the Dago Duke whistled softly, listening without emotion
or surprise. He still whistled when the deputy had finished.

"Do you believe it?" the sheriff asked anxiously, at last.

"Emphatically I do. Let me tell you something, Dan: a woman that will
stoop to the petty leg-pulling, sponging, grafting that she does to save
two bits or less has got a thief's make-up. Her mania for money, for
getting, for saving it, is a matter of common knowledge.

"You know and I know that she will do any indelicate thing which occurs
to her to get what she wants without paying for it. When she wants a
drink, which the good God knows is often, she asks any man she happens
to know and is near to buy it for her. Her camaraderie flatters him. She
habitually 'bums' cigarettes and I've known her to go through a fellow's
war-bag, in his absence, for tobacco. When she's hungry, which I should
judge was all the time, she drops in casually upon a patient and
humorously raids the pantry--all with that air of nonchalant good
fellowship which shields her from much criticism, since what in reality
is miserliness and gluttony passes very well for amusing eccentricity."

Dan Treu laughed.

"You've got her sized up right in that way, Dago. I know a fellow that
was sick and had to cache the chocolate and things his folks sent him
from the East under the mattress when he saw her coming and he always
locked the fruit in his trunk after she had cleaned him out a dozen
times as though a flock of seventeen-year locusts had swarmed down upon
him. One night about two or three in the morning when she couldn't
sleep, she called on a typhoid patient under the pretext of making a
professional visit, and got the nurse to fry her some eggs. She's as
regular as a boarder at Andy P. Symes's when meal-time rolls around. I
wonder sometimes that he stands for it."

The Dago Duke looked at him oddly, but observed merely:

"Do you?"

"And you don't think the dagos made a mistake or misunderstood something
through not talkin' English much? It sounded straight to me the way
they told it, but a thing like this is something you don't want to
repeat unless you just about saw it for yourself."

"If they told you they had $5.50 taken from them you can bet it's so.
Italians of that class know to a penny what they have sent home, what
they have in the bank, what there is in their pockets to spend.
Generations of poverty have taught them carefulness and thrift.
Americans cal