“A dark, stylish chap, with shifty black eyes and a curled-up merstache?” continued Bill, with dry, colorless persistence. “No. Look here, Bill, I'm in a little bit of a hurry--but I suppose you must have your little joke before we part. Now, what is your little game?” “Wot you mean?” demanded Bill, with sudden brusqueness. “Mean? Well, old man, you know as well as I do. You're giving me the very description of Ramon Martinez himself, ha! ha! No--Bill! you didn't play me this time. You're mighty spry and clever, but you didn't catch on just then.” He nodded and moved away with a light laugh. Bill turned a stony face to the Expressman. Suddenly a gleam of mirth came into his gloomy eyes. He bent over the young man, and said in a hoarse, chuckling whisper:-- “But I got even after all!” “How?” “He's tied up to that lying little she-devil, hard and fast!” THE REFORMATION OF JAMES REDDY. I. It was a freshly furrowed field, so large that the eye at first scarcely took in its magnitude. The irregular surface of upturned, oily, wave-shaped clods took the appearance of a vast, black, chopping sea, that reached from the actual shore of San Francisco Bay to the low hills of the Coast Range. The sea-breeze that blew chilly over this bleak expanse added to that fancy, and the line of straggling whitewashed farm buildings, that half way across lifted themselves above it, seemed to be placed on an island in its midst. Even the one or two huge, misshapen agricultural machines, abandoned in the furrows, bore an odd resemblance to hulks or barges adrift upon its waste.