“I’m glad to hear Jonesville is prosperous,” he told his host.  “And they say you’re in everything.”

“That’s right; and prosperity’s no name for it.  Every-body wants Blaze to have a finger in the pie.  I’m interested in the bank, the sugar-mill, the hardware-store, the ice-plant—­Say, that ice-plant’s a luxury for a town this size.  D’you know what I made out of it last year?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Twenty-seven thousand dollars!” The father of Jonesville spoke proudly, impressively, and then through habit called upon his daughter for verification.  “Didn’t I, Paloma?”

Miss Paloma’s answer was unexpected, and came with equal emphasis:  “No, you didn’t, father.  The miserable thing lost money.”

Blaze was only momentarily dismayed.  Then he joined in his visitor’s laughter.  “How can a man get along without the co-operation of his own household?” he inquired, naively.  “Maybe it was next year I was thinking about.”  Thereafter he confined himself to statements which required no corroboration.

Dave had long since learned that to hold Blaze Jones to a strict accountability with fact was to rob his society of its greatest charm.  A slavish accuracy in figures, an arid lack of imagination, reduces conversation to the insipidness of flat wine, and Blaze’s talk was never dull.  He was a keen, shrewd, practical man, but somewhere in his being there was concealed a tremendous, lop-sided sense of humor which took the form of a bewildering imagery.  An attentive audience was enough for him, and, once his fancy was in full swing, there was no limit to his outrageous exaggerations.  A light of credulity in a hearer’s eye filled him with prodigious mirth, and it is doubtful if his listeners ever derived a fraction of the amusement from his fabrications that he himself enjoyed.  Paloma’s spirit of contradiction was the only fly in his ointment; now that his daughter was old enough to “keep books” on him, much of the story-teller’s joy was denied him.

Of course his proclivities occasionally led to misapprehensions; chance acquaintances who recognized him as an artful romancer were liable to consider him generally untruthful.  But even in this misconception Blaze took a quiet delight, secure in the knowledge that all who knew him well regarded him as a rock of integrity.  As a matter of fact, his genuine exploits were quite as sensational as those of his manufacture.

When, after supper, Blaze had hitched a pair of driving-mules to his buckboard, preparatory to showing his guest the glories of Jonesville, Dave said: 

“Paloma’s getting mighty pretty.”

“She’s as pretty as a blue-bonnet flower,” her father agreed.  “And she runs me around something scandalous.  I ’ain’t got the freedom of a peon.”  Blaze sighed and shook his shaggy head.  “You know me, Dave; I never used to be scared of nobody.  Well, it’s different now.  She rides me with a Spanish bit, and my soul ain’t my own.”  With a sudden lightening of his gloom, he added:  “Say, you’re going to stay right here with us as long as you’re in town; I want you to see how I cringe.”  In spite of Blaze’s plaintive tone it was patent that he was inordinately proud of Paloma and well content with his serfdom.