“Then you’re a play-actor now?” said the farmer, in a tone which did not, however, exhibit the exact degree of admiration which shone in Phoebe’s eyes.

“For the present,” said Jim, with lofty indifference.  “You see I was in—­in partnership with McClosky, the manager, and I didn’t like the style of the chump that was doin’ Red-handed Dick, so I offered to take his place one night to show him how.  And by Jinks! the audience, after that night, wouldn’t let anybody else play it,—­wouldn’t stand even the biggest, highest-priced stars in it!  I reckon,” he added gloomily, “I’ll have to run the darned thing in all the big towns in Californy,—­if I don’t have to go East with it after all, just for the business.  But it’s an awful grind on a man,—­leaves him no time, along of the invitations he gets, and what with being run after in the streets and stared at in the hotels he don’t get no privacy.  There’s men, and women, too, over at that table, that just lie in wait for me here till I come, and don’t lift their eyes off me.  I wonder they don’t bring their opery-glasses with them.”

Concerned, sympathizing, and indignant, poor Phoebe turned her brown head and honest eyes in that direction.  But because they were honest, they could not help observing that the other table did not seem to be paying the slightest attention to the distinguished impersonator of Red-handed Dick.  Perhaps he had been overheard.

“Then that was the reason ye didn’t come back to your location.  I always guessed it was because you’d got wind of the smash-up down there, afore we did,” said Hopkins grimly.

“What smash-up?” asked Jim, with slightly resentful quickness.

“Why, the smash-up of the Sisters’ title,—­didn’t you hear that?”

There was a slight movement of relief and a return of gloomy hauteur in Jim’s manner.

“No, we don’t know much of what goes on in the cow counties, up here.”

“Ye mout, considerin’ it concerns some o’ your friends,” returned Hopkins dryly.  “For the Sisters’ title went smash as soon as it was known that Pedro Valdez—­the man as started it—­had his neck broken outside the walls o’ Robles Rancho; and they do say as this yer Brant, your friend, had suthin’ to do with the breaking of it, though it was laid to the ghost of old Peyton.  Anyhow, there was such a big skeer that one of the Greaser gang, who thought he’d seen the ghost, being a Papist, to save his everlasting soul went to the priest and confessed.  But the priest wouldn’t give him absolution until he’d blown the hull thing, and made it public.  And then it turned out that all the dockyments for the title, and even the custom-house paper, were forged by Pedro Valdez, and put on the market by his confederates.  And that’s just where your friend, Clarence Brant, comes in, for he had bought up the whole title from them fellers.  Now, either, as some say, he was in the fraud from the beginnin’, and never paid