z, for two that I know of, and some
cousin of theirs, I believe. They came aboard on our up trip. The old
man likes our tap of champagne and don't care what it costs. He has more
ready cash than any Mexican I know. You're a married man, colonel, but
how about the lieutenant here?"

Loring, still pallid and listless, smiled feebly and shook his head.

"Well, here's your chance, young man," said the bluff salt, unconscious
of giving offense. "No time like a voyage for love making, once the girl
gets her sea legs on. You ought to capture one of 'em before we're
halfway to the Golden Gate. They rate 'em at two hundred thousand
apiece. Don't know how long it takes a soldier to win a prize like that,
but give a sailor such a show and she'd strike her colors before we
sight St. Lucas. If you don't care for ducats and only want beauty,
there's that little cousin. She can sing and play your soul away; give
her half a chance and a good guitar."

"Who's she?" queried Turnbull, balancing his half-smoked cigar between
the fingers, as he blew a fragrant cloud to the cloudless vault above.

"Didn't get the family name--Pancha they called her, a slip of a
sixteen-year-old, going to school, perhaps." And the captain turned away
to answer a question from his steward, leaving the two soldiers looking
intently at each other, with new interest in their eyes.

"Blake's destroyer was a sixteen-year-old Pancha, wasn't she?" asked the
colonel in low tone. He had no mercy whatever on Blake, and was
outspoken in condemnation of what he called his idiocy.

Loring was silent a moment, then he drew a letter from an inner pocket.
It had come with Turnbull--the last news from Arizona. "Read that when
you've time, colonel," said he. "Perhaps had you been in Blake's place
at his age you'd have forgotten everything but the stage and the fight.
I think I should."

And as this was the longest speech Turnbull had ever heard from Loring's
lips, except his arraignment of Nevins before the court, the colonel
pondered over it not a little. He took the letter and read it when, an
hour later, the Idaho was plowing her lazy way southward through a dull
and leaden sea.

"I'm not the first man to be fooled by a slip of a girl, Loring," wrote
Blake. "It isn't the first time that a woman has got the better of me,
and it may not be the last. But the chagrin and misery I feel is not
because I have suffered so much, but because you have, and all through
my fault