BY HUGH PENDEXTER Tiberius Smith in love was a spectacle I had never conjured up. Billy Campbell, the strolling actor and his patron’s Boswell, had pictured the old showman to me as being arrested for a spy in Russia, for a madman in France, for a too active Carlist in Spain and for smuggling opium in China, but he had never hinted at sentiment. I had taken it for granted that Smith’s many wanderings over the face of the earth with his various theatrical enterprises and circuses had eliminated any inclination for love-sickness, and it seems it had until he met the lord’s daughter. That was like Smith. It was impossible to conceive of him as married and settled down, and when he did fall in love it was his characteristic to indulge in a hopeless passion. For all that, the lord’s daughter was forced to see him at his best, sturdy and resourceful, when others failed her, and I doubt not but that this knowledge was sadly sweet to the old showman, and that in after years he enjoyed diagnosing the climax and realizing it was superbly dramatic. If she ignored his existence at first, he had the keen pleasure of knowing she had only him to rely on at a most critical finale and that her world was better, much better, for his having lived. Possibly the trick could have been turned without him, turned in a prosaic manner with some bloodshed and a great waste of gunpowder. But when a lovely girl is the stake, be she a lord’s daughter or a queen from the masses, it is sometimes advisable to finesse. And Tiberius, if slightly melodramatic, solved the problem as he could only do, and as only he could do—that is, in an unusual manner. Campbell used to style him the “assassin of adversity,” and his peculiar faculty of rescuing the weak from undesirable situations was, perhaps, never better demonstrated than when, with cutter bars down, he restored the English girl to her people and incidentally introduced the uses and abuses of modern farming implements to some unsophisticated savages in a lonely Pacific isle. I had recurred to the time when Tiberius piloted an Uncle Tom’s Cabin company up and down the land, and Billy, gazing sadly into my open grate, irrelevantly observed: “Yes; and that was when Tib ought to have won her and settled down. He was clear daffy over that girl, and I’ll admit she was a hummer; one, you know, that would make a man abandon his grandmother in a blinding snowstorm if it pleased her. But I reckon Fate had other work cut out for Tiberius besides spooning, love in a cottage and no money for the iceman and all that sort of stuff. Yes, it was fully ten years ago that the _Kalanke_ broke her propeller.” “You are speaking of a boat?” I inquired.