l,--what's the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do? Nobody
knows or cares about it now.

The end of it was bound to come. Even in Mariposa some of the people
must have thought so. Else how was it that Henry Mullins made such a
fuss about selling a draft for forty thousand on New York? And why was
it that Mr. Smith wouldn't pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back wages
when he wanted to put it into Cuba?

Oh yes; some of them must have seen it. And yet when it came it seemed
so quiet,--ever so quiet,--not a bit like the Northern Star mine and
the oyster supper and the Mariposa band. It is strange how quiet these
things look, the other way round.

You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomez
shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with
two hundred thousand? No, of course you don't; why, even in the city
papers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names were
hard to remember. That was Jeff's money--part of it. Mullins got the
telegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as he
was going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty lot
on the hill behind the town--the very place for these incurables.

And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet--have you ever seen an animal
that is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?

Well, that's how he walked.

And since that, though it's quite a little while ago, the shop's open
till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that
five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and--

Pathetic? tut! tut! You don't know Mariposa. Jeff has to work pretty
late, but that's nothing--nothing at all, if you've worked hard all your
lifetime. And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange--they were glad
enough to get her, and she says now that if there's one thing she hates,
it's the stage, and she can't see how the actresses put up with it.

Anyway, things are not so bad. You see it was just at this time that
Mr. Smith's caff opened, and Mr. Smith came to Jeff's Woman and said he
wanted seven dozen eggs a day, and wanted them handy, and so the hens
are back, and more of them, and they exult so every morning over the
eggs they lay that if you wanted to talk of Rockefeller in the barber
shop you couldn't hear his name for the cackling.

THREE. The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias

Half-past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at