“There’s something in that,” admitted Dan Anderson.  “You’ve got to be dead to make a really well-preserved, highly embalmed success in art, of course.  It’s true that in a hundred years from now that song will be just what it is to-day.  That’s Art.  But I’m tellin’ you the truth, Tom.  The woman who sang into that machine is alive to-day.  She belongs to a grand opera troupe under the management of a gent by the name of Blauring, who is in hot water with these stars all his life, but makes so much money out of them that he can’t bear to be anything but boiled continuous.

“Now, these people are bound for California, for an early season.  They are goin’ six hundred miles at a jump, and they stop at El Paso for a moment, to catch a little of their financial breath.  The Southern Pacific raineth on the just and the unjust in the matter of railroad fares.  Now, as they are still goin’ to be too early for the season on the coast, Monsieur Blauring has conceived in his fertile brain the idea that it will be an interestin’ and inexpensive thing for him to sidetrack his whole rodeo for a few weeks up in the Sacramentos, at the Sky Top hotel,—­that new railroad health resort some Yankees have just built, for lungers and other folks that have money and no pleasure in livin’.”

“How do you know she’ll be there?” asked Tom.

“Well, this El Paso daily has got about four pages about it.  They think it’s news, and Blauring thinks it’s advertising so they’re both happy.  And this very lady who sang into your tin horn, yonder, will be down there at Sky Top just about ten days from now.”

Tom Osby was silent.  The Sacramentos, as all men knew, lay but a hundred miles or so distant by wagon trail.  “It ain’t so,” said Tom, at length.  “A singin’ artist would choke to death in El Paso.  The dust’s a fright.”

“Oh, I reckon it’s so,” said Dan Anderson.  “Now, the bull-ring over at Juarez would be a fine place for grand opera—­especially for ’Carmen’—­which, I may inform you, Tom, is all about a bull-fight, anyway.  Yes,” he went on softly, “I hope they’ll sing ‘Carmen’ over there.  I hope, also, they won’t see the name on the Guggenheim smelters and undertake to give Wagner under a misapprehension.  If Blauring has any judgment at all, he’ll stick to ‘Carmen’ at El Paso.  He’d have to hire a freight train to get away with the money.

“But now,” resumed he, “after they get done at El Paso, whatever they sing, the grub wagon will be located in the Sacramentos, while old Blauring, he goes on in advance and rides a little sign out near ’Frisco and other places, where Art is patronized copious.  Yes, friend, ‘Annie Laurie,’ she’ll be up in Sacramentos; and from all I can figure, there’ll be trouble in that particular health resort.”

“Sometimes I think you’re loco,” said Tom Osby, slowly; “then again I think you ain’t, quite.  The man who allows he’s any better than this country don’t belong here; but I didn’t think you ever did.”