The Black Pearl. Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
boy tossed his head impatiently, but made no answer. From the moment Hanson had spoken he had assumed an air of immobile and concentrated attention, tense as that of an Indian listening and sighting in a forest, or of a highly trained dog on guard.
"Take you at your word," laughed Hanson, and swung up the path, a big, dominant presence, as vital as the morning. "Howdy," he shook hands with Pearl and then turned to the boy, but Hugh drew quickly away from that extended hand, quite as if he saw it before him.
Hanson raised his eyebrows in involuntary surprise, but his good humor was unabated. "What's the good word with Hughie?" he asked genially. "I can't call you anything else, because I don't know your last name."
"My name is Hugh Braddock," said the boy coldly.
Again Hanson lifted his brows, this time humorously, as at a child's unexpected rebuff, and looked at Pearl, and again he experienced a feeling of surprise, for she was gazing at Hugh with a puzzled frown, which held a faint touch of apprehension.
"Then," Hanson looked from one to the other, but spoke to Pearl, "you ain't brother and sister?"
"No," said Pearl, and it disturbed Hanson more than he would have dreamed to notice the change in voice and manner. The warm, provocative, inherent coquetry was gone from both smile and eyes; instead of a soft, alluring girl ready to play with him a baffling, blood-stirring game of flirtation, she was again the sphynx of last night, whose unrevealing eyes seemed to have looked out over the desert for centuries, until its infinite heart was as an open page to her, and she repressed in the scarlet curves of her mouth its eternal, secret enigma.
"We are brother and sister." Hugh edged along the step until he could lay his head against Pearl's knee. "But we're not blood relations, if you're curious to know." The insolence of his tone was barely veiled. "My mother was a circus woman that Mrs. Gallito knew. She deserted me when I was a baby, and Mrs. Gallito has been all the mother I ever had or wanted, and Pearl the only sister. I was born blind."
"Oh, Hughie," remonstrated Pearl, "you've got no call to say that. He don't see with his eyes," she turned to Hanson, "but I never saw anybody that could see so much."
"How's that?" asked Hanson easily. He was used from long experience to the temperamental, emotional people of the stage, and he had no intention of being daunted by any moods these two might exhibit.
"Hughie, what color are Mr. Hanson's clothes?" asked Pearl.
Still with a petulant, disdainful expression, the boy leaned forward and ran his long, slender fingers with their cushioned tips over Hanson's coat. "Brown," he replied indifferently.
"He can tell you the color of every flower in the garden, just by touching them," explained Pearl. "He knows all the different kinds of birds just by the whirr of their wings. He can tell the color o every dress I wear. He—"
But Hugh had risen. "I don't like you to tell strangers about me," he cried with passionate petulance, "and you know it. I'm going to find mother."
"Well, tell her that Mr. Hanson's here," called Pearl after him, unaffected by his outburst. "He hasn't taken a shine to you," she remarked frankly to Hanson.
Again he was disturbed to notice that she seemed to give this obvious fact some weight. She had rested her chin on her hand and was gazing meditatively at the gay garden. A shadow of disappointment was on her face, and more than a touch of it in her voice.
"That don't bother me," affirmed Hanson confidently. "All that I'm caring about is whether some one else shares his opinion." His bold, gay eyes looked straight into hers.
"I wonder who?" drawled Pearl. The gleam of her eyes shining through narrowed lids and black, tangled lashes flicked him like the tang of a whip.> "Maybe you mean Lolita?"
The parrot, which had perched on her shoulder and was tweaking her ear, now hearing its name, looked up, fluttered its wings, and called out in a gruff, masculine voice: "Mi jasmin, Pearl. Mi corazon."
"He's talking for me, sure," said Hanson, who knew enough Spanish to make out.
"Oh, damn," said the parrot disgustedly; "why the hell can't you shut up?"
Hanson gave a great burst of laughter. "Lolita and Hughie are well matched when it comes to politeness."
"They got the artistic temperament, and me, too, and mom, also," said Pearl. "That's what the newspaper boys always wrote about me when I was on the road."
The manager did not miss the opening. "Look here," he said earnestly; "ain't you tired loafing around here? I guess you know what I'm in Paloma for. I've made no secret of it. Now all you got to do is to show me your contract with Sweeney and I'll double what he gave you, play you over a bigger circuit, and advertise you, so's before your contract with me's expired you'll be asked to do a few turns on the Metropolitan Opera stage of New York City, New York."
"Love me to-day," sang Lolita, meltingly, if with grating harshness.
"That's right, Lolita, sing your pretty song," coaxed Pearl. "Come on, I'll sing with you." She lifted her languorous eyes and sang softly, almost under her breath, but straight at Hanson:
"Love me to-day,
Love me an hour;
Love is a flower,
Fading alway."
The blood surged to his temples at the direct challenge, he half rose and leaned toward her. Then, as she laughed at him, he sat down. "Treble Sweeney's offer, by God!" he said hoarsely. "Cash down beforehand." He brought his fist down on the arm of the chair with a crash.
"Oh, I ain't ready to make any plans yet," Pearl announced indifferently. "I want to talk things over with Pop first. He'll be down from the mines before long, maybe to-day."
She sat for a few moments in silence, her eyes fixed on the far purple hazes of the desert. "Oh, I wish there weren't so many of me," she said at last and wistfully. "After I'm 'out' a while, I'll get to longing so for the desert that I'm likely to raise any kind of a row and break any old contract just to get here. I can't breathe. I feel as if everything, buildings and people and all, were crowding me so's if I didn't have a place to stand; and then, after I'm here a while, I got to see the footlights, I got to hear them clapping, I got to dance for the big crowds. Oh, Lord! life's awful funny, always trying to chain you up to one thing or another. But I won't be tied. I got to be free, and I will be free." She threw out her arms with a passionate gesture.
"You'd be free with me," he cried.
But, if she heard him, she gave no indication of having done so. "Can you ride?" she asked presently.
"You bet," said Hanson eagerly. "I was born in Kaintucky. Just tell me where I can get a horse here, and—"
"I'll lend you one of mine, and we'll have some rides. I'll take you out on the desert. It ain't safe to go alone. You see those sand hills yonder? Do you think you could walk out to them and back?"
"Sure," said Hanson confidently and looking at her in some surprise.
Pearl laughed. "Oh, Lolita!" she cried; "a tenderfoot is sure funny. The chances are, Mr. Hanson, that if you started to walk around those dunes you'd never get back. Goodness! ain't that mirage pretty?"
The desert, which had lain vast, dun-colored and unbroken before their eyes, had vanished; instead, a sapphire sea sparkled in the sunshine, its white-capped waves breaking upon the beach. Upon one side of it spread a city with white domes and fairy towers, and palm trees uplifting their graceful fronds among them.
Hanson rubbed his eyes and looked again. It was the first time that he had ever seen one of these miracles of illusion, and he became so absorbed in it that he failed to notice that some one else had entered the gate and was making a leisurely progress toward the house.
It was Bob Flick, and Rudolf Hanson could not repress a slight scowl at this unexpected appearance of one whom he was constrained to regard as more or less of an enemy, and certainly this morning as a blot upon