Her father did not respond to her gayety.

"Look-a-here, Panchita," he began, but she stopped him, flapping a long hand.

"Cut it out, Pop. I know all that. You needn't come any stern parent business over me. _I'm_ on. _I_ know my way about. I ain't going to run my head into any noose, or tie any millstone round my neck. Don't you think by this time you can trust me?"

Her words seemed to rea.s.sure him. The bovine intensity of his gaze softened.

"You've had a heap of beaux," he said moodily.

"And kept every last one of 'em in their place, except for those I kicked out. And they got to their place; my kick landed them there."

"Who is he?"

Pancha returned to her fig, looking over its wilted skin for clinging tidbits.

"Named Mayer, a foreigner--at least he's born here, but he looks foreign and acts foreign; hands out the kind of talk you read in books. Awful high cla.s.s."

"Treats you respectful?"

She gave him a withering glance.

"_Respectful!_ Treats me like I'd faint if he spoke rough or break if he touched me. I ain't ever seen anything so choice. You said I was thin--it's keeping up such a dignified style that's worn me down."

This description was so unlike the bandit's idea of love-making that he became incredulous.

"How do you know he's a beau? Looks like to me he was just marking time."

She smiled, the secret smile of a woman who has seen the familiar signs.

She had taken another fig and delicately breaking it open, eyed its crimson heart.

"He's jealous."

"Who of?"

"n.o.body, anybody, everybody." She began to laugh, and putting her lips to the fruit, sucked, and then drew them away stained with its ruby juice.

"He's always trying to draw me, find out if there isn't somebody I like.

Pop, you'd laugh if you could hear him sniffing round the subject like a cat round the cream."

"What do you tell him?"

"_Me?_" She gave him a scornful cast of her eye. Her face was flushed, and with her crimsoned mouth and shining eyes she was for the moment 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 bushiness of its garden and then, barring the night sky, the skeleton of a new building. The sight gave him a disagreeable shock; anything that let more life and light into that secluded backwater was a menace. He approached, anxiously scanning it. It took the place of old rookeries, demolished in his absence, one side rising gaunt and high against Mrs.

Meeker's. He leaned from the front steps and looked over the fence; the separation between the two walls was not more than two or three feet.

His room was on the top floor in the back, and gaining it, he jerked up the shade and looked out. Formerly a row of dreary yards extended to the houses in the rear. Now the frame of the new building filled them in, projecting in sketchy outline to the end of the lots. Disturbed he studied it--four stories, a hotel, apartments, or offices. Whatever it was it would be bad for him, bringing men so close to his lair.

He stood for some time gazing out, saw a late, lopsided moon swim into the sky and by its light the yard below develop a beauty of glistening leaves and fretted shadows. The windows of the houses beyond the fence shone bright, glazed with a pallid l.u.s.ter. Even Mrs. Meeker's stable, wherein she kept her horse and cart, the one relic saved from better days, stood out darkly picturesque amid the frosted silver of vines. He saw nothing of all this, only the black skeleton which would soon be astir with the life he shunned.

He drew down the shade and dropped heavily into a chair, his feet sprawled, his chin sunk on his breast. The single gas jet emitted a torn yellow flame that issued from the burner with a stuttering, ripping sound. The light gilded the bosses of his face, wax-smooth above the shadowed hollows, and it looked even older than it had in sleep. His spirit drooped in a somber exhaustion--he was so tired of it all, of the stealth, the watchfulness, the endless vigilance, the lack of rest. One more coup, one lucky haul, and he was done. Then there would be the ranch, peace, security, an honest ending, and Pancha, believing, never knowing.

CHAPTER XI

THE SOLID GOLD NUGGET

The autumn was drawing to an end and the winter season settling into its gait. Everybody was back in town, at least Mrs. Wesson said so in her column, where she also prophesied a program of festivities for the coming six months. This was rea.s.suring as Mrs. Wesson was supposed to know, and anyway there were signs of it already--a first tentative outbreak of parties, little dinners cropping up here and there. People who did things were trailing back from Europe, bringing new clothes and ideas with which to abash the stay-at-homes. Big houses were opening and little houses that had been open all along were trying to pretend they had been shut.

Furs were being hung on clothes lines and raincoats brought out of closets. Violets would soon be blooming around the roots of the live oaks and the Marin County hills be green. In short the San Francisco winter was at hand.

The Alston house had been cleaned and set in order from the cellar to the roof and in its dustless, shining s.p.a.ciousness Lorry sat down and faced her duties. The time had come for her to act. Chrystie must take her place among her fellows, be set forth, garnished and launched as befitted the daughter of George Alston. It was an undertaking before which Lorry's spirit quailed, but it was part of the obligation she had a.s.sumed. Though she had accepted the idea, the translation from contemplation to action was slow. In fact she might have stayed contemplating had not a conversation one night with Chrystie nerved her to a desperate courage.

The girls occupied two adjoining rooms on the side of the house which overlooked the garden. Across the hall was their parents' room, exactly the same as it had been when Minnie Alston died there. Behind it were others, large, high-ceilinged, with vast beds and heavy curtains. These had been tenanted at long intervals, once by an uncle from the East, since deceased, and lately by the Barlow girls, Chrystie's friends from San Mateo. That had been quite an occasion. Chrystie talked of it as she did of going to the opera or on board the English man-of-war.

Lorry was sitting in front of the gla.s.s brushing her hair, when Chrystie, supposedly retired, came in fully dressed. She dropped onto the side of the bed, watching her sister, with her head tilted, her eye dreamily ruminant.

"What's the matter, dear?" said Lorry. "Why aren't you in bed?"

Chrystie yawned.

"I can't possibly imagine except that I don't want to be there," came through the yawn.

"Aren't you sleepy?"

"In a sort of way." She yawned again and stretched with a wide spread of arms. "I seem to be sleepy on the outside but it doesn't go down into my soul."

Lorry, drawing the comb through her long hair which fell in a shining sweep from her forehead to the chair seat, wanted this explained. But her sister vaguely shook her head and stared at the carpet, then, after a pause, murmured:

"I wish something would happen."

"What kind of thing?"

"Oh, just something--any old thing would be a change."

Lorry stopped combing.

"Do you mean that you're dull?" she asked. The worried gravity of her face did not fit the subject.