in California from that day to this. Mind that. No one knows, or seems
to know, just where he had been, just how he got his money ... you
understand ... all the little bits o' things that are told, and guessed,
and leak out in a year. I asked fifty people, I suppose, and all they
knew was: California. You'd think Judy Haskell knew, and she told me
everything. What had she to tell? that no one dared to ask him about
such matters."

"Dillon is a very close man."

"Endicott had to be among that long-tongued Irish crowd. I watched him.
He was stupid at first ... stuck to the house ... no one saw him for
weeks ... except the few. He listened and watched ... I saw him ... his
eyes and his ears ought to be as big as a donkey's from it ... and he
said nothing. They made excuses for a thing that everyone saw and talked
about. He was ill. I say he wanted to make no mistakes; he was learning
his part; there was nothing of the Irish in him, only the sharp Yankee.
It made me wonder for weeks what was wrong. He looked as much like the
boy that ran away as you do. And then I had no suspicions, mind you. I
believed Anne Dillon's boy had come back with a fortune, and I was
thinking how I could get a good slice of it."

"And you didn't get a cent," Curran remarked.

"He hated me from the beginning. It takes one that is playing a part to
catch another in the same business. After a while he began to bloom. He
got more Irish than the Irish. There's no Yankee living, no Englishman,
can play the Irishman. He can give a good imitation maybe, d'ye hear?
That's what Dillon gave. He did everything that young Dillon used to do
before he left home ... a scamp he was too. He danced jigs, flattered
the girls, chummed with the ditch-diggers and barkeepers ... and he
hated them all, women and men. The Yankees hate the Irish as easy as
they breathe. I tell you he had forgotten nothing that he used to do as
a boy. And the fools that looked on said, oh, it's easy to see he was
sick, for now that he is well we can all recognize our old dare-devil,
Arthur."

"He's dare-devil clear enough," commented her husband.

"First point you've scored," she said with contempt. "Horace Endicott
was a milksop: to run away when he should have killed the two idiots.
Dillon is a devil, as I ought to know. But the funniest thing was his
dealings with his mother. She was afraid of him ... as much as I am ...
she is till this minute. Haven't I seen her look at him, when