corroborated, and this required a liberal outlay of his fee. With the
loss of his credibility as a witness bad habits supervened. He was
frequently drunk, he lost his position, he lost his house, and Carmen,
removed to San Francisco, supported him with her brush.
And this brings us once more to that pretty painter and innocent forger
whose unconscious act bore such baleful fruit on the barren hill-sides
of the "Red-Rock Rancho," and also to a later blossom of her life, that
opened, however, in kindlier sunshine.
CHAPTER IX
WHAT THE FAIR HAD TO DO ABOUT IT
The house that Royal Thatcher so informally quitted in his exodus to
the promised land of Biggs was one of those oversized, under-calculated
dwellings conceived and erected in the extravagance of the San
Francisco builder's hopes, and occupied finally in his despair. Intended
originally as the palace of some inchoate California Aladdin, it usually
ended as a lodging house in which some helpless widow or hopeless
spinster managed to combine respectability with the hard task of bread
getting.
Thatcher's landlady was one of the former class. She had unfortunately
survived not only her husband but his property, and, living in some
deserted chamber, had, after the fashion of the Italian nobility, let
out the rest of the ruin. A tendency to dwell upon these facts gave
her conversation a peculiar significance on the first of each month.
Thatcher had noticed this with the sensitiveness of an impoverished
gentleman. But when, a few days after her lodger's sudden disappearance,
a note came from him containing a draft in noble excess of all arrears
and charges, the widow's heart was lifted, and the rock smitten with the
golden wand gushed beneficence that shone in a new gown for the widow
and a new suit for "Johnny," her son, a new oil cloth in the hall,
better service to the lodgers, and, let us be thankful, a kindlier
consideration for the poor little black-eyed painter from Monterey, then
dreadfully behind in her room rent. For, to tell the truth, the calls
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