beautiful. "I got my pride. I told him the truth at first, and when he
wouldn't believe me--'Oh, no, there _must be_ someone'--I says to myself,
'All right, deary, have it your own way,' and I jolly him along now,"
she laughed with joyous memory. "I got him good and guessing, Pop."

The old man looked dissatisfied.

"I ain't much stuck on this, Panchita. What good are you goin' to get
out of it?"

"Fun!" she cried, throwing the fig skin on the table. "Don't I deserve
some after six years? If he wants to act like a fool that's his affair,
and believe me, he's able to take care of himself. And so am I. No one
knows that better than you do, deary."

He left soon after that. In his nomad life, with its long gaps of
separation from her, it was easy for him to keep his movements concealed
and caution had become a habit. So he had not told her that on his last
visit to the city he had taken a room, instead of going to one of the
men's hotels that dotted the Mission. It was in a battered, dingy house
that crouched in shame-faced decay behind the shrubs and palms of a once
jaunty garden. Mrs. Meeker, the landlady, was a respectable woman who had
seen so complete an extinction of fortune that she asked nothing of her
few lodgers but the rent in advance and a decent standard of sobriety. To
the bandit it offered a seclusion so grateful that he had resolved to
keep it, a hiding-place to which he could steal when the longing for his
child would not be denied.

The house was not far from the Vallejo Hotel, on a cross street off one
of the main avenues of traffic. As he rounded the corner he saw the black