ustomers was gone. The towel was no
longer used after its perfunctory fashion; the counter remained unwiped;
the disks of countless glasses marked its surface, and indicated other
preoccupation on the part of the proprietor. The keen grey eyes of the
claimant of the "Red-Rock Rancho" were always on the lookout for friend
or enemy.

Garcia comes next. That gentleman's inborn talent for historic
misrepresentation culminated unpleasantly through a defective memory;
a year or two after he had sworn in his application for the "Rancho,"
being engaged in another case, some trifling inconsistency was
discovered in his statements, which had the effect of throwing the
weight of evidence to the party who had paid him most, but was instantly
detected by the weaker party. Garcia's preeminence as a witness, an
expert and general historian began to decline. He was obliged to be
corroborated, and this required a liberal outlay of his fee. With the
loss of his credibility as a witness bad habits supervened. He was
frequently drunk, he lost his position, he lost his house, and Carmen,
removed to San Francisco, supported him with her brush.

And this brings us once more to that pretty painter and innocent forger
whose unconscious act bore such baleful fruit on the barren hill-sides
of the "Red-Rock Rancho," and also to a later blossom of her life, that
opened, however, in kindlier sunshine.

CHAPTER IX

WHAT THE FAIR HAD TO DO ABOUT IT

The house that Royal Thatcher so informally quitted in his exodus to
the promised land of Biggs was one of those oversized, under-calculated
dwellings conceived and erected in the extravagance of the San
Francisco builder's hopes, and occupied finally in his despair. Intended
originally as the palace of some inchoate California Aladdin, it usually
ended as a lodging house in which some helpless widow or hopeless
spinster managed to combine respectability with the hard task of bread
getting.

Thatcher's landlady was one of the former class. She had unfortunately
survived not only her husband but his property, and, living in some
deserted chamber, had, after the fashion of the Italian nobility, let
out the rest of the ruin. A tendency to dwell upon these facts gave
her conversation a peculiar significance on the first of each month.
Thatcher had noticed this with the sensitiveness of an impoverished
gentleman. But when, a few days after her lodger's sudden disappearance,
a note came from him cont