Attired as a picturesque combination of the Neapolitan smuggler, river-bar miner, and Mexican vacquero, Jim Hooker instantly began to justify the plaudits that greeted him and the most sanguinary hopes of the audience.

A gloomy but fascinating cloud of gunpowder and dark intrigue from that moment hung about the stage.
Yet in this sombre obscuration Rosalie had passed a happy six months, coming out with her character and stockings equally unchanged and unblemished, to be rewarded with the hand of Red Dick and the discovery of her father, the governor of New Mexico, as a white-haired, but objectionable vacquero, at the fall of the curtain.
Through this exciting performance Phoebe sat with a vague and increasing sense of loneliness and distrust.

She did not know that Hooker had added to his ordinary inventive exaggeration the form of dramatic composition.
But she had early detected the singular fact that such shadowy outlines of plot as the piece possessed were evidently based on his previous narrative of his OWN experiences, and the saving of Susy Peyton--by himself! There was the episode of their being lost on the plains, as he had already related it to her, with the addition of a few years to Susy's age and some vivid picturesqueness to himself as Red Dick.

She was not, of course, aware that the part of the giddy worldling was Jim's own conception of the character of Clarence.

But what, even to her provincial taste, seemed the extravagance of the piece, she felt, in some way, reflected upon the truthfulness of the story she had heard.