that his keen sorrows had given him; but he was quite
as impulsively reckless, and just as impulsively tender, and he began
his story in a kind of weary way, that, to one knowing his history, was
really sad and touching.

"Well, sir," said Hosford, "I knew the gal had been doing wrong at
Detroit, but for all these hard years in Californy I had been working,
savin', and goin' through danger with the purty pictur ahead that the
bright girl I had left by the river would one day make me a happy home.
I worked like a nigger, and it was sometimes up and sometimes down with
me out thar--mostly down, though. But I struck a good lead one day, and
worked close till it panned dry. I didn't have much aside some of them
fellows out thar; but instead of runnin' it down my throat, givin' it to
cut-throat gamblers, or flingin' it away on vile women, I started full
chisel for the States. I come to Terre Haute, as you know, and spent
nearly all my dust buyin' a little farm. Then I started fur Nettleton's,
whar I expected heaven--but found hell!

"It bust me all up like, and I wandered about the old place jest as
though I had went to sleep happy and waked up in a big grave that I
couldn't get out of. The old folks themselves wasn't any more cut up
than me; but I thought as how I wasn't doin' anything to help matters,
'n only making _them_ more trouble. So I thought and thought what to do,
and finally made up to go a-huntin' her, 'n told the old folks I
wouldn't come back 'thout her.

"It all come over me then what she was doing; but I only thought to get
her back for the old folks' sake. Well, sir, I went to Chicago, and hung
around that doggoned city fur a week 'r two; but no Lil. Then I come
back, lookin' everywhere, askin' everybody, an' peerin'