I did.

“You have been very good to me,” she said, hesitatingly, “and I thought I would tell you.  I am going to leave the stage.”

“Yes,” said I, “I suppose you will.  They usually do when there’s so much money.”

“There is no money,” she said, “or very little.  Our money is almost gone.”

“But I am told,” said I, “that he has something like two or ten or thirty millions—­I have forgotten which.”

“I know what you mean,” she said.  “I will not pretend that I do not.  I am not going to marry Mr. North.”

“Then why are you leaving the stage?” I asked, severely.  “What else can you do to earn a living?”

She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she spoke.

“I can pick ducks,” she said.

We sold the first year’s feathers for $350.

A POOR RULE

I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her.  That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind.  Whether I am right or wrong we shall see.  As “Harper’s Drawer” used to say in bygone years:  “The following good story is told of Miss ——­, Mr. ——­, Mr. ——­, and Mr. ——.”

We shall have to omit “Bishop X” and “the Rev. ——­,” for they do not belong.

In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern Pacific.  A reporter would have called it a “mushroom” town; but it was not.  Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.

The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the passengers both to drink and to dine.  There was a new yellow-pine hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.  The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, “black-waxy” mud, and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon.  Paloma was an about-to-be city.  The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of charity.

The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while it rained, and the warmest when it shone.  It was operated, owned, and perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and sorghum.

There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which the family lived.  From the kitchen extended a “shelter” made of poles covered with chaparral brush.  Under this was a table and two benches, each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry.  Here was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.

Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as “Betty,” but denied to the eyesight, presided at the range.  Pa Hinkle himself, with salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands.  During rush hours a Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided him in waiting on the guests.  As is customary at Parisian banquets, I place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.