The Black Pearl

It was just at sunset that the train which had crawled across the desert drew up, puffing and panting, before the village of Paloma, not many miles from the Salton Sea. After a moment's delay, one lone passenger descended. Paloma was not an important station.

Rudolf Hanson, the one passenger, whom either curiosity or business had brought thither, stood on the platform of the little station looking about him. To the right of him, beyond the village, blooming like an oasis from the irrigation afforded by the artesian wells, rose the mountains, the foothills green and dimpled, the slopes with their massed shadows of pines and oaks climbing upward and gashed with deep purple ca?ons, and above them the great white, solemn peaks, austere and stately guardians of the desert which stretched away and away, its illimitable distances lost at last in the horizon line.

Hanson, of the far west, was used to magnificent scenic effects, but the desert that sparkled like the gold of man's eternal quest, that lay with its sentinel hills enfolded and encompassed in color, colors that seemed as if some spinner of the sunset courts wove forever fresh combinations and sent these ethereal tapestries out to float over the wide spaces of the wilderness-this caused him to catch his breath and exclaim.

It was truly a sight to take any man's breath away; but even such a view could only arrest Hanson's interest temporarily. He was hungry, and the station agent, a weedy youth, was making a noisy closing up. Intentionally noisy, for when one is the agent of a small desert station, the occasional visitor is apt to whet one's curiosity to razor edge.

Roused by these sounds, and by his growing hunger, which the cool purity of the air only augmented, Hanson turned to the boy.

"Where's a place to stay?" he asked.

"There ain't but one," replied the youth; "the San Gorgonio hotel. You walk right up this street until you come to it, on the left side. It's got a sign out, electric," he added with some pride. He looked curiously at Hanson, standing tall and straight with his ruddy, good-looking face, keen, quick, gray eyes and curling light hair. "Going to be here long?" he asked tentatively.

"I don't know," returned Hanson idly. "Guess not. No string on me, though, even if I'd choose to put in a month or so here. This way, you say?" He lifted his suit case and began to walk in the direction the station agent had indicated.

"Say," the latter called after him, "you don't want to miss the show to-night."

"What show?" Hanson turned, interest amounting almost to eagerness in his tone.

"Benefit." The boy rolled the word unctuously under his tongue. "I guess maybe you saw why in the papers. The river got on a tear and cut into a nice little town here on the desert, drowned some of the folks and did a lot of damage generally, so we're raising some money to send to 'em."

The stranger's interest had increased perceptibly. "Sounds good to me," he said heartily. "What's your features?"

"Just one," the other answered impressively. "We don't need no more in this part of the world, if we got her."

"Her!" cried Hanson, and now his cold eyes were alight. "Who the hell is her?"

"Why, the Black Pearl!" as if surprised that anyone should be unaware of the fact. "'Course we got a few thousand square miles of desert waiting to be reclaimed, and any amount of mountains full of ore, but to us they's small potatoes and few in a hill beside the Black Pearl."

Hanson swore softly and ecstatically. "If that ain't that good old blind luck of mine hitting me again after all these years," he muttered. "Say, son, I'm making no secret of my business. Don't have to. I am a theatrical manager-vaudeville. Got great backing this year and am out for new features. Set my heart on the Black Pearl and got to figuring on her. Sweeney had her on his circuit last winter. Well, Sweeney, let me tell you, is pretty shrewd. He knows a good thing when he's got it, so I thought there was no show for me. Presently, I hear that she's scrapped with Sweeney and is off to the desert like a flash. So she's really here?"

"Sure," said the boy.

"So," continued Hanson, who was loquacious by nature, but sufficiently shrewd and experienced only to let himself be so when he thought it worth his while, "I begin to figure on my chances. I learn that Sweeney's trying to coax her back by letter, so I says to myself: 'Rudolf, you just chassez down to Paloma and see what you can do,' but honest, son," he put his suit case down in the road and pushed his hat back on his head and put his hands on his hips, "honest to God, I didn't expect anything like this, the first night I got here, too."

His companion shifted his quid of tobacco to the other side of his mouth and nodded understandingly.

Hanson's eyes were fixed ruminatively but unseeingly upon the golden desert, its sand dunes touched with a deep rose soon to be eclipsed by the jealous tyrian purples which were beginning to mass themselves gorgeously beneath the oranges and flame of the setting sun.

"Gee whiz!" he muttered, "and I was figuring that if I hung round here a week or so and played my hand all right, I'd maybe get her to do a few steps for me in the parlor. Oh, Lordy! And now I got a chance to see her before the footlights and size up her capacity for getting over them."

The station agent looked puzzled and a little offended. "There won't be any footlights," he said; "and you're mistaken if you think she's up to any rough work like climbing over them, any way."

Hanson laughed loudly. "That's all right, son, you ain't on to the shop talk, that's all. But now, where is this show and what time does it begin?"

"Oh, in an hour or so, 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.

The Black Pearl was generous to-night. She was the program-its one feature. She gave the audience its money's worth, judged by their standards, which were measured by time; and yet, when she finished, she gave one no idea of having exhausted her repertoire. In fact, she could not have defined that repertoire. Dancing was her expression, and the Black Pearl was conscious of infinite and unsounded phases of self.

Most of the features of the program were familiar to Hanson by her reputation. They included some old Spanish dances, some gypsy ones and others manifestly her own. But dancer though she was by nature and training, her personality dominated and eclipsed her art.

Hanson was not imaginative, but as he watched her he seemed to be gazing at some gorgeous cactus blossom opening its scentless petals to the burning sun. Beneath and beyond her stretched the gray wastes of the desert turning to gold under her feet, but still untrammeled and merciless, holding strange secrets close to its savage heart; now, exerting all its magic of illusion in delicate and exquisite mirages, all of its luring fascination which has drawn men to it from the beginning of the world; and now revealing itself desolate and unashamed in all of its repulsive, stark aridity.

The Pearl certainly made no effort to attract. If a glance from those narrow eyes enthralled, it stung too. It was the flame of wine in the blood, the flick of a whip on the raw, which roused in a man's heart, in Hanson's at least, the passionate disposition to conquer and subdue.

Finally she gave a slight signal to the musicians, her steps slowed, the music stopped, and she went over and sat down beside the woman, who had placed her violin on the piano, and then flung herself into a chair, where she sat, carefully dabbing her warm brow with her handkerchief.

The vague pictures which Hanson had been seeing vanished. "Gee! She got me going!" he said to himself, half dazedly, "hypnotized me sure." This, the manager. But the man exulted: "She ain't easy. She ain't easy."

The moment the Pearl stopped dancing the audience was on its feet applauding, and then, to a man, it eddied about her, casting banknotes into her lap. These she lifted in handfuls and gave to two men who had sat down beside her to count, while a third bent over them watching the operation.

Hanson, although he had drawn nearer her, still stood on the edge of the crowd, leaning against the bar. "So that's the Black Pearl!" he said presently to the bar-keeper.

"That's her," responded Jimmy equably. "Can't be beat. What'll you have?"

"Nothing, just yet. Say, those stones around her neck look good to me." Hanson narrowed his eyes.

"Good!" Jimmy laughed shortly, a characteristic, mirthful little chuckle. "I guess so. Bob Flick, up there beside Pearl, counting that money, he gave 'em to her after she found him when he'd been lost on the desert about three days. I'll tell you about it when I got more time."

Hanson had been conscious from time to time of the close but furtive scrutiny of the man whom the bar-keeper had designated as Bob Flick, and now he, in turn, made Flick an object of observation.

He saw a tall man of noticeable languor and deliberation of movement, doubtless so long studied that it had become natural. His face, with regular, rather aquiline features, was devoid of expression, almost mask-like, while the deep lines about the mouth and eyes showed that he lived much in the hard, brilliant, western sunlight.

Hanson was quick enough to size up a man and a situation. "I'll make a note to look out for you," he thought, "just about as cold and just about as deadly as a rattler."

"Say," he turned to Jimmy again, "I want to meet her. I'm a theatrical manager, always looking out for new turns. Heard of this Black Pearl and thought I'd run down and sign her up if I could."

"She does go traveling once in a while," returned Jimmy dubiously, "but it's all in the mood she's in whether she'll let you even talk to her. You might as well count on the desert out there as the Pearl."

"I suppose she's out for big money?" queried Hanson.

"She'll get all she can, I guess," Jimmy chuckled. "But," he added boastfully, "she can make big money by staying right here. Look at what she's pulled in to-night. And there's her father, old Gallito, he's got more than one good 'prospect,' and is foreman beside of one of the big mines in the mountains. And her mother, there, that played the violin, she's got some nice irrigated land, and even Hughie, that played, he makes money playing for dances in the different towns. Oh, they're smart folks."

"Is Hughie the brother?" asked Hanson, looking at the boy, who sat listlessly at the piano.

"No. Adopted." Jimmy spoke briefly. "Born blind, but let me tell you, he sees considerable more than those of us who have eyes."

"Well, the Pearl's a certain winner," said the manager earnestly, "a flower of the desert, a what-you-may-call-'em, a cactus bloom."

"Correct, and don't forget the spines," chuckled Jimmy. "Looks as if they were all out to-night, too. Kind of sulky, ain't she? Well, did you say you was waitin' to be introduced? I'll take you up and ask her. Like as not, she'll turn you down. She ain't looked at you once, I notice. I been watching her."

"So've I," said Hanson good humoredly, "but you're wrong, son"-there was a brief, triumphant flash of his light eyes-"she's looked at me twice, took me all in, too. Numbered the hairs of my head and the size of my shoes. Threw a search light on my heart and soul. Gee! It felt like the violet rays. Now, look here, friend, I ain't going to take chances on a turn-down, nor of your Mr. Bob Flick having fun all night shooting holes in the floor while this little Johnny Tenderfoot does his imitation Black Pearl dancing. Listen," he tapped the bar sharply, "when I meet the Black Pearl, it's because she requested an introduction. You take me up to that old lion tamer, her mother."

Jimmy threw him a glance of ungrudging admiration. "You ain't so dumb," he vouchsafed. "Say, have one on me."

"A little later," replied the other. "Never drink during business hours."

A small table had been placed before Mrs. Gallito, upon which were two glasses, one of beer for herself, and one of lemonade for her daughter.

As Jimmy performed the introduction, she put down her beer from which she had been somewhat thirstily drinking and received Hanson with a perfunctory bow and a brief mechanical smile. "Think of settling here?" she asked politely.

"No, I'm just down for a few days," replied Hanson genially. He had drawn a chair up and seated himself on the other side of the table, directly opposite Mrs. Gallito and her daughter.

The surprise of the glance she threw at him was heightened by a quick curiosity. "Just prospecting?" she asked. "I saw at once that you weren't a 'lunger.' I didn't think you were an engineer, so I made up my mind that you were looking for land."

"None of them," returned Hanson, smiling, and hastened to inform her of his real calling. Immediately she relaxed, her smile became genuine, the bored and constrained politeness vanished from her manner.

"Well, that is certainly nice," she exclaimed with real animation and cordiality. "I'm always glad to meet any of the profession. No folks like your own folks, you know." She bridled a little.

"That's so," agreed Hanson heartily. "I knew the minute that I saw you that you belonged."

She lifted her head with a gesture of pride, the glow and color came back into her face, giving it a transitory appearance of youth, and restoring, for a fugitive moment, something of its vanishing beauty.

"Born to it," she said. "My mother and her mother, and my father and his father, and, 'way back on both sides, was all circus people. Yes, I was born in the sawdust-rode-drove-tight-rope-trapeze-learned dancing on the side-ambitious, you know. Say, you must have heard of my mother-greatest bare-back rider ever in the ring. Isobel Montmorenci. English, you know. I wasn't so shy myself, Queenie Madrew."

"Gee! Well, you were some. Shake." Hanson extended his hand, which Mrs. Gallito shook warmly. "And I do remember your mother. I should say so. First time I went to the circus, I was about ten years old-ran off you know. Knew well enough what I'd get when I turned up at home. Pop laying for me with a strap. Goodness! It takes me right back. It's all a kind of jumble, sawdust clowns and all; but what I do remember plain is Isobel Montmorenci, her and a big black horse she was riding."

"C?sar!" cried Mrs. Gallito excitedly. "Lord! don't I remember! I learned to ride on him."

"Yes," mused the manager, "all I recall of that circus is her and my two nickels. I broke my bank to get 'em. They seemed a fortune to me; but even then I was a shrewd kid and meant to get my money's worth. Well-the first one I laid out in a great tall glass of lemonade. Say, that was the first time I came up against the disillusions of life. Nothing but a little sweetened water. The next nickel went for peanuts, and they were too stale for even a kid to chew."

"Ain't that just like a young one at the circus!" Mrs. Gallito laughed loudly.

"What's the joke, mom?" drawled a lazy, sliding, soft voice on the other side of her.

"A circus story, honey. Oh!" as the sudden formal silence recalled her to her duty. "I forget. You two ain't been introduced, have you? Pearl, make you acquainted with Mr. Hanson. He's in the show business."

Pearl bowed without lifting her eyes, giving Hanson ample opportunity to note the incredible length, as it seemed to him, of the upcurling lashes upon her smooth cheeks. But just as he bent forward to speak to her, she half-turned from him and said something to one of the men beside her.

The manager's quickness saved him. He was perfectly aware of all those jealous masculine eyes, flickering now with repressed and delighted laughter over his discomfiture. He recovered himself in a moment and slipped easily and with unabated geniality into a conversation with Mrs. Gallito.

"Funny you should marry out of the profession," deftly catching up his threads.

"She didn't," again that soft, sliding voice. "Pop was born in the sawdust, too."

Without a change of expression in his face, Hanson waited imperturbably for Mrs. Gallito's answer. Since his eyes were fixed on the red spark at the end of his cigarette, who could see the quick flash in them?

Mrs. Gallito took a hasty gulp of beer. "It's just like Pearl says," she murmured. "Her pop came of a long line of circus people, same as me, but he broke clean away from it, couldn't bear the life." There was unabated wonder in her tones. "I guess," resignedly, "it's the Spanish of him."

"Say," cried Hanson, and now his voice rang with a new note in it, something of gay, masterful, masculine dominance, "say, what you ladies drinking beer and lemonade for? It's got to be wine to-night. Hey, Jimmy. Wine for this table, and treat the house. Wine, understand? Got enough to float 'em?"

"Hold on a minute, Jimmy." Hanson heard Bob Flick's voice for the first time, soft as the Pearl's, liquidly southern, gentle, even apologetic. "I'm sorry, stranger"-he leaned forward courteously to Hanson-"we all would enjoy accepting your hospitality, but you see, it ain't etiquette."

A silence that could be felt had fallen upon the room. Mrs. Gallito, pale under her paint, was nervously biting her handkerchief and glancing from one man to the other, while the Pearl leaned back in her chair as lazily, languidly, scornfully indifferent as ever.

Then Hanson laughed, and a little thrill went over the room. The new man was game. "Ain't that just your ruling, stranger?" he asked pleasantly. "Since we've not been introduced, I can't call your name. But I hold that it is etiquette. Jimmy, get on your job. The occasion when I first set my eyes upon the Black Pearl has got to be honored."

"Hold on just a moment, Jimmy." It was Flick now. "You see," again to Hanson, his voice more apologetic than ever, "you being new here, naturally don't understand. It ain't etiquette on a Benefit night, when Miss Pearl Gallito, whose name you have, most unfortunately, just miscalled, condescends to dance. I'm afraid I got to ask you to take back your order and to apologize to Miss Gallito."

Hanson was on his feet in a minute. "I'm sure ready now and always to apologize my humblest to Miss Gallito, although I don't know what's the offense. But the order stands."

"Oh, Pearl," wailed her mother, "you raise mischief wherever you go. You know Bob wouldn't go on so if you'd ask him to stop. You just like to raise the devil."

Then, for the first time, the Pearl's face became animated. It broke into brilliance, her eyes gleamed, she showed her white teeth when she laughed.

"Quit your fooling, both of you," she said composedly, rising to her feet. "I ain't going to have tales flying all over the desert about the ructions stirred up the night I danced for the benefit of the flood sufferers. Shake hands, you two," imperiously. "Go on, do what I tell you. That's right," as the two men perfunctorily shook hands. "Bob don't mean a thing, Mr. Hanson. It's just his temper, and there ain't going to be any wine, because I'm going home, but-" and here she smiled into his eyes-"you can walk a piece of the way with me, if you want to. Come on, mother and Hughie. Good-night, Bob."