“Not that I blame ’em.  We’re all alike—­innocent enough, with freaks here and there that ain’t.  Why, I remember about a thousand years ago I was reading a book called ‘Lillian’s Honour,’ in which the rightful earl didn’t act like an earl had ought to, but went travelling off over the moors with a passel of gypsies, with all the she-gypsies falling in love with him, and no wonder—­he was that dashing.  Well, I used to think what might happen if he should come along while Lysander John was out with the beef round-up or something.  I was well-meaning, understand, but at that I’d ought to have been laid out with a pick-handle.  Oh, the nicest of us got specks inside us—­if ever we did cut loose the best one of us would make the worst man of you look like nothing worse than a naughty little boy cutting up in Sunday-school.  What holds us, of course—­we always dream of being took off our feet; of being carried off by main force against our wills while we snuggle up to the romantic brute and plead with him to spare us—­and the most reckless of ’em don’t often get their nerve up to that.  Well, as I was saying—­”

But she was not saying.  The thing moved too slowly.  And still the woman paltered with her poisoned tea and made cigarettes and muttered inconsequently, as when she now broke out after a glance at the photograph: 

“That Ben Sutton certainly runs amuck when he buys his vests.  He must have about fifty, and the quietest one in the lot would make a leopard skin look like a piker.”  Again her glance dreamed off to visions.

I seated myself before her with some emphasis and said firmly:  “Now, then!” It worked.

“Wilfred Lennox,” she began, “calling himself the hobo poet, gets into Red Gap one day and makes the rounds with that there piece of poetry you see; pushes into stores and offices and hands the piece out, and like as not they crowd a dime or two bits onto him and send him along.  That’s what I done.  I was waiting in Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale’s office for a little painless dentistry, and I took Wilfred’s poem and passed him a two-bit piece, and Doc Martingale does the same, and Wilfred blew on to the next office.  A dashing and romantic figure he was, though kind of fat and pasty for a man that was walking from coast to coast, but a smooth talker with beautiful features and about nine hundred dollars’ worth of hair and a soft hat and one of these flowing neckties.  Red it was.

“So I looked over his piece of poetry—­about the open road for his untamed spirit and him being stifled in the cramped haunts of men—­and of course I get his number.  All right about the urge of the wild to her wayward child, but here he was spending a lot of time in the cramped haunts of men taking their small change away from ’em and not seeming to stifle one bit.