It was something that Dan Anderson saw in the daily paper that caused him on the following day to lead Tom Osby aside. "Did you know, Tom," said he, "that that opera singer you've got in your box, the 'Annie Laurie' artist, is goin' to be down in this part of the world before long?" "I never _loved_ a fo-o-o-nd ga-aze-ll-lle!" began Tom Osby, defensively. "Well, it's true." "What are you tellin' me?" said Tom, scornfully. "Comin' down here? Why, don't it say that them things is all sung by _artists_?" "So they are." "Well, now, a artist," said Tom Osby argumentatively, "ain't never comin' within a thousand miles of this here country. Besides, a _artist_ is somebody that's _dead_." "There's something in that," admitted Dan Anderson. "You've got to be dead to make a really well-preserved, highly embalmed success in art, of course. It's true that in a hundred years from now that song will be just what it is to-day. That's Art. But I'm tellin' you the truth, Tom. The woman who sang into that machine is alive to-day. She belongs to a grand opera troupe under the management of a gent by the name of Blauring, who is in hot water with these stars all his life, but makes so much money out of them that he can't bear to be anything but boiled continuous. "Now, these people are bound for California, for an early season. They are goin' six hundred miles at a jump, and they stop at El Paso for a moment, to catch a little of their financial breath. The Southern Pacific raineth on the just and the unjust in the matter of railroad fares. Now, as they are still goin' to be too early for the season on the coast, Monsieur Blauring has conceived in his fertile brain the idea that it will be an interestin' and inexpensive thing for him to sidetrack his whole _rodeo_ for a few weeks up in the Sacramentos, at the Sky Top hotel,--that new railroad health resort some Yankees have just built, for lungers and other folks that have money and no pleasure in livin'." "How do you know _she'll_ be there?" asked Tom. "Well, this El Paso daily has got about four pages about it. They think it's news, and Blauring thinks it's advertising so they're both happy. And this very lady who sang into your tin horn, yonder, will be down there at Sky Top just about ten days from now." Tom Osby was silent. The Sacramentos, as all men knew, lay but a hundred miles or so distant by wagon trail. "It ain't so," said Tom, at length. "A singin' artist would choke to death in El Paso. The dust's a fright."