Pearl never made any conventional attempts at conversation, and for a time they walked in silence through those fairy aisles where the light fell golden-green and the sun only filtered in tiny broken disks through the delicate lace of the mesquite leaves.  Then Flick spoke: 

“Pearl, I got something to say to you, and it’s about the hardest thing I ever tried to do, because I know,” his mouth twisted a little, “that you’re not going to like me any better for it.”

“What do you do it for then, Bob?” she asked, and there was more than a half impatient mockery in her tone, there was wonder.

“I got to,” he said doggedly.  “I guess there’s no sense in it, but, whether you like it or not, I always got to do what seems the best thing for you.”

It was an inflexible attitude, an ideal of conduct unfalteringly held, and uncompromisingly adhered to, and she knew it.  Therefore, she shrugged her shoulders resignedly, the faint horse-shoe frown again appearing in her forehead.  “Well—­go on, then,” her voice as resigned as her shoulders, “and get it over.”

“It’s this—­” he hesitated and looked down at her a moment, and the tenderness his glance expressed she did not lift her eyes to see and would not have noticed if she had; “Pearl, Hanson ain’t on the level.”

She laughed that slightly grating, almost unpleasant, laugh of hers.  “It’s no secret to me, Bob, that several of you are thinking that.”

“We got cause to,” he answered moodily; and then, as if struck by something in her words, he looked at her quickly.  “Has your Pop told you anything?” There was surprise in both glance and voice.

“Not a thing,” she assured him, scornfully amused by the question, “but there are some things that don’t have to be told.  Do you suppose I haven’t caught on to the way you’ve all been acting?”

Again he looked his surprise.  “We all been acting?” he repeated.

“Yes.  I’ve seen things and I’ve felt them.  Oh, you might just as well out with it, Bob.  What is it all about?”

He stared unseeing down the sun-sifted dusk of the green lane.  Here the desert silence was like a benediction of peace, broken now and then by the faint, shrill note of an insect, or the occasional soft, mournful plaint of a dove.

“Pearl, you can laugh at me if you want to, and say I’m jealous.  That’s true, I am.  I can’t help it; but this time it wasn’t all that.  I got to size up men quick; that was my business for a good many years, and the first minute I set eyes on Hanson I knew he wasn’t straight.  And then, Hughie—­”

“And so you stirred up Pop to watch him?” she broke in quick as a flash.

“No,” he answered patiently, “no, but Hughie’s feelings got so strong about him that your Pop kind of woke up and got to studying him, and then he saw what—­what neither of you tried to hide,” there was bitterness in his tone, “and then he kind of remembered something he’d heard up in Colina, and—­”