But these disturbing conditions could not daunt Pearl’s high spirits; she was like flame, and the light of her eye, the glow on her cheek, the buoyancy of her step were not all due to the ardor of her loving and the joy of being ardently loved.  There was also the zest of intrigue.

And, oh! what a mad and splendid game she and Hanson played together!  He rose to her every soaring audacity; they took almost impossible chances as lightly as a hunter takes a hurdle.  The lift of her eyelash, an imperceptibly significant gesture, a casual word spoken in conversation, these Hanson met with an incredible quickness of understanding.  It was a game at which he was master, and which he had played many times before, but never had his intuitions been so keen, his always rapid comprehension been so stimulated.

Beneath the eye of another master of intrigue, Gallito, watchful as a spider, they met and loved until, it seemed to Hanson, that the whole, wide desert rang with their glorious laughter.  And through it all Francisco Gallito sat and smoked and sipped his cognac imperturbably; apparently unruffled by defeat, a defeat—­the Pearl with subtle femininity saw to that—­which was not without its elements of ignominy.

But now Bob Flick had returned and had sat late with Gallito the night before, talking, although Mrs. Gallito, who tendered this information to her daughter, had not been able to overhear any part of their conversation, in spite of her truly persistent efforts to do so.  These circumstances, and results which would probably ensue when a definite course of action had been decided upon, occupied the Pearl’s thoughts as she stood at the gate gazing out on the gray wastes spread before her in the broad morning sunshine.  Lolita was perched on the fence beside her, swaying back and forth, muttering to herself and occasionally dipping down perilously in a curious effort to see the garden upside down through the fence palings.

Pearl turned at last from her contemplation of the subject which absorbed her attention, and smiled as her glance fell upon the gaudy tail, the only part of Lolita now visible, although, even then, the horse-shoe frown, which showed faintly on her smooth forehead, a facsimile of the one graven deep on her father’s wrinkled brow, did not disappear.

“They’ve got it in for us, Lolita—­Rudolf and me.”  She laughed outright now.  Pearl’s laughter was ever a disagreeable surprise; low, harsh, unpleasantly vibrant, and in strange dissonance to her soft, contralto voice.  “Lay you any odds you say, Lolita, that it’s poor old Bob that’s got to be the goat.”

The parrot swung back to a normal position with surprising rapidity.  “Bob, Bob,” she croaked.  “Mi jasmin, Pearl, mi corazon,” and she gazed at her mistress with wrinkled, cynical eyes.

“Yes, Bob’s got to do the telling.”  Pearl confided more to Lolita than she ever did in her fellow beings.  “Oh, Rudolf, this is where you get knifed!  They’ve been laying for you right from the first.  When Bob’s got to do a thing, he never wastes any time; he’ll be along sure this morning.  I guess we’ll just wait right here and catch him.”