. Here
it had made her talkative long after bedtime, and she hadn't yet found
out just how few dollars stood between her and the poorhouse.

I allowed her to sort papers for a moment. As she scanned them under
drawn brows beside a lamp that was dimming, she again rumbled into song.
She now sang: "What fierce diseases wait around to hurry mortals home!"
It is, musically, the crudest sort of thing. And it clashed with my mood;
for I now wished to know how Herman had revealed Prussian guile by his
manner of leaving Reno. Only after another verse of the hymn could I be
told. It seems worth setting down here:

Well, Herman is working on a sheep ranch out of Reno, as I'm telling you,
and has trouble with a fellow outcast named Manuel Romares. Herman was
vague about what started the trouble, except that they didn't understand
each other's talk very well and one of 'em thought the other was making
fun of him. Anyway, it resulted in a brutal fist affray, greatly to
Herman's surprise. He had supposed that no man, Mexican or otherwise,
would dare to attack a German single-handed, because he would of heard
all about Germans being invincible, that nation having licked two
nations--Serbia and Belgium--at once.

So, not suspecting any such cowardly attack, Herman was took unprepared
by Manuel Romares, who did a lot of things to him in the way of ruthless
devastation. Furthermore, Herman was clear-minded enough to see that
Manuel could do these things to him any time he wanted to. In that coarse
kind of fighting with the fists he was Herman's superior. So Herman
drawed off and planned a strategic coop.

First thing he done was to make a peace offer, at which the trouble
should be discussed on a fair basis to both sides. Manuel not being one
to nurse a grudge after he'd licked a man in jig time, and being of a
sunny nature anyway, I judge, met him halfway. Then, at this peace
conference, Herman acted much unlike a German, if he was honest. He
said he had been all to blame in this disturbance and his conscience
hurt him; so he couldn't rest till he had paid Manuel an indemnity.

Manuel is tickled and says what does Herman think of paying him? Herman
shows up his month's pay and says how would it suit Manuel if they go in
to Reno that night and spend every cent of this money in all the lovely
ways which could be thought up by a Mexican sheep herder that had just
come in from a six weeks' cross-country tour with two thousand of the
ho