“Mandy’s dress costs something,” I observed.

“Considerable,—­I’d misremembered that.  Her rig-out las’ fall cost me the vally o’ three boxes o’ apples—­winter pearmains!”

“She will marry soon, Mr. Bobo.”

“An’ leave me?” he cried shrilly.  “I’d like to see a man prowlin’ around my Mandy—­I’d stimilate him.  Besides, mister, Mandy ain’t the marryin’ kind.  She’s homely as a mud fence, is Mandy.  She ain’t put up right for huggin’ and kissin’.”

“But she is your heiress, Mr. Bobo.”

“Heiress,” he repeated with a cunning leer.  “I’m poor, mister, poor.  The tax collector has eat me up—­eat me up, I say, eat me up!”

He looked such an indigestible morsel, so obviously unfit for the maw of even a tax collector, that I laughed and took my leave.  He was worth, I had reason to know, at least fifty thousand dollars.

* * * * *

“Say, Mandy, I like ye awful well!  D’ye know it?”

The speaker, Mr. Rinaldo Roberts, trainer and driver of horses, was sitting upon the top rail of the fence that divided the land of old man Bobo from the property of the Race Track Association.

Mandy, freckled, long-legged, and tow-headed, balanced herself easily upon one ill-shod foot and rubbed herself softly with the other.  The action to those who knew her ways denoted mental perplexity and embarrassment.  This assignation was bristling with peril as well as charm.  Her grandfather had the eyes of a turkey-buzzard, eyes which she contrasted involuntarily with the soft, kindly orbs now bent upon her.  She decided instantly that blue was a prettier colour than yellow.  Rinaldo’s skin, too, commended itself.  She had never seen so white a forehead, such ruddy cheeks.  David, she reflected, must have been such a man; but Rinaldo was a nicer name than David, ever so much nicer.

“Shakespeare never repeats,” observed Mr. Roberts, “but I’ll tell ye again, Mandy, that I like ye awful well.”

“Pshaw!” she replied.

“Honest, Mandy, I ain’t lyin’.”

He smoothed his hair, well oiled by the barber an hour before, wiped his hand upon his brown overalls, and laughed.  The overalls were worn so as to expose four inches of black trouser.

“Ye think more of your sorrel than ye do of me, Nal.”

“I do?”

“Yes, indeed, you do.  You know you do.”

“I know I don’t!  Say—­I’ve gone an’ christened the cuss.”

“You have?” said Mandy, in a tone of intense interest.  “Tell me its name.”

“It’s a her, Mandy, an’ me an’ Pete fixed on By-Jo.  That’s French, Mandy,” he added triumphantly, “an’ it means a gem, a jool, an’ that’s what she is—­a regler ruby!”

“It don’t sound like French,” said Amanda doubtfully.

“That French feller,” replied Nal, with the fine scorn of the Anglo-Saxon, “him as keeps the ‘Last Chance’ saloon, pronounces it By-Jew, but he’s as ignorant as a fool, an’ By-Jo seems to come kind o’ nateral.”