for the diversion he had expected he had found; he even was conscious of
thinking more kindly of his wife who had supplanted her.

"I told Jim he must fetch you if he had to carry you," she said,
striking the palm of her hand with her fan, and glancing at her husband.
"I reckon he guessed WHY, though I didn't tell him--I don't tell Jim
EVERYTHING."

Here Jim rose, and looking at his watch, "guessed he'd run over to the
Lick House and get some cigars." If he was acting upon some hint from
his wife, his simulation was so badly done that Clarence felt his
first sense of uneasiness. But as Hooker closed the door awkwardly and
unostentatiously behind him, Clarence smilingly said he had waited to
hear the message from her own lips.

"Jim only knows what he's heard outside: the talk of men, you know,--and
he hears a good deal of that--more, perhaps, than YOU do. It was that
which put me up to finding out the truth. And I didn't rest till I did.
I'm not to be fooled, Clarence,--you don't mind my calling you Clarence
now we're both married and done for,--and I'm not the kind to be fooled
by anybody from the Cow counties--and that's the Robles Ranche. I'm a
Southern woman myself from Missouri, but I'm for the Union first, last,
and all the time, and I call myself a match for any lazy, dawdling,
lash-swinging slaveholder and slaveholderess--whether they're mixed
blood, Heaven only knows, or what--or their friends or relations, or
the dirty half-Spanish grandees and their mixed half-nigger peons who
truckle to them. You bet!"

His blood had stirred quickly at the mention of the Robles Ranche,
but the rest of Susy's speech was too much in the vein of her old