that hour. She had changed her gown and received them
in a charming half-neglige of some filmy white stuff that set off her
dark beauty ravishingly. Her eyes were out-gleaming her diamonds but her
manner was quiet and composed.

They sat down and respectfully awaited her pleasure; but every article
in that room could have been accurately catalogued by either man. There
was only one door in the room besides the one through which they had
entered and that stood partly ajar, revealing beyond a luxuriously
furnished bedroom. A large double window gave down on the main street;
one-half of it was closely curtained, but the hangings of the other was
looped aside, and for a time she stood beside it looking down into the
squalid street. Suddenly she drew the curtains close and with a strength
hardly to be looked for in that slender wrist, whirled a heavy Morris
chair directly before them and seated herself.

For a full minute she regarded them intently through half-closed eyes
and then, addressing herself to Douglass, but keeping her eyes for the
greater part of the time on McVey, she said slowly in her soft mother
tongue:

"Your friend understands Spanish?"

"Sufficiently, Senorita," assured Red, "to follow your conversation."

"It is well," she said quietly, "but your address flatters me. I am
Senora, not Senorita." She held out her left hand with a curiously proud
gesture; on the third finger was a heavy plain band of dull gold.

"I am desolated--madame," said Red, instantly. Douglass bowed his polite
acceptance of the correction.

"Yes," she went on wearily, "I am a married woman, no matter what the
world, what _you_ may think. The ceremony was performed by the Jefe
Politico of Ameca, my natal town, though not solemnized by the church.
There was a witness, but he is dead now. It was Pedro Rodriguez, the man
you killed the night he and Senor Matlock burned the hay on your
rancho."

In the tense silence which followed, the ticking of Douglass's watch was
distinctly audible. Red's hand, fumbling with his watch chain, went up
swiftly to his armpit; but Douglass, interpreting her even intonation
more correctly, never moved a muscle. She smiled reassuringly at McVey:

"Nay, Senor. There is nothing to--to regret. He was a dog--and I love
you for it." The hand sank to his knee and he flushed slightly.

"I was only a young girl," she went on rapidly, "and he was as big and
as fair as his words. My mother was dead, my fathe