whenever Pearl's minded, and it's to be held at Chickasaw Pete's place—saloon. You see," apologetically, "we ain't a very big community, and that's the only place where there's a decent floor for her to dance on."

Hanson raised his brows and laughed. "Well"—he pulled out his watch and looked at it—"I've got time to wash the upper crust of sand off anyway, and get a bite or so first. I suppose I'll see you later. Up this way, you say?"

The agent nodded assent. "It's a good betting proposition," he mused. "He knows what he wants and he usually gets it, I'm thinking, or there's something to pay. But what'll the Pearl do? I guess she's the biggest gamble any man could tackle."

As his new acquaintance had predicted, Hanson had no difficulty in finding the San Gorgonio, a small hostelry not by any means so gorgeous as its name implied, being merely an unpretentious frame building with a few palms in the enclosure before it, and there he speedily got a room and some supper. It might be deemed significant that he gave more time and attention to his toilet than his food, but that may have been because he believed in the value of a pleasing appearance as well as in a winning address when transacting business with a woman. In any event, his motives, whatever they might be, were quite justifiable, as he undoubtedly possessed a bold and striking type of good looks which had never failed of receiving a due appreciation from most women.

Assured, aggressive, his customary good humor heightened by the comforting sense of his luck being with him, he finally emerged into the open air to discover that the stars were out and that it might be later than he thought. The air, infinitely pure, infinitely fresh, exhaled from the vast, breathing desert, and the delicious aromatic desert odors touched him like a caress. He drew them in in great draughts. The air seemed to him a wonderful, potent ichor infusing him with a new and vigorous life. Hanson was sure of himself always, but now, in this awakened sense of such power and dominance as he had never known, he threw back his head and laughed aloud.

"Gosh!" he muttered, "I feel like all I got to do was to reach up and pull down a few of those stars and use them for poker chips." He exulted like a sleek and lordly animal in this thrilling vitality, this imperious and insistent demand for conquest.

Chickasaw Pete's place, as he soon discovered, was no more pretentious in appearance than the San Gorgonio. It also was a long, low frame building with some great cottonwood trees before it and a few palms with their infinite and haunting suggestions of the tropics.

It was with a sense of mounting excitement which still held that strong element of exultation that Hanson crossed the porch, opened the door and walked in. He saw before him a long room well lighted with electricity and with a shining polished floor. The bar ran along one side, and behind it lounged a short, stout, round-faced man with very black hair and eyes and a perpetual smile. This was the bar-keeper, known familiarly as Jimmy. At the rear of the room, covering about half of the floor, were rows and rows of chairs, occupied by both men and women, strong, sun-burned looking people in the main, but with the invariable and unmistakable sprinkling of "lungers" in various stages of recovery.

Hanson saw his friend, the station agent, leaning across the bar talking to Jimmy, and knew from the interested glances cast in his direction that he was the topic of conversation.

At the opposite end of the room was a piano. A young man sat before it facing the wall, while beside him there stood a woman intently tuning a violin which she held tucked under her chin. Approaching middle age, she was rather stout, with a sallow, discontented face, which yet held some traces of its former evanescent prettiness. Both lashes and brows of her faded light eyes were heavily blackened, and the rouge which lay thickly on her cheeks only served to accentuate their haggard lines. The hair, dark at the roots, was blondined to a canary color where it rolled back under her hat, large and black, of a dashing Gainsborough style and covered with faded red roses. For the rest, her costume consisted of a white shirt waist, a wine-colored skirt and shoes with very high heels which were conspicuously, and no doubt uncomfortably, run over.

Her violin finally tuned to her satisfaction, she bent her head to speak to the young man at the piano. He turned to answer her, and for a moment his delicate, sad face was outlined against the wall behind him. Then, with an emphatic little nod, he began to play and the woman lifted her violin and swung in with him.

The only virtue she possessed as a violinist was that she kept good time, but although it was extremely unlikely that any member of that audience recognized the fact, the boy was a musician by the divine right of gift, a gift bestowed at birth. A wheezy old piano, and yet he drew from it sweet and thrilling notes; a hackneyed, cheap waltz measure, and yet he invested it with the glamour of romance.

A ripple stirred all those waiting people, as a wind stirs a field of wheat, a movement of settling and attention. Hanson, who had been careful to secure a seat in the front row of chairs, was conscious that his heart was beating faster.

"This is where she whirls in through that door by the piano," he muttered to himself with the acumen born of long knowledge of the stage and its conventions. He had a swift mental vision of a graceful painted creature, all undulating movement, alluring smiles, twinkling feet and waving arms. This passed with a slight shock as a girl entered the door by the piano, as he had foreseen, and walked indifferently to the center of the room, and then, without a bow to he audience, began, still with an air of languor and absorption, to take vague, sliding steps, gradually falling in with the waltz rhythm, but, even so, the movement was without any definite form, certainly not enough to call it a dance.

As she swayed about, listless, apparently indifferent to any effect she might be producing, Hanson had a full opportunity to study her, and, in that concentrated attention, the man and the manager were fused. He was at once the cynical showman discounting every> favorable impression and the most critical and disillusioned of audiences.

In this dancer he saw a woman who was like the desert willow and younger than he had supposed; straight and supple, with a body of such plasticity, such instant response to the directing will of its possessor as only comes from the constant and arduous exercises begun in early childhood.

"Been trained for it since she was born, almost," was Hanson's first unspoken comment.

She wore a soft, clinging frock of scarlet crêpe. It was short enough to display her ankles, slender for a dancer, and her arched feet in heelless black slippers. In contrast to her red frock was a string of sparkling green stones which fell low on her breast. Her long, brown fingers blazed with rings, and in her ears, swinging against her olive cheeks, were great hoops of dull gold. Her black shining hair was gathered low on her neck, her unsmiling lips were scarlet as a pomegranate flower, and exquisitely cut; and the fainter, duskier pomegranate bloom on her oval cheeks faded into delicate stains like pale coffee beneath her long, narrow eyes.

"She ain't done a thing yet; she ain't even showed whether she can dance a few bars or not, but, Lord! how she has got over!" was Hanson's unspoken comment. "Clean to the back seats. There's nobody else here."

Although still aimlessly moving with the rhythm of the waltz she no longer merely followed the music. She and it were one now. And Hanson, a connoisseur, familiar with the best, at least in his part of the world, recognized the artist whose technique is so perfect that it is absorbed, assimilated and forgotten; but its essence remains, nevertheless, a sure foundation upon which to build securely future combinations and improvisations.