The Black Pearl | Page 8

jeweler there to get him the handsomest string of matched emeralds that money could buy. The fellow was a year matching them, had to make two trips to the other side. They do say," Jimmy lowered his voice cautiously, "that Bob's father was a rich man and left him a nice little fortune, and that he blew every cent of it in on those stones. The Pearl certainly likes jewels. All the rings and things that she wears were given her by the boys."
"Umm-m-hum. Great story!" he nodded perfunctorily. "Guess I'll take a walk." He strolled toward the door.
"Bet I know which way you're going," chuckled Jimmy, as he disappeared.
The unspoken surmise was perfectly correct. Hanson took his way slowly and with apparent abstraction in the direction of the Gallito home, and it was not until he was at the very gate that he paused and looked up with a start of well simulated surprise.
The house stood beyond a garden of brilliant flowers, and in the shadow of the long porch--a porch facing the desert and not the mountains--sat Pearl, swinging back and forth in a rocking chair and talking impartially to the blind boy, who sat on the step beneath her, and a gorgeous crimson and green parrot, which walked back and forth in its pigeon-toed fashion on the arm of her chair, muttering, occasionally screaming, and sometimes inclining its head to be scratched.
"Good morning," called Hanson in his blithest, most assured fashion. "Can I come in?"
"Sure," drawled the Pearl. "Hughie and I were just waiting for company, weren't we, Hughie?"
The 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 of 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