“Thank you for your warning of your intended visit,” said Hooper in silky tones, indicating my bandana which lay on the table.  “And now may I inquire to what I owe the honour of this call?  Or it may be that the visit was not intended for me at all.  Mistake in the rooms, perhaps.  I often shift and change my quarters, and those of my household; especially if I suspect I have some reason for doing so.  It adds interest to an otherwise uneventful life.”

He was eying me sardonically, evidently gloating over the situation as he found it.

“How did you get on that roof?  Who let you inside the walls?” he demanded, abruptly.

I merely smiled at him.

“That we can determine later,” he observed, resuming command of himself.

I measured my chances, and found them at present a minus quantity.  The old man was separated from me by a table, and he held my own revolver ready for instant use.  So I stood tight and waited.

The room was an almost exact replica of the one in which I had spent the night so short a time before; the same long narrow transom near the ceiling, the same barred windows opening on the court, the same closet against the blank wall.  Hooper had evidently inhabited it for some days, for it was filled with his personal belongings.  Indeed he must have moved in en bloc when his ward had been moved out, for none of the furnishings showed the feminine touch, and several articles could have belonged only to the old man personally.  Of such was a small iron safe in one corner and a tall old-fashioned desk crammed with papers.

But if I decided overt action unwise at this moment, I decidedly went into action the next.  Hooper whistled and four Mexicans appeared with ropes.  Somehow I knew if they once hog-tied me I would never get another chance.  Better dead now than helpless in the morning, for what that old buzzard might want of me.

One of them tossed a loop at me.  I struck it aside and sailed in.

It had always been my profound and contemptuous belief that I could lick any four Mexicans.  Now I had to take that back.  I could not.  But I gave the man argument, and by the time they had my elbows lashed behind me and my legs tied to the legs of one of those big solid chairs they like to name as “Mission style,” I had marked them up and torn their pretty clothes and smashed a lot of junk around the place and generally got them so mad they would have knifed me in a holy second if it had not been for Old Man Hooper.  The latter held up the lamp where it wouldn’t get smashed and admonished them in no uncertain terms that he wanted me alive and comparatively undamaged.  Oh, sure! they mussed me up, too.  I wasn’t very pretty, either.

The bravos withdrew muttering curses, as the story books say; and after Hooper had righted the table and stuck the lamp on it, and taken a good look at my bonds, he withdrew also.