hter of the road, senorita, and a student
of Kipling. We brothers of the wild are usually not much given to books."

"That is true," she assented. "I have heard them say: 'We know cities and
deserts, men and women of every race. What can books give us?' But I tell
them: 'Everything can pay us toll if we ask it. A star in the sky, the
tiniest grain of sand on the beach. We can demand their secrets and they
will not withhold them.'" She mused a moment. "One must learn from all
sources, knock upon every door. When I weary of gaining wisdom from the
ant or considering a serpent on the rock, or the way of a man with a
maid, why, I turn to books. They are my solace, my narcotics, my friends,
and my teachers. I take a few, a very few with me on any rough journey I
may be making; but when I am here or in London or Paris, any place where
I may be living for months at a time, I have my books about me."

"But why do you tell fortunes?" asked Hayden involuntarily, and
immediately flushed to the roots of his hair. There was the vaguest
something in her smiling gaze, the merest flicker of an eyelash, which
convicted him of impertinence. "Forgive me. I--I beg your pardon," he
stammered.

She ignored his apologies. "Some day I will tell you," she whispered,
going through a pantomime of looking about her cautiously as if it were a
state secret of the most tremendous importance. "But we have talked
enough about myself now, senor; the topic for discussion to-day is
butterflies."

"An interesting subject might be The Veiled Mariposa," he said.

"Just so. Why beat about the bush?" He felt that she disdained
subterfuges, although when necessary for her purposes, he was assured
that she could use diplomacy, as a master of fence might his foils. "You,
Mr. Hayden, have been lucky enough to find the lost Mariposa, the lost
Veiled Mariposa. Is it not so? But you are in a peculiarly tantalizing
position. You can not convert gold into gold. Strange. It sounds so
simple. But your hands are tied."

"Perfectly true," Hayden assented.

"Then to put the matter in a nutshell and to descend from metaphor to
plain business facts, you can not organize a company and begin to operate
the mine or rather group of mines, for the reason that you can not secure
a clear title, and what is worse, you have not, so far, succeeded in
finding any trace of the present owners."

"You seem to know a lot about the matter," said Hayden pleasantly, "but
do you know,