“That d——­d Chinaman bought me these at the landing; they’re not much in style or fit,” he continued, trying to get a moonlight view of himself in the mirror behind the bar, “but that don’t matter here.”  He filled another glass of spirits, jauntily settled himself back in his chair, and added, “I don’t suppose there are any girls around, anyway.”

“’Cept your wife; she was down here this afternoon,” said Patterson meditatively.

Mr. Tucker paused with the pie in his hand.  “Ah, yes!” He essayed a reckless laugh, but that evident simulation failed before Patterson’s melancholy.  With an assumption of falling in with his friend’s manner, rather than from any personal anxiety, he continued, “Well?”

“That man Poindexter was down here with her.  Put her in the hacienda to hold possession afore the news came out.”

“Impossible!” said Tucker, rising hastily.  “It don’t belong—­that is—­” he hesitated.

“Yer thinking the creditors ’ll get it, mebbe,” returned Patterson, gazing at the floor.  “Not as long as she’s in it; no sir!  Whether it’s really hers, or she’s only keeping house for Poindexter, she’s a fixture, you bet.  They’re a team when they pull together, they are!”

The smile slowly faded from Tucker’s face, that now looked quite rigid in the moonlight.  He put down his glass and walked to the window as Patterson gloomily continued, “But that’s nothing to you.  You’ve got ahead of ’em both, and had your revenge by going off with the gal.  That’s what I said all along.  When folks—­especially women folks—­wondered how you could leave a woman like your wife, and go off with a scallawag like that gal, I allers said they’d find out there was a reason.  And when your wife came flaunting down here with Poindexter before she’d quite got quit of you, I reckon they began to see the whole little game.  No sir!  I knew it wasn’t on account of the gal!  Why, when you came here to-night and told me quite nat’ral-like and easy how she went off in the ship, and then calmly ate your pie and drank your whiskey after it, I knew you didn’t care for her.  There’s my hand, Spence; you’re a trump, even if you are a little looney, eh?  Why, what’s up?”

Shallow and selfish as Tucker was, Patterson’s words seemed like a revelation that shocked him as profoundly as it might have shocked a nobler nature.  The simple vanity and selfishness that made him unable to conceive any higher reason for his wife’s loyalty than his own personal popularity and success, now that he no longer possessed that eclat, made him equally capable of the lowest suspicions.  He was a dishonored fugitive, broken in fortune and reputation—­why should she not desert him!  He had been unfaithful to her from wildness, from caprice, from the effect of those fascinating qualities; it seemed to him natural that she should be disloyal from more deliberate motives, and he hugged himself with that belief.  Yet there was enough doubt, enough of haunting suspicion that