But his musings on his way back to the hotel would certainly not have proved calming to that lady could she have but known them.

“Gosh!” he muttered, “and I thought it had broke, this blessed blind luck of mine, when I heard ’em mention Colina; but it’s holding after all, it’s holding.  I guess what I know now about the whereabouts of Crop-eared Jose just about offsets anything Pop Gallito may know about me and anything that Mr. Bob Flick can discover.”

CHAPTER III

Pearl’s father came the next day, an older man than Hanson had imagined and of a different type.  There was no smack of the circus ring about him, no swagger of the footlights; nor any hint of the emotional, gay temperament supposed to be the inheritance of southern blood.  He was a saturnine, gnarled old Spaniard with lean jaws and beetling brows.  His skin was like parchment.  It clung to his bones and fell in heavy wrinkles in the hollows of his cheeks and about his mouth; and his dark eyes, fierce as a wild hawk’s, were as brilliant and piercing as in youth.

Little resemblance between him, gaunt and stark and seamed as a desert rock, and his tropical blossom of a daughter, and yet, indubitably, Pearl was the child of her father.  The secretiveness, the concentrated will, the unfettered individuality of spirit, which protected its own defiant isolation at all costs, the subtlety, the ability to seek sanctuary in indefinitely maintained silence, these were their traits in common.

Hanson, Gallito met with grave and impersonal courtesy which, the former was relieved to feel, held a real indifference.  There were many moths ever circling about this glowing flame of a daughter.  Gallito accepted that, met them, observed them, and assumed those introspective meditations in which he seemed ever absorbed.

There was evidently an understanding between Pearl and himself, but no show of affection, and what small tenderness of nature the Spaniard possessed appeared to be bestowed upon Hugh.

Grim and silent, sipping a little cognac from a glass on a table by his side, the old man would sit on the porch for an hour at a time listening to the boy playing the piano in the room within.

Flick and himself also seemed on fair terms of friendship and would hold apparently endless discussions concerning various mining properties.  It was understood that Gallito had come down now to give his opinion on some claim that Flick had recently staked, and they two, usually accompanied by Hughie, would ride off over the desert and be gone two or three days at a time.

Hanson, finding that the theatrical tie, “we be brothers of one blood,” had not that potency for Mr. Gallito that it exercised for his wife, and that it was not for him as for her the open sesame to confidence and friendship, speedily ceased to strike this note and approached him on the ground of pure business.  The offer he had made to Pearl he repeated to her father.