of a captain, when he found, as he thought, that Spencer was nabbed, he just confiscated all his trunks and valuables and left me in the lurch.  If I had not met a man down there that offered to marry me and brought me here, I might have died there, I reckon.  But I did, and here I am.  I went down there as your husband’s sweetheart, I’ve come back as the wife of an honest man, and I reckon it’s about square!”

There was something so startlingly frank, so hopelessly self-satisfied, so contagiously good-humored in the woman’s perfect moral unconsciousness, that even if Mrs. Tucker had been less preoccupied her resentment would have abated.  But her eyes were fixed on the gloomy face of Patterson, who was beginning to unlock the sepulchers of his memory and disinter his deeply buried thoughts.

“You kin bet your whole pile on what this Mrs. Capting Baxter—­ez used to be French Inez of New Orleans—­hez told ye.  Ye kin take everything she’s onloaded.  And it’s only doin’ the square thing to her to say, she hain’t done it out o’ no cussedness, but just to satisfy herself, now she’s a married woman and past such foolishness.  But that ain’t neither here nor there.  The gist of the whole matter is that Spencer Tucker was at the tienda the day after she sailed and after his boat capsized.”  He then gave a detailed account of the interview, with the unnecessary but truthful minutiae of his class, adding to the particulars already known that the following week he visited the Summit House and was surprised to find that Spencer had never been there, nor had he ever sailed from Monterey.

“But why was this not told to me before?” said Mrs. Tucker, suddenly.  “Why not at the time?  Why,” she demanded almost fiercely, turning from the one to the other, “has this been kept from me?”

“I’ll tell ye why,” said Patterson, sinking with crashed submission into a chair.  “When I found he wasn’t where he ought to be, I got to lookin’ elsewhere.  I knew the track of the hoss I lent him by a loose shoe.  I examined, and found he had turned off the highroad somewhere beyond the lagoon, jist as if he was makin’ a bee line here.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Tucker breathlessly.

“Well,” said Patterson, with the resigned tone of an accustomed martyr, “mebbe I’m a God-forsaken idiot, but I reckon he did come yer.  And mebbe I’m that much of a habitooal lunatic, but thinking so, I calkilated you’d know it without tellin’.”

With their eyes fixed upon her, Mrs. Tucker felt the quick blood rush to her cheeks, although she knew not why.  But they were apparently satisfied with her ignorance, for Patterson resumed, yet more gloomily: 

“Then if he wasn’t hidin’ here beknownst to you, he must have changed his mind agin and got away by the embarcadero.  The only thing wantin’ to prove that idea is to know how he got a boat, and what he did with the hoss.  And thar’s one more idea, and ez that can’t be proved,” continued Patterson, sinking his voice still lower, “mebbe it’s accordin’ to God’s laws.”