he said, that awful gray desert, worse than any hell a man ever feared, seemed all kind and tender like a mother, and then, some way, it burst into bloom, and that bloom was the Black Pearl bending over him.  Oh, you ought to hear him tell it!  Well—­she got him up on her horse and got him home, and her and her mother nursed him back to health.  And since that time Bob ain’t never felt the same about the desert.  You couldn’t drive him away now.

“When he was well enough to travel, he went to ’Frisco and ordered a jeweler there to get him the handsomest string of matched emeralds that money could buy.  The fellow was a year matching them, had to make two trips to the other side.  They do say,” Jimmy lowered his voice cautiously, “that Bob’s father was a rich man and left him a nice little fortune, and that he blew every cent of it in on those stones.  The Pearl certainly likes jewels.  All the rings and things that she wears were given her by the boys.”

“Umm-m-hum.  Great story!” he nodded perfunctorily.  “Guess I’ll take a walk.”  He strolled toward the door.

“Bet I know which way you’re going,” chuckled Jimmy, as he disappeared.

The unspoken surmise was perfectly correct.  Hanson took his way slowly and with apparent abstraction in the direction of the Gallito home, and it was not until he was at the very gate that he paused and looked up with a start of well simulated surprise.

The house stood beyond a garden of brilliant flowers, and in the shadow of the long porch—­a porch facing the desert and not the mountains—­sat Pearl, swinging back and forth in a rocking chair and talking impartially to the blind boy, who sat on the step beneath her, and a gorgeous crimson and green parrot, which walked back and forth in its pigeon-toed fashion on the arm of her chair, muttering, occasionally screaming, and sometimes inclining its head to be scratched.

“Good morning,” called Hanson in his blithest, most assured fashion.  “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” drawled the Pearl.  “Hughie and I were just waiting for company, weren’t we, Hughie?”

The boy tossed his head impatiently, but made no answer.  From the moment Hanson had spoken he had assumed an air of immobile and concentrated attention, tense as that of an Indian listening and sighting in a forest, or of a highly trained dog on guard.

“Take you at your word,” laughed Hanson, and swung up the path, a big, dominant presence, as vital as the morning.  “Howdy,” he shook hands with Pearl and then turned to the boy, but Hugh drew quickly away from that extended hand, quite as if he saw it before him.

Hanson raised his eyebrows in involuntary surprise, but his good humor was unabated.  “What’s the good word with Hughie?” he asked genially.  “I can’t call you anything else, because I don’t know your last name.”

“My name is Hugh Braddock,” said the boy coldly.

Again Hanson lifted his brows, this time humorously, as at a child’s unexpected rebuff, and looked at Pearl, and again he experienced a feeling of surprise, for she was gazing at Hugh with a puzzled frown, which held a faint touch of apprehension.