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CHAPTER II

Demorest’s dream of a few days’ conjugal seclusion and confidences with his wife was quickly dispelled by that lady. “I came down with Rosita Pico, whose father, you know, once owned this property,” she said. “She’s gone on to her cousins at Los Osos Rancho to-night, but comes here to-morrow for a visit. She knows the place well; in fact, she once had a romantic love affair here. But she is very entertaining. It will be a little change for us,” she added, naively.

Demorest kept back a sigh, without changing his gentle smile. “I’m glad for your sake, dear. But is she not a little flighty and inclined to flirt a good deal? I think I’ve heard so.”

“She’s a young girl who has been severely tried, Richard, and perhaps is not to blame for endeavoring to forget it in such distraction as she can find,” said Mrs. Demorest, with a slight return of her old manner. “I can understand her feelings perfectly.” She looked pointedly at her husband as she spoke, it being one of her late habits to openly refer to their ante-nuptial acquaintance as a natural reaction from the martyrdom of her first marriage, with a quiet indifference that seemed almost an indelicacy. But her husband only said: “As you like, dear,” vaguely remembering Dona Rosita as the alleged heroine of a forgotten romance with some earlier American adventurer who had disappeared, and trying vainly to reconcile his wife’s sentimental description of her with his own recollection of the buxom, pretty, laughing, but dangerous-eyed Spanish girl he had, however, seen but once.

She arrived the next day, flying into a protracted embrace of Joan, which included a smiling recognition of Demorest with an unoccupied blue eye, and a shake of her fan over his wife’s shoulder. Then she drew back and seemed to take in the whole veranda and garden in another long caress of her eyes. “Ah-yess! I have recognized it, mooch. It es ze same. Of no change—not even of a leetle. No, she ess always—esso.” She stopped, looked unutterable things at Joan, pressed her fan below a spray of roses on her full bodice as if to indicate some thrilling memory beneath it, shook her head again, suddenly caught sight of Demorest’s serious face, said: “Ah, that brigand of our husband laughs himself at me,” and then herself broke into a charming ripple of laughter.

“But I was not laughing, Dona Rosita,” said Demorest, smiling sadly, however, in spite of himself.

She made a little grimace, and then raised her elbows, slightly lifting her shoulders. “As it shall please you, Senor. But he is gone—thees passion. Yess—what you shall call thees sentiment of lof—zo—as he came!” She threw her fingers in the air as if to illustrate the volatile and transitory passage of her affections, and then turned again to Joan with her back towards Demorest.

“Do please go on—Dona Rosita,” said he, “I never heard the real story. If there is any romance about my house, I’d like to know it,” he added with a faint sigh.

Dona Rosita wheeled upon him with an inquiring little look. “Ah, you have the sentiment, and YOU,” she continued, taking Joan by the arms, “YOU have not. Eet ess good so. When a—the wife,” she continued boldly, hazarding an extended English abstraction, “he has the sentimente and the hoosband he has nothing, eet is not good—for a-him—ze wife,” she concluded triumphantly.

“But I have great appreciation and I am dying to hear it,” said Demorest, trying to laugh.

“Well, poor one, you look so. But you shall lif till another time,” said Dona Rosita, with a mock courtesy, gliding with Joan away.

The “other time” came that evening when chocolate was served on the veranda, where Dona Rosita, mantilla-draped against the dry, clear, moonlit air, sat at the feet of Joan on the lowest step. Demorest, uneasily observant of the influence of the giddy foreigner on his wife, and conscious of certain confidences between them from which he was excluded, leaned against a pillar of the porch in half abstracted resignation; Joan, under the tutelage of Rosita, lit a cigarette; Demorest gazed at her wonderingly, trying to recall, in her fuller and more animated face, some memory of the pale, refined profile of the Puritan girl he had first met in the Boston train, the faint aurora of whose cheek in that northern clime seemed to come and go with his words. Becoming conscious at last of the eyes of Dona Rosita watching him from below, with an effort he recalled his duty as her host and gallantly reminded her that moonlight and the hour seemed expressly fitted for her promised love story.

“Do tell it,” said Joan, “I don’t mind hearing it again.”

“Then you know it already?” said Demorest, surprised.

Joan took the cigarette from her lips, laughed complacently, and exchanged a familiar glance with Rosita. “She told it me a year ago, when we first knew each other,” she replied. “Go on, dear,” to Rosita.

Thus encouraged, Dona Rosita began, addressing herself first in Spanish to Demorest, who understood the language better than his wife, and lapsing into her characteristic English as she appealed to them both. It was really very little to interest Don Ricardo—this story of a silly muchacha like herself and a strange caballero. He would go to sleep while she was talking, and to-night he would say to his wife, “Mother of God! why have you brought here this chattering parrot who speaks but of one thing?” But she would go on always like the windmill, whether there was grain to grind or no. “It was four years ago. Ah! Don Ricardo did not remember the country then—it was when the first Americans came—now it is different. Then there were no coaches—in truth one travelled very little, and always on horseback, only to see one’s neighbors. And suddenly, as if in one day, it was changed; there were strange men on the roads, and one was frightened, and one shut the gates of the pateo and drove the horses into the corral. One did not know much of the Americans then—for why? They were always going, going—never stopping, hurrying on to the gold mines, hurrying away from the gold mines, hurrying to look for other gold mines: but always going on foot, on horseback, in queer wagons—hurrying, pushing everywhere. Ah, it took away the breath. All, except one American—he did not hurry, he did not go with the others, he came and stayed here at Buenaventura. He was very quiet, very civil, very sad, and very discreet. He was not like the others, and always kept aloof from them. He came to see Don Andreas Pico, and wanted to beg a piece of land and an old vaquero’s hut near the road for a trifle. Don Andreas would have given it, or a better house, to him, or have had him live at the casa here; but he would not. He was very proud and shy, so he took the vaquero’s hut, a mere adobe affair, and lived in it, though a caballero like yourself, with white hands that knew not labor, and small feet that had seldom walked. In good time he learned to ride like the best vaquero, and helped Don Andreas to find the lost mustangs, and showed him how to improve the old mill. And his pride and his shyness wore off, and he would come to the casa sometimes. And Don Andreas got to love him very much, and his daughter, Dona Rosita—ah, well, yes truly—a leetle.

“But he had strange moods and ways, this American, and at times they would have thought him a lunatico had they not believed it to be an American fashion. He would be very kind and gentle like one of the family, coming to the casa every day, playing with the children, advising Don Andreas and—yes—having a devotion—very discreet, very ceremonious, for Dona Rosita. And then, all in a moment, he would become as ill, without a word or gesture, until he would stalk out of the house, gallop away furiously, and for a week not be heard of. The first time it happened, Dona Rosita was piqued by his rudeness, Don Andreas was alarmed, for it was on an evening like the present, and Dona Rosita was teaching him a little song on the guitar when the fit came on him. And he snapped the guitar strings like thread and threw it down, and got up like a bear and walked away without a word.”

“I see it all,” said Demorest, half seriously: “you were coquetting with him, and he was jealous.”

But Dona Rosita shook her head and turned impetuously, and said in English to Joan:

“No, it was astutcia—a trick, a ruse. Because when my father have arrived at his house, he is agone. And so every time. When he have the fit he goes not to his house. No. And it ees not until after one time when he comes back never again, that we have comprehend what he do at these times. And what do you think? I shall tell to you.”

She composed herself comfortably, with her plump elbows on her knees, and her fan crossed on the palm of her hand before her, and began again:

“It is a year he has gone, and the stagecoach is attack of brigands. Tiburcio, our vaquero, have that night made himself a pasear on the road, and he have seen HIM. He have seen, one, two, three men came from the wood with something on the face, and HE is of them. He has nothing on his face, and Tiburcio have recognize him. We have laugh at Tiburcio. We believe him not. It is improbable that this Senor Huanson—”

“Senor who?” said Demorest.

“Huanson—eet is the name of him. Ah, Carr!—posiblemente it is nothing—a Don Fulano—or an apodo—Huanson.”

“Oh, I see, JOHNSON, very likely.”

“We have said it is not possible that this good man, who have come to the house and ride on his back the children, is a thief and a brigand. And one night my father have come from the Monterey in the coach, and it was stopped. And the brigands have take from the passengers the money, the rings from the finger, and the watch—and my father was of the same. And my father, he have great dissatisfaction and anguish, for his watch is given to him of an old friend, and it is not like the other watch. But the watch he go all the same. And then when the robbers have made a finish comes to the window of the coach a mascara and have say, ‘Who is the Don Andreas Pico?’ And my father have say, ‘It is I who am Don Andreas Pico.’ And the mask have say, ‘Behold, your watch is restore!’ and he gif it to him. And my father say, ‘To whom have I the distinguished honor to thank?’ And the mask say—”

“Johnson,” interrupted Demorest.

“No,” said Dona Rosita in grave triumph, “he say Essmith. For this Essmith is like Huanson—an apodo—nothing.”

“Then you really think this man was your old friend?” asked Demorest.

“I think.”

“And that he was a robber even when living here—and that it was not your cruelty that really drove him to take the road?”

Dona Rosita shrugged her plump shoulders. “You will not comprehend. It was because of his being a brigand that he stayed not with us. My father would not have object if he have present himself to me for marriage in these times. I would not have object, for I was young, and we have knew nothing. It was he who have object. For why? Inside of his heart he have feel he was a brigand.”

“But you might have reformed him in time,” said Demorest.

She again shrugged her shoulders. “Quien sabe.” After a pause she added with infinite gravity: “And before he have reform, it is bad for the menage. I should invite to my house some friend. They arrive, and one say, ‘I have not the watch of my pocket,’ and another, ‘The ring of my finger, he is gone,’ and another, ‘My earrings, she is loss.’ And I am obliged to say, ‘They reside now in the pocket of my hoosband; patience! a little while—perhaps to-morrow—he will restore.’ No,” she continued, with an air of infinite conviction, “it is not good for the menage—the necessity of those explanation.”

“You told me he was handsome,” said Joan, passing her arm carelessly around Dona Rosita’s comfortable waist. “How did he look?”

“As an angel! He have long curls to his back. His moustache was as silk, for he have had never a barber to his face. And his eyes—Santa Maria!—so soft and so—so melankoly. When he smile it is like the moonlight. But,” she added, rising to her feet and tossing the end of her lace mantilla over her shoulder with a little laugh—“it is finish—Adelante! Dr-rrive on!”

“I don’t want to destroy your belief in the connection of your friend with the road agents,” said Demorest grimly, “but if he belongs to their band it is in an inferior capacity. Most of them are known to the authorities, and I have heard it even said that their leader or organizer is a very unromantic speculator in San Francisco.”

But this suggestion was received coldly by the ladies, who superciliously turned their backs upon it and the suggester. Joan dropped her voice to a lower tone and turned to Dona Rosita. “And you have never seen him since?”

“Never.”

“I should—at least, I wouldn’t have let it end in THAT way,” said Joan in a positive whisper.

“Eh?” said Dona Rosita, laughing. “So eet is YOU, Juanita, that have the romance—eh? Ah, bueno! ‘you have the house—so I gif to you the lover also.’ I place him at your disposition.” She made a mock gesture of elaborate and complete abnegation. “But,” she added in Joan’s ear, with a quick glance at Demorest, “do not let our hoosband eat him. Even now he have the look to strangle ME. Make to him a little lof, quickly, when I shall walk in the garden.” She turned away with a pretty wave of her fan to Demorest, and calling out, “I go to make an assignation with my memory,” laughed again, and lazily passed into the shadow. An ominous silence on the veranda followed, broken finally by Mrs. Demorest.

“I don’t think it was necessary for you to show your dislike to Dona Rosita quite so plainly,” she said, coldly, slightly accenting the Puritan stiffness, which any conjugal tete-a-tete lately revived in her manner.

“I show dislike of Dona Rosita?” stammered Demorest, in surprise. “Come, Joan,” he added, with a forgiving smile, “you don’t mean to imply that I dislike her because I couldn’t get up a thrilling interest in an old story I’ve heard from every gossip in the pueblo since I can remember.”

“It’s not an old story to HER,” said Joan, dryly, “and even if it were, you might reflect that all people are not as anxious to forget the past as you are.”

Demorest drew back to let the shaft glance by. “The story is old enough, at least for her to have had a dozen flirtations, as you know, since then,” he returned gently, “and I don’t think she herself seriously believes in it. But let that pass. I am sorry I offended her. I had no idea of doing so. As a rule, I think she is not so easily offended. But I shall apologize to her.” He stopped and approached nearer his wife in a half-timid, half-tentative affection. “As to my forgetfulness of the past, Joan, even if it were true, I have had little cause to forget it lately. Your friend, Corwin—”

“I must insist upon your not calling him MY friend, Richard,” interrupted Joan, sharply, “considering that it was through YOUR indiscretion in coming to us for the buggy that night, that he suspected—”

She stopped suddenly, for at that moment a startled little shriek, quickly subdued, rang through the garden. Demorest ran hurriedly down the steps in the direction of the outcry. Joan followed more cautiously. At the first turning of the path Dona Rosita almost fell into his arms. She was breathless and trembling, but broke into a hysterical laugh.

“I have such a fear come to me—I cry out! I think I have seen a man; but it was nothing—nothing! I am a fool. It is no one here.”

“But where did you see anything?” said Joan, coming up.

Rosita flew to her side. “Where? Oh, here!—everywhere! Ah, I am a fool!” She was laughing now, albeit there were tears glistening on her lashes when she laid her head on Joan’s shoulder.

“It was some fancy—some resemblance you saw in that queer cactus,” said Demorest, gently. “It is quite natural, I was myself deceived the other night. But I’ll look around to satisfy you. Take Dona Rosita back to the veranda, Joan. But don’t be alarmed, dear—it was only an illusion.”

He turned away. When his figure was lost in the entwining foliage, Dona Rosita seized Joan’s shoulder and dragged her face down to a level with her own.

“It was something!” she whispered quickly.

“Who?”

“It was—HIM!”

“Nonsense,” groaned Joan, nevertheless casting a hurried glance around her.

“Have no fear,” said Dona Rosita quickly, “he is gone—I saw him pass away—so! But it was HE—Huanson. I recognize him. I forget him never.”

“Are you sure?”

“Have I the eyes? the memory? Madre de Dios! Am I a lunatico too? Look! He have stood there—so.”

“Then you think he knew you were here?”

“Quien sabe?”

“And that he came here to see you?”

Dona Rosita caught her again by the shoulders, and with her lips to Joan’s ear, said with the intensest and most deliberate of emphasis:

“NO!”

“What in Heaven’s name brought him here then?”

“You!”

“Are you crazy?”

“You! you! YOU!” repeated Dona Rosita, with crescendo energy. “I have come upon him here; where he stood and look at the veranda, absorrrb of YOU. You move—he fly.”

“Hush!”

“Ah, yes! I have said I give him to you. And he came, Bueno,” murmured Dona Rosita, with a half-resigned, half-superstitious gesture.

“WILL you be quiet!”

It was the sound of Demorest’s feet on the gravel path, returning from his fruitless search. He had seen nothing. It must have been Dona Rosita’s fancy.

“She was just saying she thought she had been mistaken,” said Joan, quietly. “Let us go in—it is rather chilly here, and I begin to feel creepy too.”

Nevertheless, as they entered the house again, and the light of the hall lantern fell upon her face, Demorest thought he had never but once before seen her look so nervously and animatedly beautiful.

CHAPTER III

The following day, when Mr. Ezekiel Corwin had delivered his letters of introduction, and thoroughly canvassed the scant mercantile community of San Buenaventura with considerable success, he deposited his carpet-bag at the stage office in the posada, and found to his chagrin that he had still two hours to wait before the coach arrived. After a vain attempt to impart cheerful but disparaging criticism of the pueblo and its people to Senor Mateo and his wife—whose external courtesy had been visibly increased by a line from Demorest, but whose confidence towards the stranger had not been extended in the same proportion—he gave it up, and threw himself lazily on a wooden bench in the veranda, already hacked with the initials of his countrymen, and drawing a jack-knife from his pocket, he began to add to that emblazonry the trade-mark of the Panacea—as a casual advertisement. During its progress, however, he was struck by the fact that while no one seemed to enter the posada through the stage office, the number of voices in the adjoining room seemed to increase, and the ministrations of Mateo and his wife became more feverishly occupied with their invisible guests. It seemed to Ezekiel that consequently there must be a second entrance which he had not seen, and this added to the circumstance that one or two lounging figures who had been approaching unaccountably disappeared before reaching the veranda, induced him to rise and examine the locality. A few paces beyond was an alley, but it appeared to be already blocked by several cigarette-smoking, short-jacketed men who were leaning against its walls, and showed no inclination to make way for him. Checked, but not daunted, Ezekiel coolly returned to the stage office, and taking the first opportunity when Mateo passed through the rear door, followed him. As he expected, the innkeeper turned to the left and entered a large room filled with tobacco smoke and the local habitues of the posada. But Ezekiel, shrewdly surmising that the private entrance must be in the opposite direction, turned to the right along the passage until he came unexpectedly upon the corridor of the usual courtyard, or patio, of every Mexican hostelry, closed at one end by a low adobe wall, in which there was a door. The free passage around the corridor was interrupted by wide partitions, fitted up with tables and benches, like stalls, opening upon the courtyard where a few stunted fig and orange trees still grew. As the courtyard seemed to be the only communication between the passage he had left and the door in the wall, he was about to cross it, when the voices of two men in the compartment struck his ears. Although one was evidently an American’s, Ezekiel was instinctively convinced that they were speaking in English only for greater security against being understood by the frequenters of the posada. It is unnecessary to say that this was an innocent challenge to the curiosity of Ezekiel that he instantly accepted. He drew back carefully into the shadow of the partition as one of the voices asked—

“Wasn’t that Johnson just come in?”

There was a movement as if some one had risen to look over the compartment, but the gathering twilight completely hid Ezekiel.

“No!”

“He’s late. Suppose he don’t come—or back out?”

The other man broke into a grim laugh. “I reckon you don’t know Johnson yet, or you’d understand this yer little game o’ his is just the one idea o’ his life. He’s been two years on that man’s track, and he ain’t goin’ to back out now that he’s got a dead sure thing on him.”

“But why is he so keen about it, anyway? It don’t seem nat’ral for a business man built after Johnson’s style, and a rich man to boot, to go into this detective business. It ain’t the reward, we know that. Is it an old grudge?”

“You bet!” The speaker paused, and then in a lower voice, which taxed Ezekial’s keen ear to the uttermost, resumed: “It’s said up in Frisco that Cherokee Bob knew suthin’ agin Johnson way back in the States; anyhow, I believe it’s understood that they came across the plains together in ‘50—and Bob hounded Johnson and blackmailed him here where he was livin’, even to the point of makin’ him help him on the road or give information, until one day Johnson bucked against it—kicked over the traces—and swore he’d be revenged on Bob, and then just settled himself down to that business. Wotever he’d been and done himself he made it all right with the sheriff here; and I’ve heard ez it wasn’t anything criminal or that sort, but that it was o’ some private trouble that he’d confided to that hound Bob, and Bob had threatened to tell agen him. That’s the grudge they say Johnson has, and that’s why he’s allowed to be the head devil in this yer affair. It’s an understood thing, too, that the sheriff and the police ain’t goin’ to interfere if Johnson accidentally blows the top of Bob’s head off in the scrimmage of a capter.”

“And I reckon Bob wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing to him when he finds out that Johnson has given him away?”

“I reckon,” said the other, sententiously, “for it’s Johnson’s knowledge of the country and the hoss-stealers that are in with Bob’s gang of road agents that made it easy for him to buy up and win over Bob’s friends here, so that they’d help to trap him.”

“It’s pretty rough on Bob to be sold out in that way,” said the second speaker, sympathizingly.

“If they were white men, p’rhaps,” returned his companion, contemptuously, “but this yer’s a case of Injin agen Injin, ez the men are Mexican half-breeds just as Bob’s a half Cherokee. The sooner that kind o’ cross cattle exterminate each other the better it’ll be for the country. It takes a white man like Johnson to set ‘em by the ears.”

A silence followed. Ezekiel, beginning to be slightly bored with his cheaply acquired but rather impractical information, was about to slip back into the passage again when he was arrested by a laugh from the first speaker.

“What’s the matter?” growled the other. “Do you want to bring the whole posada out here?”

“I was only thinkin’ what a skeer them innocent greenhorn passengers will get just ez they’re snoozing off for the night, ten miles from here,” responded his friend, with a chuckle. “Wonder ef anybody’s goin’ up from here besides that patent medicine softy.”

Ezekiel stopped as if petrified.

“Ef the – fools keep quiet they won’t be hurt, for our men will be ready to chip in the moment of the attack. But we’ve got to let the attack be made for the sake of the evidence. And if we warn off the passengers from going this trip, and let the stage go up empty, Bob would suspect something and vamose. But here’s Johnson!”

The door in the adobe wall had suddenly opened, and a figure in a serape entered the patio. Ezekiel, whose curiosity was whetted with indignation at the ignominious part assigned to him in this comedy, forgot even his risk of detection by the newcomer, who advanced quickly towards the compartment. When he had reached it he said, in a tone of bitterness:

“The game is up, gentlemen, and the whole thing is blown. The scoundrel has got some confederate here—for he’s been seen openly on the road near Demorest’s ranch, and the band have had warning and dispersed. We must find out the traitor, and take our precautions for the next time. Who is that there? I don’t know him.”

He was pointing to Ezekiel, who had started eagerly forward at the first sound of his voice. The two occupants of the compartment rose at the same moment, leaped into the courtyard, and confronted Ezekiel. Surrounded by the three menacing figures he did not quail, but remained intently gazing upon the newcomer. Then his mouth opened, and he drawled lazily:

“Wa’al, ef it ain’t Squire Blandford, of North Liberty, Connecticut, I’m a treed coon. Squire Blandford, how DO you do?”

The stranger drew back in undisguised amazement; the two men glanced hurriedly at each other; Ezekiel alone remained cool, smiling, imperturbable, and triumphant.

“Who are YOU, sir? I do not know you,” demanded the newcomer, roughly.

“Like ez not,” said Corwin dryly, “it’s a matter o’ four year sense I lived in your house. Even Dick Demorest—you knew Dick?—didn’t know me; but I reckon that Mrs. Blandford as used to be—”

“That’s enough,” said Blandford—for it was he—suddenly mastering both himself and Corwin by a supreme emphasis of will and gesture. “Wait!” Then turning to the two others who were discreetly regarding the blank adobe wall before them, he said: “Excuse me for a few minutes, gentlemen. There is no hurry now. I will see you later;” and with an imperative wave of his hand motioned Ezekiel to precede him into the passage, and followed him.

He did not speak until they entered the stage office, when, passing through it, he said peremptorily: “Follow me.” The few loungers, who seemed to recognize him, made way for him with a singular deference that impressed Ezekiel, already dominated by his manner. The first perception in his mind was that Blandford had in some strange way succeeded to Demorest’s former imperious character. There was no trace left of the old, gentle subjection to Joan’s prim precision. Ezekiel followed him out of the office as unresistingly as he had followed Demorest into the stables on that eventful night. They passed down the narrow street until Blandford suddenly stopped short and turned into the crumbling doorway of one of the low adobe buildings and entered an apartment. It seemed to be the ordinary living-room of the house, made more domestic by the presence of a silk counterpaned bed in one corner, a prie Dieu and crucifix, and one or two articles of bedchamber furniture. A woman was sitting in deshabille by the window; a man was smoking on a lounge against the wall. Blandford, in the same peremptory manner, addressed a command in Spanish to the inmates, who immediately abandoned the apartment to the seeming trespasser.

Motioning his companion to a seat on the lounge just vacated, Blandford folded his arms and stood erect before him.

“Well,” he said, with quick, business conciseness, “what do you want?”

Ezekiel was staggered out of his complacency.

“Wa’al,” he stammered, “I only reckoned to ask the news, ez we are old friends—I—”

“How much do you want?” repeated Blandford, impatiently.

Ezekiel was mystified, yet expectant. “I can’t say ez I exakly understand,” he began.

“How—much—money—do—you—want,” continued Blandford, with frigid accuracy, “to get up and get out of this place?”

“Wa’al, consideren ez I’m travellin’ here ez the only authorized agent of a first-class Frisco Drug House,” said Ezekiel, with a mingling of mortification, pride, and hopefulness, “unless you’re travellin’ in the opposition business, I don’t see what’s that to you.”

Blandford regarded him searchingly for an instant. “Who sent you here?”

“Dilworth & Dusenberry, Battery Street, San Francisco. Hev their card?” said Ezekiel, taking one from his waistcoat pocket.

“Corwin,” said Blandford, sternly, “whatever your business is here you’ll find it will pay you better, a – sight, to be frank with me and stop this Yankee shuffling. You say you have been with Demorest—what has HE got to do with your business here?”

“Nothin’,” said Ezekiel. “I reckon he wos ez astonished to see me ez you are.”

“And didn’t he send you here to seek me?” said Blandford, impatiently.

“Considerin’ he believes you a dead man, I reckon not.”

Blandford gave a hard, constrained laugh. After a pause, still keeping his eyes fixed on Ezekiel, he said:

“Then your recognition of me was accidental?”

“Wa’al, yes. And ez I never took much stock in the stories that you were washed off the Warensboro Bridge, I ain’t much astonished at finding you agin.”

“What did you believe happened to me?” said Blandford, less brusquely.

Ezekiel noticed the softening; he felt his own turn coming. “I kalkilated you had reasons for going off, leaving no address behind you,” he drawled.

“What reasons?” asked Blandford, with a sudden relapse of his former harshness.

“Wa’al, Squire Blandford, sens you wanter know—I reckon your business wasn’t payin’, and there was a matter of two hundred and fifty dollars ye took with ye, that your creditors would hev liked to hev back.”

“Who dare say that?” demanded Blandford, angrily.

“Your wife that was—Mrs. Demorest ez is—told it to her mother,” returned Ezekiel, lazily.