"When he could walk again him and Ellabelle moved to the International Hotel, where she wouldn't have to cook or split kindling and could make a brutal display of diamonds at every meal, and we went down to see them. That was when Angus give Lysander John the scarfpin he'd sent clear to New York for—a big gold bull's head with ruby eyes and in its mouth a nugget of platinum set with three diamonds. Of course Lysander John never dast wear it except when Angus was going to see it.

"Then along comes Angus, Junior, though poor Ellabelle thinks for several days that he's Elwin. We'd gone down so I could be with her.

"'Elwin is the name I have chosen for my son,' says she to Angus the third day.

"'Not so,' says Angus, slumping down his one eyebrow clear across in a firm manner. 'You're too late. My son is already named. I named him Angus the night before he was born.'

"'How could you do that when you didn't know the sex?' demands Ellabelle with a frightened air of triumph.

"'I did it, didn't I?' says Angus. 'Then why ask how I could?' And he curved the eyebrow up one side and down the other in a fighting way.

"Ellabelle had been wedded wife of Angus long enough to know when the Scotch curse was on him. 'Very well,' she says, though turning her face to the wall. Angus straightened the eyebrow. 'Like we might have two now, one of each kind,' says he quite soft, 'you'd name your daughter as you liked, with perhaps no more than a bit of a suggestion from me, to be taken or not by you, unless we'd contend amiably about it for a length of time till we had it settled right as it should be. But a son—my son—why, look at the chest on him already, projecting outward like a clock shelf—and you would name him—but no matter! I was forehanded, thank God.' Oh, you saw plainly that in case a girl ever come along Ellabelle would have the privilege of naming it anything in the world she wanted to that Angus thought suitable.

"So that was settled reasonably, and Angus went on showing what to do with your mine instead of selling it to a shark, and the baby fatted up, being stall-fed, and Ellabelle got out into the world again, with more money than ever to spend, but fewer things to buy, because in Wallace she couldn't think of any more. Trust her, though! First the International Hotel wasn't good enough. Angus said they'd have a mansion, the biggest in Wallace, only without slippery hardwood floors, because he felt brittle after his accident. Ellabelle says Wallace itself ain't big enough for the mansion that ought to be a home to his only son. She was learning how to get to Angus without seeming to. He thought there might be something in that, still he didn't like to trust the child away from him, and he had to stick there for a while.

"So Ellabelle's health broke down. Yes, sir, she got to be a total wreck. Of course the fool doctor in Wallace couldn't find it out. She tried him and he told her she was strong as a horse and ought to be doing a tub of washing that very minute. Which was no way to talk to the wife of a rich mining man, so he lost quite a piece of money by it. Ellabelle then went to Spokane and consulted a specialist. That's the difference. You only see a doctor, but a specialist you consult. This one confirmed her fears about herself in a very gentlemanly way and reaped his reward on the spot. Ellabelle's came after she had convinced Angus that even if she did have such a good appetite it wasn't a normal one, but it was, in fact, one of her worst symptoms and threatened her with a complete nervous breakdown. After about a year of this, when Angus had horned his way into a few more mines—he said he might as well have a bunch of them since he couldn't be there on the spot anyway—they went to New York City. Angus had never been there except to pass from a Clyde liner to Jersey City, and they do say that when he heard the rates, exclusive of board, at the one Ellabelle had picked out from reading the papers, he timidly asked her if they hadn't ought to go to the other hotel. She told him there wasn't any other—not for them. She told him further it was part of her mission to broaden his horizon, and she firmly meant to do it if God would only vouchsafe her a remnant of her once magnificent vitality.

"She didn't have to work so hard either. Angus begun to get a broader horizon in just a few days, corrupting every waiter he came in contact with, and there was a report round the hotel the summer I was there that a hat-boy had actually tried to reason with him, thinking he was a foreigner making mistakes with his money by giving up a dollar bill every time for having his hat snatched from him. As a matter of fact, Angus can't believe to this day that dollar bills are money. He feels apologetic when he gives 'em away. All the same I never believed that report about the hat-boy till someone explained to me that he wasn't allowed to keep his loot, not only having clothes made special without pockets but being searched to the hide every night like them poor unfortunate Zulus that toil in the diamond mines of Africa. Of course I could see then that this boy had become merely enraged like a wild-cat at having a dollar crowded onto him for some one else every time a head waiter grovelled Angus out of the restaurant.

"The novelty of that life wore off after about a year, even with side trips to resorts where the prices were sufficiently outrageous to charm Ellabelle. She'd begun right off to broaden her own horizon. After only one week in New York she put her diamond napkin pincher to doing other work, and after six months she dressed about as well as them prominent society ladies that drift round the corridors of this hotel waiting for parties that never seem on time, and looking none too austere while they wait.

"So Ellabelle, having in the meantime taken up art and literature and gone to lectures where the professor would show sights and scenes in foreign lands with his magic lantern, begun to feel the call of the Old World. She'd got far beyond 'Lucile'—though 'Peck's Bad Boy' was still the favourite of Angus when he got time for any serious reading—- and was coming to loathe the crudities of our so-called American civilization. So she said. She begun to let out to Angus that they wasn't doing right by the little one, bringing him up in a hole like New York City where he'd catch the American accent—though God knows where she ever noticed that danger there!—and it was only fair to the child to get him to England or Paris or some such place where he could have decent advantages. I gather that Angus let out a holler at first so that Ellabelle had to consult another specialist and have little Angus consult one, too. They both said: 'Certainly, don't delay another day if you value the child's life or your own,' and of course Angus had to give in. I reckon that was the last real fight he ever put up till the time I'm going to tell you about.

"They went to England and bought a castle that had never known the profane touch of a plumber, having been built in the time of the first earl or something, and after that they had to get another castle in France, account of little Angus having a weak throat that Ellabelle got another gentlemanly specialist to find out about him; and so it went, with Ellabelle hovering on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, and taking up art and literature at different spots where fashion gathered, going to Italy and India's coral strand to study the dead past, and so forth, and learning to address her inferiors in a refined and hostile manner, with little Angus having a maid and a governess and something new the matter with him every time Ellabelle felt the need of a change.

"At first Angus used to make two trips back every year, then he cut them down to one, and at last he'd only come every two or three years, having his hirelings come to him instead. He'd branched out a lot, even at that distance, getting into copper and such, and being president of banks and trusts here and there and equitable cooperative companies and all such things that help to keep the lower classes trimmed proper. For a whole lot of years I didn't see either of 'em. I sort of lost track of the outfit, except as I'd see the name of Angus heading a new board of directors after the reorganization, or renting the north half of Scotland for the sage-hen and coyote shooting, or whatever the game is there. Of course it took genius to do this with Angus, and I've never denied that Ellabelle has it. I bet there wasn't a day in all them years that Angus didn't believe himself to be a stubborn, domineering brute, riding roughshod over the poor little wreck of a woman. If he didn't it wasn't for want of his wife accusing him of it in so many words—and perhaps a few more.

"I guess she got to feeling so sure of herself she let her work coarsen up. Anyway, when little Angus come to be eighteen his pa shocked her one day by saying he must go back home to some good college. 'You mean England,' says Ellabelle, they being at the time on some other foreign domains.

"'I do not,' says Angus, 'nor Sweden nor Japan nor East Africa. I mean the United States.' 'You're jesting,' says she. 'You wrong me cruelly,' says Angus. 'The lad's eighteen and threatening to be a foreigner. Should he stay here longer it would set in his blood.' 'Remember his weak throat,' says Ellabelle. 'I did,' says Angus. 'To save you trouble I sent for a specialist to look him over. He says the lad has never a flaw in his throat. We'll go soon.'

"Of course it was dirty work on the part of Angus, getting to the specialist first, but she saw she had to take it. She knew it was like the time they agreed on his name—she could see the Scotch blood leaping in his veins. So she gave in with never a mutter that Angus could hear. That's part of the genius of Ellabelle, knowing when she can and when she positively cannot, and making no foolish struggle in the latter event.

"Back they come to New York and young Angus went to the swellest college Ellabelle could learn about, and they had a town house and a country house and Ellabelle prepared to dazzle New York society, having met frayed ends of it in her years abroad. But she couldn't seem to put it over. Lots of male and female society foreigners that she'd met would come and put up with her and linger on in the most friendly manner, but Ellabelle never fools herself so very much. She knew she wasn't making the least dent in New York itself. She got uncomfortable there. I bet she had that feeling you get when you're riding your horse over soft ground and all at once he begins to bog down.

"Anyway, they come West after a year or so, where Angus had more drag and Ellabelle could feel more important. Not back to Wallace, of course. Ellabelle had forgotten the name of that town, and also they come over a road that misses the thriving little town of North Platte by several hundred miles. And pretty soon they got into this darned swell little suburb out from San Francisco, through knowing one of the old families that had lived there man and boy for upward of four years. It's a town where I believe they won't let you get off the train unless you got a visitor's card and a valet.

"Here at last Ellabelle felt she might come into her own, for parties seemed to recognize her true worth at once. Some of them indeed she could buffalo right on the spot, for she hadn't lived in Europe and such places all them years for nothing. So, camping in a miserable rented shack that never cost a penny over seventy thousand dollars, with only thirty-eight rooms and no proper space for the servants, they set to work building their present marble palace—there's inside and outside pictures of it in a magazine somewhere round here—bigger than the state insane asylum and very tasty and expensive, with hand-painted ceilings and pergolas and cafes and hot and cold water and everything.

"It was then I first see Ellabelle after all the years, and I want to tell you she was impressive. She looked like the descendant of a long line of ancestry or something and she spoke as good as any reciter you ever heard in a hall. Last time I had seen her she was still forgetting about the r's—she'd say: 'Oh, there-urr you ah!' thus showing she was at least half Iowa in breed—but nothing like that now. She could give the English cards and spades and beat them at their own game. Her face looked a little bit overmassaged and she was having trouble keeping her hips down, and wore a patent chin-squeezer nights, and her hair couldn't be trusted to itself long at a time; but she knew how to dress and she'd learned decency in the use of the diamond except when it was really proper to break out all over with 'em. You'd look at her twice in any show ring. Ain't women the wonders! Gazing at Ellabelle when she had everything on, you'd never dream that she'd come up from the vilest dregs only a few years before—helping cook for the harvest hands in Iowa, feeding Union Pacific passengers at twenty-two a month, or splitting her own kindling at Wallace, Idaho, and dreaming about a new silk dress for next year, or mebbe the year after if things went well.

"Men ain't that way. Angus had took no care of his figure, which was now pouchy, his hair was gray, and he was either shedding or had been reached, and he had lines of care and food in his face, and took no pains whatever with his accent—or with what he said, for that matter. I never saw a man yet that could hide a disgraceful past like a woman can. They don't seem to have any pride. Most of 'em act like they don't care a hoot whether people find it out on 'em or not.

"Angus was always reckless that way, adding to his wife's burden of anxiety. She'd got her own vile past well buried, but she never knew when his was going to stick its ugly head up out of its grave. He'd go along all right for a while like one of the best set had ought to—then Zooey! We was out to dinner at another millionaire's one night—in that town you're either a millionaire or drawing wages from one—and Angus talked along with his host for half an hour about the impossibility of getting a decent valet on this side of the water, Americans not knowing their place like the English do, till you'd have thought he was born to it, and then all at once he breaks out about the hardwood finish to the dining-room, and how the art of graining has perished and ought to be revived. 'And I wish I had a silver dollar,' he says, 'for every door like that one there that I've grained to resemble the natural wood so cunningly you'd never guess it—hardly.'

"At that his break didn't faze any one but Ellabelle. The host was an old train-robber who'd cut your throat for two bits—I'll bet he couldn't play an honest game of solitaire—and he let out himself right off that he had once worked in a livery stable and was proud of it; but poor Ellabelle, who'd been talking about the dear Countess of Comtessa or somebody, and the dukes and earls that was just one-two-three with her on the other side, she blushed up till it almost showed through the second coating. Angus was certainly poison ivy to her on occasion, and he'd refuse to listen to reason when she called him down about it. He'd do most of the things she asked him to about food and clothes and so forth—like the time he had the two gold teeth took out and replaced by real porcelain nature fakers—but he never could understand why he wasn't free to chat about the days when he earned what money he had.

"It was this time that I first saw little Angus since he had changed from a governess to a governor—or whatever they call the he-teacher of a millionaire's brat. He was home for the summer vacation. Naturally I'd been prejudiced against him not only by his mother's praise but by his father's steady coppering of the same. Judiciously comparing the two, I was led to expect a kind of cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and the late Sitting Bull, with the vices of each and the virtues of neither. Instead of which I found him a winsome whelp of six-foot or so with Scotch eyes and his mother's nose and chin and a good, big, straight mouth, and full of the most engaging bedevilments for one and all. He didn't seem to be any brighter in his studies than a brute of that age should be, and though there was something easy and grand in his manner that his pa and ma never had, he wasn't really any more foreign than what I be. Of course he spoke Eastern American instead of Western, but you forgive him that after a few minutes when you see how nice he naturally meant to be. I admit we took to each other from the start. They often say I'm a good mixer, but it took no talent to get next to that boy. I woke up the first night thinking I knew what old silly would do her darndest to adopt him if ever his poor pa and ma was to get buttered over the right of way in some railroad accident.

"And yet I didn't see Angus, Junior, one bit the way either of his parents saw him. Ellabelle seemed to look on him merely as a smart dresser and social know-it-all that would be a 98 cent credit to her in the position of society queen for which the good God had always intended her. And his father said he wasn't any good except to idle away his time and spend money, and would come to a bad end by manslaughter in a high-powered car; or in the alcoholic ward of some hospital; that he was, in fact, a mere helling scapegrace that would have been put in some good detention home years before if he hadn't been born to a father that was all kinds of a so-and-so old Scotch fool. There you get Angus, fills, from three different slants, and I ain't saying there wasn't justification for the other two besides mine. The boy could act in a crowd of tea-drinking women with a finish that made his father look like some one edging in to ask where they wanted the load of coal dumped. But also Angus, peer, was merely painting the lily, as they say, when he'd tell all the different kinds of Indian the boy was. That very summer before he went back to the educational centre where they teach such arts, he helped wreck a road house a few miles up the line till it looked like one of them pictures of what a Zeppelin does to a rare old English drug store in London. And a week later he lost a race with the Los Angeles flyer, account of not having as good a roadbed to run on as the train had, and having to take too short a turn with his new car.

"I remember we three was wondering where he could be that night the telephone rung from the place where kindly strangers had hauled him for first aid to the foolish. But it was the boy himself that was able to talk and tell his anxious parents to forget all about it. His father took the message and as soon as he got the sense of it he begun to get hopeful that the kid had broke at least one leg—thinking, he must have been, of the matched pacing stallions that once did himself such a good turn without meaning to. His disappointment was pitiful as he turned to us after learning that he had lit on his head but only sustained a few bruises and sprains and concussions, with the wall-paper scraped off here and there.

"'Struck on his head, the only part of him that seems invulnerable,' says the fond father. 'What's that?' he yells, for the boy was talking again. He listened a minute, and it was right entertaining to watch his face work as the words come along. It registered all the evil that Scotland has suffered from her oppressors since they first thought up the name for it. Finally he begun to splutter back—it must have sounded fine at the other end—but he had to hang up, he was that emotional. After he got his face human again he says to us:

"'Would either of you think now that you could guess at what might have been his dying speech? Would you guess it might be words of cheer to the bereaved mother that nursed him, or even a word of comfort to the idiot father that never touched whipleather to his back while he was still husky enough to get by with it? Well, you'd guess wild. He's but inflamed with indignation over the state of the road where he passed out for some minutes. He says it's a disgrace to any civilized community, and he means to make trouble about it with the county supervisor, who must be a murderer at heart, and then he'll take it up to the supreme court and see if we can't have roads in this country as good as Napoleon the First made them build in France, so a gentleman can speed up a bit over five miles an hour without breaking every bone in his body, to say nothing of totally ruining a car costing forty-eight hundred dollars of his good money, with the ink on the check for it scarce dry. He was going on to say that he had the race for the crossing as good as won and had just waved mockingly at the engineer of the defeated train who was pretending to feel indifferent about it—but I hung up on him. My strength was waning. Was he here this minute I make no doubt I'd go to the mat with him, unequal as we are in prowess.' He dribbled off into vicious mutterings of what he'd say to the boy if he was to come to the door.

"Then dear Ellabelle pipes up: 'And doesn't the dear boy say who was with him in this prank?'

"Angus snorted horribly at the word 'prank,' just like he'd never had one single advantage of foreign travel. 'He does indeed—one of those Hammersmith twin louts was with him—the speckled devil with the lisp, I gather—and praise God his bones, at least, are broke in two places!'

"Ellabelle's eyes shined up at this with real delight. 'How terrible!' she says, not looking it. 'That's Gerald Hammersmith, son of Mrs. St. John Hammersmith, leader of the most exclusive set here—oh, she's quite in the lead of everything that has class! And after this we must know each other far, far better than we have in the past. She has never called up to this time. I must inquire after her poor boy directly to-morrow comes.' That is Ellabelle. Trust her not to overlook a single bet.

"Angus again snorted in a common way. 'St. John Hammersmith!' says he, steaming up, 'When he trammed ore for three-fifty a day and went to bed with his clothes on any night he'd the price of a quart of gin-and-beer mixed—liking to get his quick—his name was naked 'John' with never a Saint to it, which his widow tacked on a dozen years later. And speaking of names, Mrs. McDonald, I sorely regret you didn't name your own son after your first willful fancy. It was no good day for his father when you put my own name to him.'

"But Ellabelle paid no attention whatever to this rough stuff, being already engaged in courting the Hammersmith dame for the good of her social importance. I make no doubt before the maid finished rubbing in the complexion cream that night she had reduced this upstart to the ranks and stepped into her place as leader of the most exclusive social set between South San Francisco and old Henry Miller's ranch house at Gilroy. Anyway, she kept talking to herself about it, almost over the mangled remains of her own son, as you might say.

"A year later the new mansion was done, setting in the centre of sixty acres of well-manicured land as flat as a floor and naturally called Hillcrest. Angus asked me down for another visit. There had been grand doings to open the new house, and Ellabelle felt she was on the way to ruling things social with an iron hand if she was just careful and didn't overbet her cards. Angus, not being ashamed of his scandalous past, was really all that kept her nerves strung up. It seems he'd give her trouble while the painters and decorators was at work, hanging round 'em fascinated and telling 'em how he'd had to work ten hours a day in his time and how he could grain a door till it looked exactly like the natural wood, so they'd say it wasn't painted at all. And one day he become so inflamed with evil desire that Ellabelle, escorting a bunch of the real triple-platers through the mansion, found him with his coat off learning how to rub down a hardwood panel with oil and pumice stone. Gee! Wouldn't I like to of been there! I suppose I got a lower nature as well as the rest of us.

"After I'd been there a few days, along comes Angus, fills, out into the world from college to make a name for himself. By ingenuity or native brute force he had contrived to graduate. He was nice as ever and told me he was going to look about a bit until he could decide what his field of endeavour should be. Apparently it was breaking his neck in outdoor sports, including loop-the-loop in his new car on roads not meant for it, and delighting Ellabelle because he was a fine social drag in her favour, and enraging his father by the same reasons. Ellabelle was especially thrilled by his making up to a girl that was daughter to this here old train-robber I mentioned. It was looking like he might form an alliance, as they say, with this old family which had lived quite a decent life since they actually got it. The girl looked to me nice enough even for Angus, Junior, but his pa denounced her as a yellow-haired pest with none but frivolous aims in life, who wouldn't know whether a kitchen was a room in a house or a little woolly animal from Paraguay. We had some nice, friendly breakfasts, I believe not, whilst they discussed this poisonous topic, old Angus being only further embittered when it comes out that the train-robber is also dead set against this here alliance because his only daughter needs a decent, reputable man who would come home nights from some low mahogany den in a bank building, and not a worthless young hound that couldn't make a dollar of his own and had displayed no talent except for winning the notice of head waiters and policemen. Old Angus says he knows well enough his son can be arrested out of most crowds just on that description alone, but who is this So-and-So old thug to be saying it in public?

"And so it went, with Ellabelle living in high hopes and young Angus busy inventing new ways to bump himself off, and old Angus getting more and more seething—quiet enough outside, but so desperate inside that it wasn't any time at all till I saw he was just waiting for a good chance to make some horrible Scotch exhibition of himself.

"Then comes the fatal polo doings, with young Angus playing on the side that won, and Ellabelle being set up higher than ever till she actually begins to snub people here and there at the game that look like they'd swallow it, and old Angus ashamed and proud and glaring round as if he'd like to hear some one besides himself call his son a worthless young hound—if they wanted to start something.

"And the polo victory of course had to be celebrated by a banquet at the hotel, attended by all the players and their huskiest ruffian friends. They didn't have the ponies there, but I guess they would of if they'd thought of it. It must have been a good banquet, with vintages and song and that sort of thing—I believe they even tried to have food at first—and hearty indoor sports with the china and silver and chairs that had been thoughtlessly provided and a couple of big mirrors that looked as if you could throw a catsup bottle clear through them, only you couldn't, because it would stop there after merely breaking the glass, and spatter in a helpless way.

"And of course there was speeches. The best one, as far as I could learn, was made by the owner of the outraged premises at a late hour—when the party was breaking up—as you might put it. He said the bill would be about eighteen hundred dollars, as near as he could tell at first glance. He was greeted with hearty laughter and applause from the high-spirited young incendiaries and retired hastily through an unsuspected door to the pantry as they rushed for him. It was then they found out what to do with the rest of the catsup—and did it—so the walls and ceiling wouldn't look so monotonous, and fixed the windows so they would let out the foul tobacco smoke, and completed a large painting of the Yosemite that hung on the wall, doing several things to it that hadn't occurred to the artist in his hurry, and performed a serious operation on the piano without the use of gas. The tables, I believe, was left flat on their backs.

"Angus, fills, was fetched home in a car by a gang of his roguish young playmates. They stopped down on the stately drive under my window and a quartet sung a pathetic song that run:

"Don't forget your parents, Think all they done for you!

"Then young Angus ascended the marble steps to the top one, bared his agreeable head to the moonlight, and made them a nice speech. He said the campaign now in progress, fellow-citizens, marked the gravest crisis in the affairs of our grand old state that an intelligent constituency had ever been called upon to vote down, but that he felt they were on the eve of a sweeping victory that would sweep the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal opposition into an ignominy from which they would never be swept by any base act of his while they honoured him with their suffrages, because his life was an open book and he challenged any son-of-a-gun within sound of his voice to challenge this to his face or take the consequences of being swept into oblivion by the high tide of a people's indignation that would sweep everything before it on the third day of November next, having been aroused in its might at last from the debasing sloth into which the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal opposition had swept them, but a brighter day had dawned, which would sweep the onrushing hordes of petty chicanery to where they would get theirs; and, as one who had heard the call of an oppressed people, he would accept this fitting testimonial, not for its intrinsic worth but for the spirit in which it was tendered. As for the nefarious tariff on watch springs, sawed lumber, and indigo, he would defer his masterly discussion of these burning issues to a more fitting time because a man had to get a little sleep now and then or he wasn't any good next day. In the meantime he thanked them one and all, and so, gentlemen, good-night.

"The audience cheered hoarsely and drove off. I guess the speech would have been longer if a light hadn't showed in the east wing of the castle where Angus, peer, slept. And then all was peace and quiet till the storm broke on a rocky coast next day. It didn't really break until evening, but suspicious clouds no bigger than a man's hand might have been observed earlier. If young Angus took any breakfast that morning it was done in the privacy of his apartment under the pitying glances of a valet or something. But here he was at lunch, blithe as ever, and full of merry details about the late disaster. He spoke with much humour about a wider use for tomato catsup than was ever encouraged by the old school of house decorators. Old Angus listened respectfully, taking only a few bites of food but chewing them long and thoughtfully. Ellabelle was chiefly interested in the names of the hearty young vandals. She was delighted to learn that they was all of the right set, and her eyes glowed with pride. The eyes of Angus, peer, was now glowing with what I could see was something else, though I couldn't make out just what it was. He never once exploded like you'd of thought he was due to.

"Then come a note for the boy which the perfect-mannered Englishman that was tending us said was brought by a messenger. Young Angus glanced at the page and broke out indignantly. 'The thieving old pirate!' he says. 'Last night he thought it would be about eighteen hundred dollars, and that sounded hysterical enough for the few little things we'd scratched or mussed up. I told him he would doubtless feel better this morning, but in any event to send the bill to me and I would pay it.'

"'Quite right of you,' says Ellabelle proudly.

"'And now the scoundrel sends me one for twenty-three hundred and odd. He's a robber, net!'

"Old Angus said never a word, but chewed slowly, whilst various puzzling expressions chased themselves acrost his eloquent face. I couldn't make a thing out of any of them.

"'Never patronize the fellow again,' says Ellabelle warmly.

"'As to that,' says her son, 'he hinted something last night about having me arrested if I ever tried to patronize him again, but that isn't the point. He's robbing me now.'

"'Oh, money!' says Ellabelle in a low tone of disgust and with a gesture like she was rebuking her son for mentioning such a thing before the servant.

"'But I don't like to be taken advantage of,' says he, looking very annoyed and grand. Then old Angus swallowed something he'd been chewing for eight minutes and spoke up with an entirely new expression that puzzled me more than ever.

"'If you're sure you have the right of it, don't you submit to the outrage.'

"Angus, Junior, backed up a little bit at this, not knowing quite how to take the old man's mildness. 'Oh, of course the fellow might win out if he took it into court,' he says. 'Every one knows the courts are just a mass of corruption.'

"'True, I've heard gossip to that effect,' says his father. 'Yet there must be some way to thwart the crook. I'm feeling strangely ingenious at the moment.' He was very mild, and yet there was something sinister and Scotch about him that the boy felt.

"'Of course I'd pay it out of my own money,' he remarks generously.

"'Even so, I hate to see you cheated,' says his father kindly. 'I hate to have you pay unjust extortions out of the mere pittance your tight-fisted old father allows you.'

"Young Angus said nothing to this, but blushed and coughed uncomfortably.

"'If you hurt that hotel anything like twenty-three hundred dollars' worth, it must be an interesting sight,' his father goes on brightly.

"'Oh, it was funny at the time,' says Angus boy, cheering up again.

"'Things often are,' says old Angus. 'I'll have a look.'

"'At the bill?'

"'No, at the wreck,' says he. The old boy was still quiet on the outside, but was plainly under great excitement, for he now folded his napkin with care, a crime of which I knew Ellabelle had broken him the first week in New York, years before. I noticed their butler had the fine feeling to look steadily away at the wall during this obscenity. The offender then made a pleasant remark about the beauty of the day and left the palatial apartment swiftly. Young Angus and his mother looked at each other and strolled after him softly over rugs costing about eighty thousand dollars. The husband and father was being driven off by a man he could trust in a car they had let him have for his own use. Later Ellabelle confides to me that she mistrusts old Angus is contemplating some bit of his national deviltry. 'He had a strange look on his face,' says she, 'and you know—once a Scotchman, always a Scotchman! Oh, it would be pitiful if he did anything peculiarly Scotch just at our most critical period here!' Then she felt of her face to see if there was any nervous lines come into it, and there was, and she beat it for the maid to have 'em rubbed out ere they set.

"Yet at dinner that night everything seemed fine, with old Angus as jovial as I'd ever seen him, and the meal come to a cheerful end and we was having coffee in the Looey de Medisee saloon, I think it is, before a word was said about this here injured hotel.

"'You were far too modest this morning, you sly dog!' says Angus, peer, at last, chuckling delightedly. 'You misled me grievously. That job of wrecking shows genius of a quality that was all too rare in my time. I suspect it's the college that does it. I shouldn't wonder now if going through college is as good as a liberal education. I don't believe mere uneducated house-wreckers could have done so pretty a job in twice the time, and there's clever little touches they never would have thought of at all.'

"'It did look thorough when we left,' says young Angus, not quite knowing whether to laugh.

"'It's nothing short of sublime,' says his father proudly. 'I stood in that deserted banquet hall, though it looks never a bit like one, with ruin and desolation on every hand as far as the eye could reach. It inspired such awe in the bereaved owner and me that we instinctively spoke in hushed whispers. I've had no such gripping sensation as that since I gazed upon the dead city of Pompeii. No longer can it be said that Europe possesses all the impressive ruins.'

"Angus boy grinned cheerfully now, feeling that this tribute was heartfelt.

"'I suspect now,' goes on the old boy, 'that when the wreckage is cleared away we shall find the mangled bodies of several that perished when the bolts descended from a clear sky upon the gay scene.'

"'Perhaps under the tables,' says young Angus, chirking up still more at this geniality. 'Two or three went down early and may still be there.'

"'Yet twenty-three hundred for it is a monstrous outrage,' says the old man, changing his voice just a mite. 'Too well I know the cost of such repairs. Fifteen hundred at most would make the place better than ever—and to think that you, struggling along to keep up appearances on the little I give you, should be imposed upon by a crook that undoubtedly has the law on his side! I could endure no thought of it, so I foiled him.'

"'How?' says young Angus, kind of alarmed.

"Angus, peer, yawned and got up. 'It's a long story and would hardly interest you,' says he, moving over to the door. 'Besides, I must be to bed against the morrow, which will be a long, hard day for me.' His voice had tightened up.

"'What have you done?' demands Ellabelle passionately.

"'Saved your son eight hundred dollars,' says Angus, 'or the equivalent of his own earnings for something like eight hundred years at current prices for labour.'

"'I've a right to know,' says Ellabelle through her teeth and stiffening in her chair. Young Angus just set there with his mouth open.

"'So you have,' says old Angus, and he goes on as crisp as a bunch of celery: 'I told you I felt ingenious. I've kept this money in the family by the simple device of taking the job. I've engaged two other painters and decorators besides myself, a carpenter, an electrician, a glazier, and a few proletariats of minor talent for clearing away the wreckage. I shall be on the job at eight. The loafers won't start at seven, as I used to. Don't think I'd see any son of mine robbed before my very eyes. My new overalls are laid out and my valet has instructions to get me into them at seven, though he persists in believing I'm to attend a fancy-dress ball at some strangely fashionable hour. So I bid you all good evening.'

"Well, I guess that was the first time Ellabelle had really let go of herself since she was four years old or thereabouts. Talk about the empress of stormy emotion! For ten minutes the room sounded like a torture chamber of the dark Middle Ages. But the doctor reached there at last in a swift car, and him and the two maids managed to get her laid out all comfortable and moaning, though still with outbreaks about every twenty minutes that I could hear clear over on my side of the house.

"And down below my window on the marble porch Angus, fills, was walking swiftly up and down for about one hour. He made no speech like the night before. He just walked and walked. The part that struck me was that neither of them had ever seemed to have the slightest notion of pleading old Angus out of his mad folly. They both seemed to know the Scotch when it did break out.

"At seven-thirty the next morning the old boy in overalls and jumper and a cap was driven to his job in a car as big as an apartment house. The curtains to Ellabelle's Looey Seez boudoir remained drawn, with hourly bulletins from the two Swiss maids that she was passing away in great agony. Angus, Junior, was off early, too, in his snakiest car. A few minutes later they got a telephone from him sixty miles away that he would not be home to lunch. Old Angus had taken his own lunch with him in a tin pail he'd bought the day before, with a little cupola on top for the cup to put the bottle of cold coffee in.

"It was a joyous home that day, if you don't care how you talk. All it needed was a crepe necktie on the knob of the front door. That ornery old hound, Angus, got in from his work at six, spotty with paint and smelling of oil and turpentine, but cheerful as a new father. He washed up, ridding himself of at least a third of the paint smell, looked in at Ellabelle's door to say, 'What! Not feeling well, mamma? Now, that's too bad!' ate a hearty dinner with me, young Angus not having been heard from further, and fell asleep in a gold armchair at ten minutes past nine.

"He was off again next morning. Ellabelle's health was still breaking down, but young Angus sneaked in and partook of a meagre lunch with me. He was highly vexed with his pa. 'He's nothing but a scoundrelly old liar,' he says to me, 'saying that he gives me but a pittance. He's always given me a whale of an allowance. Why, actually, I've more than once had money left over at the end of the quarter. And now his talk about saving money! I tell you he has some other reason than money for breaking the mater's heart.' The boy looked very shrewd as he said this.

"That night at quitting time he was strangely down at the place with his own car to fetch his father home. 'I'll trust you this once,' says the old man, getting in and looking more then ever like a dissolute working man. On the way they passed this here yellow-haired daughter of the old train-robber that there had been talk of the boy making a match with. She was driving her own car and looked neither to right nor left.

"'Not speaking?' says old Angus.

"'She didn't see us,' says the boy.

"'She's ashamed of your father,' says the old man.

"'She's not,' says the boy.

"'You know it,' says the old scoundrel.

"'I'll show her,' says his son.

"Well, we had another cheerful evening, with Ellabelle sending word to old Angus that she wanted me to have the necklace of brilliants with the sapphire pendant, and the two faithful maids was to get suitable keepsakes out of the rest of her jewels, and would her son always wear the seal ring with her hair in it that she had given him when he was twenty? And the old devil started in to tell how much he could have saved by taking charge of the work in his own house, and how a union man nowadays would do just enough to keep within the law, and so on; but he got to yawning his head off and retired at nine, complaining that his valet that morning had cleaned and pressed his overalls. Young Angus looked very shrewd at me and again says: 'The old liar! He has some other reason than money. He can't fool me.'

"I kind of gathered from both of them the truth of what happened the next day. Young Angus himself showed up at the job about nine A.M., with a bundle under his arm. 'Where's the old man?' his father heard him demand of the carpenter, he usually speaking of old Angus as the governor.

"'Here,' says he from the top of a stepladder in the entry which looked as if a glacier had passed through it.

"'Could you put me to work?' says the boy.

"'Don't get me to shaking with laughter up here,' says the old brute. 'Can't you see I'd be in peril of falling off?'

"Young Angus undoes his bundle and reveals overalls and a jumper which he gets into quickly. 'What do I do first?' says he.

"His father went on kalsomining and took never a look at him more. 'The time has largely passed here,' says he, 'for men that haven't learned to do something, but you might take some of the burnt umber there and work it well into a big gob of that putty till it's brown enough to match the woodwork. Should you display the least talent for that we may see later if you've any knack with a putty knife.'

"The new hand had brought no lunch with him, but his father spared him a few scraps from his own, and they all swigged beer from a pail of it they sent out for. So the scandal was now complete in all its details. The palatial dining-room that night, being a copy of a good church or something from ancient Italy, smelled like a paint shop indeed—and sounded like one through dinner. 'That woodwork will be fit to second-coat first thing in the morning,' says old Angus. 'I'll have it sandpapered in no time,' says the boy. 'Your sandpapering ain't bad,' says the other, 'though you have next to no skill with a brush.' 'I thought I was pretty good with that flat one though.' 'Oh, fair; just fair! First-coating needs little finesse. There! I forgot to order more rubbing varnish. Maybe the men will think of it.' And so on till they both yawned themselves off to their Scotch Renaysence apartments. Ellabelle had not yet learned the worst. It seemed to be felt that she had a right to perish without suffering the added ignominy of knowing her son was acting like a common wage slave.

"They was both on the job next day. Of course the disgraceful affair had by now penetrated to the remotest outlying marble shack. Several male millionaires this day appeared on the scene to josh Angus, peer, and Angus, fills, as they toiled at their degrading tasks. Not much attention was paid to 'em, it appears, not even to the old train-robber who come to jest and remained to cross-examine Angus about how much he was really going to clear on the job, seriously now. Anything like that was bound to fascinate the old crook.

"And next day, close to quitting time, what happens but this here robber chieftain's petted daughter coming in and hanging round and begging to be let to help because it was such jolly fun. I believe she did get hold of a square of sandpaper with which she daintily tried to remove some fresh varnish that should have been let strictly alone; and when they both ordered her out in a frenzy of rage, what does she do but wait for 'em with her car which she made them enter and drove them to their abode like they belonged to the better class of people that one would care to know. The two fools was both kind of excited about this that night.

"The next day she breezes in again and tries to get them to knock off an hour early so she can take them to the country club for tea, but they refuse this, so she makes little putty statues of them both and drove a few nails where they would do no good and upset a bucket of paste and leaned a two-hundred-dollar lace thing against a varnished wall to the detriment of both, and fell off a stepladder. Old Angus caught her and boxed her ears soundly. And again she drove them through the avenues of a colony of fine old families with money a little bit older, by a few days, and up the drive to their own door.

"Ellabelle was peeking between the plush curtains on this occasion, for some heartless busybody during the day had told her that her son and husband was both renegades now. And strangely enough, she begun to get back her strength from that very moment—seeing that exclusive and well-known young debby-tant consorting in public with the reprobates. I'm darned if she didn't have the genius after that to treat the whole thing as a practical joke, especially when she finds out that none of them exclusives had had it long enough to look down on another millionaire merely for pinching a penny now and then. Old Angus as a matter of fact had become just a little more important than she had ever been and could have snubbed any one he wanted to. The only single one in the whole place that throwed him down was his own English valet. He was found helpless drunk in a greenhouse the third day, having ruined nine thousand dollars' worth of orchids he'd gone to sleep amongst, and he resigned his position with bitter dignity the moment he recovered consciousness.

"Moreover, young Angus and this girl clenched without further opposition. Her train-robber father said the boy must have something in him even if he didn't look it, and old Angus said he still believed the girl to be nothing but a yellow-haired soubrette; but what should we expect of a woman, after all?

"The night the job was finished we had the jolliest dinner of my visit, with a whole gang of exclusive-setters at the groaning board, including this girl and her folks, and champagne, of which Angus, peer, consumed near one of the cut-glass vases full.

"I caught him with young Angus in the deserted library later, while the rest was one-stepping in the Henry Quatter ballroom or dance hall. The old man had his arms pretty well upon the boy's shoulders. Yes, sir, he was almost actually hugging him. The boy fled to this gilded cafe where the rest was, and old Angus, with his eyes shining very queer, he grabs me by the arm and says, 'Once when he was very small—though unusually large for his age of three, mind you—he had a way of scratching my face something painful with his little nails, and all in laughing play, you know. I tried to warn him, but he couldn't understand, of course; so, not knowing how else to instruct him, I scratched back one day, laughing myself like he was, but sinking my nails right fierce into the back of his little fat neck. He relaxed the tension in his own fingers. He was hurt, for the tears started, but he never cried. He just looked puzzled and kept on laughing, being bright to see I could play the game, too. Only he saw it wasn't so good a game as he'd thought. I wonder what made me think of that, now! I don't know. Come—from yonder doorway we can see him as he dances.'

"And Ellabelle was saying gently to one and all, with her merry peal of laughter, 'Ah, yes—once a Scotchman, always—'

"My land! It's ten o'clock. Don't them little white-faced beauties make the music! Honestly I'd like to have a cot out in the corral. We miss a lot of it in here."



V

NON PLUSH ULTRA

Sunday and a driving rain had combined to keep Ma Pettengill within the Arrowhead ranch house. Neither could have done this alone. The rain would merely have added a slicker to her business costume of khaki riding breeches, laced boots, and flannel shirt as she rode abroad; while a clement Sabbath would have seen her "resting," as she would put it, in and round the various outbuildings, feeding-pens, blacksmith shop, harness-room, branding-chute, or what not, issuing orders to attentive henchmen from time to time; diagnosing the gray mule's barbed-wire cut; compounding a tonic for Adolph, the big milk-strain Durham bull, who has been ailing; wishing to be told why in something the water hadn't been turned into that south ditch; and, like a competent general, disposing her forces and munitions for the campaign of the coming week. But Sunday—and a wildly rainy Sunday—had housed her utterly.

Being one who can idle with no grace whatever she was engaged in what she called putting the place to rights. This meant taking out the contents of bureau drawers and wardrobes and putting them back again, massing the litter on the big table in the living-room into an involved geometry of neat piles that would endure for all of an hour, straightening pictures on the walls, eliminating the home-circles of spiders long unmolested, loudly calling upon Lew Wee, the Chinaman, who affrightedly fled farther and farther after each call, and ever and again booming pained surmises through the house as to what fearful state it would get to be in if she didn't fight it to a clean finish once in a dog's age.

The woman dumped a wastebasket of varied rubbish into the open fire, leaned a broom against the mantel, readjusted the towel that protected her gray hair from the dust—hair on week days exposed with never a qualm to all manner of dust—cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude. She held it up before critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper for headlines of significance.

"Ruined!" she murmured. Even her murmur must have reached Lew Wee, how remote soever his isle of safety. "Worn one time and all ruined up! That's what happens for trying to get something for nothing. You'd think women would learn. You would if you didn't know a few. Hetty Daggett, her that was Hetty Tipton, orders this by catalogue, No. 3456 or something, from the mail-order house in Chicago. I was down in Red Gap when it come. 'Isn't it simply wonderful what you can get for three thirty-eight!' says she with gleaming eyes, laying this thing out before me. 'I don't see how they can ever do it for the money.' She found out the next day when she rode up here in it with me and Mr. Burchell Daggett, her husband. Nothing but ruin! Seams all busted, sleazy cloth wore through. But Hetty just looks it over cheerfully and says: 'Oh, well, what can you expect for three thirty-eight?' Is that like a woman or is it like something science has not yet discovered?

"That Hetty child is sure one woman. This skirt would never have held together to ride back in, so she goes down as far as the narrow gauge in the wagon with Buck Devine, wearing a charming afternoon frock of pale blue charmeuse rather than get into a pair of my khakis and ride back with her own lawful-wedded husband; yes, sir; married to him safe as anything, but wouldn't forget her womanhood. Only once did she ever come near it. I saved her then because she hadn't snared Mr. Burchell Daggett yet, and of course a girl has to be a little careful. And she took my counsels so much to heart she's been careful ever since. 'Why, I should simply die of mortification if my dear mate were to witness me in those,' says she when I'm telling her to take a chance for once and get into these here riding pants of mine because it would be uncomfortable going down in that wagon. 'But what is my comfort compared to dear Burchell's peace of mind?' says she.

"Ain't we the goods, though, when we do once learn a thing? Of course most of us don't have to learn stuff like this. Born in us. I shouldn't wonder if they was something in the talk of this man Shaw or Shavian—I see the name spelled both ways in the papers. I can't read his pieces myself because he rasps me, being not only a smarty but a vegetarian. I don't know. I might stand one or the other purebred, but the cross seems to bring out the worst strain in both. I once got a line on his beliefs and customs though—like it appears he don't believe anything ought to be done for its own sake but only for some good purpose. It was one day I got caught at a meeting of the Onward and Upward Club in Red Gap and Mrs. Alonzo Price read a paper about his meaning. I hope she didn't wrong him. I hope she was justified in all she said he really means in his secret heart. No one ought to talk that way about any one if they ain't got the goods on 'em. One thing I might have listened to with some patience if the man et steaks and talked more like some one you'd care to have in your own home. In fact, I listened to it anyway. Maybe he took it from some book he read—about woman and her true nature. According to Henrietta Templeton Price, as near as I could get her, this Shaw or Shavian believes that women is merely a flock of men-hawks circling above the herd till they see a nice fat little lamb of a man, then one fell swoop and all is over but the screams of the victim dying out horribly. They bear him off to their nest in a blasted pine and pick the meat from his bones at leisure. Of course that ain't the way ladies was spoken of in the Aunt Patty Little Helper Series I got out of the Presbyterian Sabbath-school library back in Fredonia, New York, when I was thirteen—and yet—and yet—as they say on the stage in these plays of high or English life."

It sounded promising enough, and the dust had now settled so that I could dimly make out the noble lines of my hostess. I begged for more.

"Well, go on—Mrs. Burchell Daggett once nearly forgot her womanhood. Certainly, go on, if it's anything that would be told outside of a smoking-car."

The lady grinned.

"Many of us has forgot our womanhood in the dear, dead past," she confessed. "Me? Sure! Where's that photo album. Where did I put that album anyway? That's the way in this house. Get things straightened up once, you can't find a single one you want. Look where I put it now!" She demolished an obelisk of books on the table, one she had lately constructed with some pains, and brought the album that had been its pedestal. "Get me there, do you?"

It was the photograph of a handsome young woman in the voluminous riding skirt of years gone by, before the side-saddle became extinct. She held a crop and wore an astoundingly plumed bonnet. Despite the offensive disguise, one saw provocation for the course adopted by the late Lysander John Pettengill at about that period.

"Very well—now get me here, after I'd been on the ranch only a month." It was the same young woman in the not too foppish garb of a cowboy. In wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, woolly chaps, quirt in hand, she bestrode a horse that looked capable and daring.

"Yes, sir, I hadn't been here only a month when I forgot my womanhood like that. Gee! How good it felt to get into 'em and banish that sideshow tent of a skirt. I'd never known a free moment before and I blessed Lysander John for putting me up to it. Then, proud as Punch, what do I do but send one of these photos back to dear old Aunt Waitstill, in Fredonia, thinking she would rejoice at the wild, free life I was now leading in the Far West. And what do I get for it but a tear-spotted letter of eighteen pages, with a side-kick from her pastor, the Reverend Abner Hemingway, saying he wishes to indorse every word of Sister Baxter's appeal to me—asking why do I parade myself shamelessly in this garb of a fallen woman, and can nothing be said to recall me to the true nobility that must still be in my nature but which I am forgetting in these licentious habiliments, and so on! The picture had been burned after giving the Reverend his own horrified flash of it, and they would both pray daily that I might get up out of this degradation and be once more a good, true woman that some pure little child would not be ashamed to call the sacred name of mother.

"Such was Aunt Waitstill—what names them poor old girls had to stand for! I had another aunt named Obedience, only she proved to be a regular cinch-binder. Her name was never mentioned in the family after she slid down a rainspout one night and eloped to marry a depraved scoundrel who drove through there on a red wagon with tinware inside that he would trade for old rags. I'm just telling you how times have changed in spite of the best efforts of a sanctified ministry. I cried over that letter at first. Then I showed it to Lysander John, who said 'Oh, hell!' being a man of few words, so I felt better and went right on forgetting my womanhood in that shameless garb of a so-and-so—though where aunty had got her ideas of such I never could make out—and it got to be so much a matter of course and I had so many things to think of besides my womanhood that I plumb forgot the whole thing until this social upheaval in Red Gap a few years ago.

"I got to tell you that the wild and lawless West, in all matters relating to proper dress for ladies, is the most conservative and hidebound section of our great land of the free and home of the brave—if you can get by with it. Out here the women see by the Sunday papers that it's being wore that way publicly in New York and no one arrested for it, but they don't hardly believe it at that, and they wouldn't show themselves in one, not if you begged them to on your bended knees, and what is society coming to anyway? You might as well dress like one of them barefooted dancers, only calling 'em barefooted must be meant like sarcasm—and they'd die before they'd let a daughter of theirs make a show of herself like that for odious beasts of men to leer at, and so on—until a couple years later Mrs. Henrietta Templeton Price gets a regular one and wears it down Main Street, and nothing objectionable happens; so then they all hustle to get one—not quite so extreme, of course, but after all, why not, since only the evil-minded could criticise? Pretty soon they're all wearing it exactly like New York did two years ago, with mebbe the limit raised a bit here and there by some one who makes her own. But again they're saying that the latest one New York is wearing is so bad that it must be confined to a certain class of women, even if they do get taken from left to right at Asbury Park and Newport and other colonies of wealth and fashion, because the vilest dregs can go there if they have the price, which they often do.

"Red Gap is like that. With me out here on the ranch it didn't matter what I wore because it was mostly only men that saw me; but I can well remember the social upheaval when our smartest young matrons and well-known society belles flung modesty to the chinook wind and took to divided skirts for horseback riding. My, the brazen hussies! It ain't so many years ago. Up to that time any female over the age of nine caught riding a horse cross-saddle would have lost her character good and quick. And these pioneers lost any of theirs that wasn't cemented good and hard with proved respectability. I remember hearing Jeff Tuttle tell what he'd do to any of his womenfolks that so far forgot the sacred names of home and mother. It was startling enough, but Jeff somehow never done it. And if he was to hear Addie or one of the girls talking about a side-saddle to-day he'd think she was nutty or mebbe wanting one for the state museum. So it goes with us. My hunch is that so it will ever go.

"The years passed, and that thrill of viciousness at wearing divided skirts in public got all rubbed off—that thrill that every last one of us adores to feel if only it don't get her talked about—too much—by evil-minded gossips. Then comes this here next upheaval over riding pants for ladies—or them that set themselves up to be such. Of course we'd long known that the things were worn in New York and even in such modern Babylons as Spokane and Seattle; but no woman in Red Gap had ever forgot she had a position to keep up, until summer before last, when we saw just how low one of our sex could fall, right out on the public street.

"She was the wife of a botanist from some Eastern college and him and her rode a good bit and dressed just alike in khaki things. My, the infamies that was intimated about that poor creature! She was bony and had plainly seen forty, very severe-featured, with scraggly hair and a sharp nose and spectacles, and looked as if she had never had a moment of the most innocent pleasure in all her life; but them riding pants fixed her good in the minds of our lady porch-knockers. And the men just as bad, though they could hardly bear to look twice at her, she was that discouraging to the eye; they agreed with their wives that she must be one of that sort.

"But things seem to pile up all at once in our town. That very summer the fashion magazines was handed round with pages turned down at the more daring spots where ladies were shown in such things. It wasn't felt that they were anything for the little ones to see. But still, after all, wasn't it sensible, now really, when you come right down to it? and as a matter of fact isn't a modest woman modest in anything?—it isn't what she wears but how she conducts herself in public, or don't you think so, Mrs. Ballard?—and you might as well be dead as out of style, and would Lehman, the Square Tailor, be able to make up anything like that one there?—but no, because how would he get your measure?—and surely no modest woman could give him hers even if she did take it herself—anyway, you'd be insulted by all the street rowdies as you rode by, to say nothing of being ogled by men without a particle of fineness in their natures—but there's always something to be said on both sides, and it's time woman came into her own, anyway, if she is ever to be anything but man's toy for his idle moments—still it would never do to go to extremes in a narrow little town like this with every one just looking for an excuse to talk—but it would be different if all the best people got together and agreed to do it, only most of them would probably back out at the last moment and that smarty on the Recorder would try to be funny about it—now that one with the long coat doesn't look so terrible, does it? or do you think so?—of course it's almost the same as a skirt except when you climb on or something—a woman has to think of those things—wouldn't Daisy Estelle look rather stunning in that?—she has just the figure for it. Here's this No. 9872 with the Norfolk jacket in this mail-order catalogue—do you think that looks too theatrical, or don't you? Of course for some figures, but I've always been able to wear—And so forth, for a month or so.

"Late in the fall Henrietta Templeton Price done it. You may not know what that meant to Alonzo Price, Choice Villa Sites and Price's Addition to Red Gap. Alonzo is this kind: I met him the day Gussie Himebaugh had her accident when the mules she was driving to the mowing machine run away out on Himebaugh's east forty. Alonzo had took Doc Maybury out and passes me coming back. 'How bad was she hurt?' I asks. The poor thing looks down greatly embarrassed and mumbles: 'She has broken a limb.' 'Leg or arm?' I blurts out, forgetting all delicacy. You'd think I had him pinned down, wouldn't you? Not Lon, though. 'A lower limb,' says he, coughing and looking away.

"You see how men are till we put a spike collar and chain on 'em. When Henrietta declared herself Alonzo read the riot act and declared marital law. But there was Henrietta with the collar and chain and pretty soon Lon was saying: 'You're quite right, Pettikins, and you ought to have the thanks of the community for showing our ladies how to dress rationally on horseback. It's not only sensible and safe but it's modest—a plain pair of riding breeches, no coquetry, no frills, nothing but stern utility—of course I agree.'

"'I hoped you would, darling,' says Henrietta. She went to Miss Gunslaugh and had her make the costume, being one who rarely does things by halves. It was of blue velvet corduroy, with a fetching little bolero jacket, and the things themselves were fitted, if you know what I mean. And stern utility! That suit with its rosettes and bows and frogs and braid had about the same stern utility as those pretty little tin tongs that come on top of a box of candy—ever see anybody use one of those? When Henrietta got dressed for her first ride and had put on the Cuban Pink Face Balm she looked like one of the gypsy chorus in the Bohemian Girl opera.

"Alonzo gulped several times in rapid succession when he saw her, but the little man never starts anything he don't aim to finish, and it was too late to start it then. Henrietta brazened her way through Main Street and out to the country club and back, and next day she put them on again so Otto Hirsch, of the E-light Studio, could come up and take her standing by the horse out in front of the Price mansion. Then they was laid away until the Grand Annual Masquerade Ball of the Order of the Eastern Star, which is a kind of hen Masons, when she again gave us a flash of what New York society ladies was riding their horse in. As a matter of fact, Henrietta hates a horse like a rattlesnake, but she had done her pioneer work for once and all.

"Every one was now laughing and sneering at the old-fashioned divided skirt with which woman had endangered her life on a horse, and wondering how they had endured the clumsy things so long; and come spring all the prominent young society buds and younger matrons of the most exclusive set who could stay on a horse at all was getting theirs ready for the approaching season, Red Gap being like London in having its gayest season in the summer, when people can get out more. Even Mis' Judge Ballard fell for it, though hers was made of severe black with a long coat. She looked exactly like that Methodist minister, the old one, that we had three years ago.

"Most of the younger set used the mail-order catalogue, their figures still permitting it. And maybe there wasn't a lot of trying on behind drawn blinds pretty soon, and delighted giggles and innocent girlish wonderings about whether the lowest type of man really ogles as much under certain circumstances as he's said to. And the minute the roads got good the telephone of Pierce's Livery, Feed, and Sale Stable was kept on the ring. Then the social upheaval was on. Of course any of 'em looked quiet after Henrietta's costume, for none of the girls but Beryl Mae Macomber, a prominent young society bud, aged seventeen, had done anything like that. But it was the idea of the thing.

"A certain element on the South Side made a lot of talk and stirred things up and wrote letters to the president of the Civic Purity League, who was Mis' Judge Ballard herself, asking where this unspeakable disrobing business was going to end and calling her attention to the fate that befell Sodom and Gomorrah. But Mis' Ballard she's mixed on names and gets the idea these parties mean Samson and Delilah instead of a couple of twin cities, like St. Paul and Minneapolis, and she writes back saying what have these Bible characters got to do with a lady riding on horseback—in trousers, it is true, but with a coat falling modestly to the knee on each side, and certain people had better be a little more fussy about things that really matter in life before they begin to talk. She knew who she was hitting at all right, too. Trust Mis' Ballard!

"It was found that there was almost the expected amount of ogling from sidewalk loafers, at first. As Daisy Estelle Maybury said, it seemed as if a girl couldn't show herself on the public thoroughfare without being subjected to insult. Poor Daisy Estelle! She had been a very popular young society belle, and was considered one of the most attractive girls in Red Gap until this happened. No one had ever suspected it of her in the least degree up to that time. Of course it was too late after she was once seen off her horse. Them that didn't see was told in full detail by them that did. Most of the others was luckier. Beryl Mae Macomber in her sport shirt and trouserettes complained constantly about the odious wretches along Main Street and Fourth, where the post office was. She couldn't stop even twenty minutes in front of the post office, minding her own business and waiting for some one she knew to come along and get her mail for her, without having dozens of men stop and ogle her. That, of course, was during the first two weeks after she took to going for the mail, though the eternal feminine in Beryl Mae probably thought the insulting glances was going to keep up forever.

"I watched the poor child one day along in the third week, waiting there in front of the post office after the four o'clock mail, and no one hardly ogled her at all except some rude children out from school. What made it more pitiful, leaning right there against the post office front was Jack Shiels, Sammie Hamilton, and little old Elmer Cox, Red Gap's three town rowdies that ain't done a stroke of work since the canning factory closed down the fall before, creatures that by rights should have been leering at the poor child In all her striking beauty. But, no; the brutes stand there looking at nothing much until Jack Shiels stares a minute at this horse Beryl Mae is on and pipes up: 'Why, say, I thought Pierce let that little bay runt go to the guy that was in here after polo ponies last Thursday. I sure did.' And Sam Hamilton wakes up and says: 'No, sir; not this one. He got rid of a little mare that had shoulders like this, but she was a roan with kind of mule ears and one froze off.' And little old Elmer Cox, ignoring this defenceless young girl with his impudent eyes, he says: 'Yes, Sam's right for once. Pierce tried to let this one go, too, but ain't you took a look at his hocks!' Then along comes Dean Duke, the ratty old foreman in Pierce's stable, and he don't ogle a bit, either, like you'd expect one of his debased calibre to, but just stops and talks this horse over with 'em and says yes, it was his bad hocks that lost the sale, and he tells 'em how he had told Pierce just what to do to get him shaped up for a quick sale, but Pierce wouldn't listen to him, thinking he knew it all himself; and there the four stood and gassed about this horse without even seeing Beryl Mae, let alone leering at her. I bet she was close to shedding tears of girlish mortification as she rode off without ever waiting for the mail. Things was getting to a pretty pass. If low creatures lost to all decent instincts, like these four, wouldn't ogle a girl when she was out for it, what could be expected of the better element of the town? Still, of course, now and then one or the other of the girls would have a bit of luck to tell of.

"Well, now we come to the crookedest bit of work I ever been guilty of, though first telling you about Mr. Burchell Daggett, an Eastern society man from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that had come to Red Gap that spring to be assistant cashier in the First National, through his uncle having stock in the thing. He was a very pleasant kind of youngish gentleman, about thirty-four, I reckon, with dark, parted whiskers and gold eyeglasses and very good habits. He took his place among our very best people right off, teaching the Bible class in the M.E. Sabbath-school and belonging to the Chamber of Commerce and the City Beautiful Association, of which he was made vice-president, and being prominent at all functions held in our best homes. He wasn't at all one of them that lead a double life by stopping in at the Family Liquor Store for a gin fizz or two after work hours, or going downtown after supper to play Kelly pool at the Temperance Billiard Parlours and drink steam beer, or getting in with the bunch that gathers in the back room of the Owl Cigar Store of an evening and tells these here suggestive stories. Not that he was hide-bound. If he felt the need for a shot of something he'd go into the United States Grill and have a glass of sherry and bitters brought to him at a table and eat a cracker with it, and he'd take in every show, even the Dizzy Belles of Gotham Big Blonde Beauty Show. He was refined and even moral in the best sense of the word, but still human.

"Our prominent young society buds took the keenest notice of him at once, as would naturally happen, he being a society bachelor of means and by long odds the best catch in Red Gap since old Potter Knapp, of the Loan and Trust Company, had broke his period of mourning for his third wife by marrying Myrtle Wade that waited on table at the Occidental Hotel, with the black band still on his left coat sleeve. It's no exaggeration to say that Mr. Burchell Daggett became the most sought-after social favourite among Reg Gap's hoot mondy in less than a week after he unpacked his trunk. But it was very soon discovered by the bright-eyed little gangsters of the best circles that he wasn't going to be an easy one to disable. Naturally when a man has fought 'em off to his age he has learned much of woodcraft and the hunter's cunning wiles, and this one had sure developed timber sense. He beat 'em at their own game for three months by the simple old device of not playing any favourite for one single minute, and very, very seldom getting alone with one where the foul stroke can be dealt by the frailest hand with muscular precision. If he took Daisy Estelle Maybury to the chicken pie supper to get a new carpet for the Presbyterian parsonage, he'd up and take Beryl Mae and her aunt, or Gussie Himebaugh, or Luella Stultz, to the lawn feet at Judge Ballard's for new uniforms for the band boys. At the Bazaar of All Nations he bought as many chances of one girl as he did of another, and if he hadn't any more luck than a rabbit and won something—a hanging lamp or a celluloid manicure set in a plush-lined box—he'd simply put it up to be raffled off again for the good of the cause. And none of that moonlight loitering along shaded streets for him, where the dirk is so often drove stealthily between a man's ribs, and him thinking all the time he's only indulging in a little playful nonsense. Often as not he'd take two girls at once, where all could be merry without danger of anything happening.

"It was no time at all till this was found out on him. It was seen that under a pleasing exterior, looking all too easy to overcome by any girl in her right mind, he had powers of resistance and evasion that was like steel. Of course this only stirred the proud beauties on to renewed and crookeder efforts. Every darned one of 'em felt that her innocent young girlhood was challenged, and would she let it go at that? Not so. My lands! What snares and deadfalls was set for this wise old timber wolf that didn't look it, with his smiling ways and seemingly careless response to merry banter, and so forth!

"And of course every one of these shrinking little scoundrels thought at once of her new riding costume, so no time at all was lost in organizing the North Side Riding and Sports Club, which Mr. Burchell Daggett gladly joined, having, as he said, an eye for a horse and liking to get out after banking hours to where all Nature seems to smile and you can let your mount out a bit over the firm, smooth road. Them that had held off until now, on account of the gossip and leering, hurried up and got into line with No. 9872 in the mail-order catalogue, or went to Miss Gunslaugh, who by this time had a female wax dummy in her window in a neat brown suit and puttees, with a coat just opening and one foot advanced carelessly, with gauntlets and a riding crop, and a fetching little cap over the wind-blown hair and the clear, wonderful blue eyes. Oh, you can bet every last girl of the bunch was seeing herself send back picture postals to her rivals telling what a royal time they was having at Palm or Rockaway Beach or some place, and seeing the engraved cards—'Mr. and Mrs. Burchell Daggett, at Home After the Tenth, Ophir Avenue, Red Gap, Wash.'

"Ain't we good when you really get us, if you ever do—because some don't. Many, indeed! I reckon there never was a woman yet outside of a feeb' home that didn't believe she could be an A. No. 1 siren if she only had the nerve to dress the part; never one that didn't just ache to sway men to her lightest whim, and believe she could—not for any evil purpose, mind you, but just to show her power. Think of the tender hearts that must have shuddered over the damage they could and actually might do in one of them French bathing suits like you are said to witness in Paris and Atlantic City and other sinks of iniquity. And here was these well-known society favourites wrought up by this legible party, as the French say, till each one was ready to go just as far as the Civic Purity League would let her in order to sweep him off his feet in one mad moment. Quite right, too. It all depends on what the object is, don't it; and wasn't theirs honourable matrimony with an establishment and a lawn in front of it with a couple of cast-iron moose, mebbe?

"And amid all this quaint girlish enterprise and secret infamy was the problem of Hetty Tipton. Hetty had been a friend and a problem of mine for seven years, or ever since she come back from normal to teach in the third-grade grammar school; a fine, clean, honest, true-blue girl, mebbe not as pretty you'd say at first as some others, but you like her better after you look a few times more, and with not the slightest nonsense about her. That last was Hetty's one curse. I ask you, what chance has a girl got with no nonsense about her? Hetty won my sympathy right at the start by this infirmity of hers, which was easily detected, and for seven years I'd been trying to cure her of it, but no use. Oh, she was always took out regular enough and well liked, but the gilded youth of Red Gap never fought for her smiles. They'd take her to parties and dances, turn and turn about, but they always respected her, which is the greatest blight a man can put on one of us, if you know what I mean. Every man at a party was always careful to dance a decent number of times with Hetty and see that she got back to her seat; and wasn't it warm in here this evening, yes, it was; and wouldn't she have a glass of the punch—No, thank you—then he'd gallop off to have some fun with a mere shallow-pated fool that had known how from the cradle. It was always a puzzle to me, because Hetty dressed a lot better than most of them, knowing what to wear and how, and could take a joke if it come slow, and laid herself out to be amiable to one and all. I kind of think it must be something about her mentality. Maybe it is too mental. I can't put her to you any plainer than to say that every single girl in town, young and old, just loved her, and not one of them up to this time had ever said an unkind or feminine thing about her. I guess you know what that would mean of any woman.

"Hetty was now coming twenty-nine—we never spoke of this, but I could count back—and it's my firm belief that no man had ever proposed marriage or anything else on earth to her. Wilbur Todd had once endeavoured to hold her hand out on the porch at a country-club dance and she had repulsed him in all kindness but firmly. She told him she couldn't bring herself to permit a familiarity of that sort except to the man who would one day lead her to the altar, which is something I believe she got from writing to a magazine about a young girl's perplexities. And here, in spite of her record, this poor thing had dared to raise her eyes to none other than this Mr. Burchell Daggett. There was something kind of grand and despairing about the impudence of it when you remember these here trained efficiency experts she was competing with. Yet so it was. She would drop in on me after school for a cup of tea and tell me frankly how distinguished his manner was and what shapely features he had and what fine eyes, and how there was a certain note in his voice at times, and had I ever noticed that one stubborn lock of hair that stuck out back of his left ear? Of course that last item settled it. When they notice that lock of hair you know the ship has struck the reef and all hands are perishing.

"And it seemed that the cuss had not only shown her more than a little attention at evening functions but had escorted her to the midspring production of 'Hamlet' by the Red Gap Amateur Theatrical and Dramatic Society. True, he had conducted himself like a perfect gentleman every minute they was alone together, even when they had to go home in Eddie Pierce's hack because it was raining when the show let out—but would I, or would I not, suspect from all this that he was in the least degree thinking of her in a way that—you know!

"Poor child of twenty-eight, with her hungry eyes and flushed face while she was showing down her hand to me! I seen the scoundrel's play at once. Hetty was the one safe bet for him in Red Gap's social whirl. He was wise, all right—this Mr. D. He'd known in a second he could trust himself alone with that girl and be as safe as a babe in its mother's arms. Of course I couldn't say this to Hetty. I just said he was a man that seemed to know his own mind very clearly, whatever it was, and Hetty blushed some more and said that something within her responded to a certain note in his voice. We let it go at that.

"So I think and ponder about poor Hetty, trying to invent some conspiracy that would fix it right, because she was the ideal mate for an assistant cashier that had a certain position to keep up. For that matter she was good enough for any man. Then I hear she has joined the riding club, and an all day's ride has been planned for the next Saturday up to Stender's Spring, with a basket lunch and a romantic ride back by moonlight. Of course, I don't believe in any of this spiritualist stuff, but you can't tell me there ain't something in it, mind-reading or something, with the hunches you get when parties is in some grave danger.

"Stella Ballard it was tells me about the picnic, calling me in as I passed their house to show me her natty new riding togs that had just come from the mail-order house. She called from back of a curtain, and when I got into the parlour she had them on, pleased as all get-out. Pretty they was, too—riding breeches and puttees and a man's flannel shirt and a neat-fitting Norfolk jacket, and Stella being a fine, upstanding figure.

"'They may cause considerable talk,' says she, smoothing down one leg where it wrinkled a bit, 'but really I think they look perfectly stunning on me, and wasn't it lucky they fit me so beautifully? They're called the Non Plush Ultra.'

"'The what?' I says.

"'The Non Plush Ultra,' she answers. 'That's the name of them sewed in the band.'

"'What's that mean?' I wanted to know.

"'Why,' says Stella, 'that's Latin or Greek, I forget which, and it means they're the best, I believe. Oh, let me see! Why, it means nothing beyond, or something like that; the farthest you can go, I think. One forgets all that sort of thing after leaving high school.'

"'Well,' I says, 'they fit fine, and it's the only modest rig for a woman to ride a horse in, but they certainly are non plush, all right. That thin goods will never wear long against saddle leather, take my word for it.'

"But of course this made no impression on Stella—she was standing on the centre table by now, so she could lamp herself in the glass over the mantel—and then she tells me about the excursion for Saturday and how Mr. Burchell Daggett is enthused about it, him being a superb horseman himself, and, if I know what she means, don't I think she carries herself in the saddle almost better than any girl in her set, and won't her style show better than ever in this duck of a costume, and she must get her tan shoes polished, and do I think Mr. Daggett really meant anything when he said he'd expect her some day to return the masonic pin she had lifted off his vest the other night at the dance, and so on.

"It was while she was babbling this stuff that I get the strange hunch that Hetty Tipton is in grave danger and I ought to run to her; it seemed almost I could hear her calling on me to save her from some horrible fate. So I tell Stella yes, she's by far the finest rider in the whole Kulanche Valley, and she ought to get anything she wants with that suit on, and then I beat it quick over to the Ezra Button house where Hetty boards.

"You can laugh all you want to, but that hunch of mine was the God's truth. Hetty was in the gravest danger she'd faced since one time in early infancy when she got give morphine for quinine. What made it more horrible, she hadn't the least notion of her danger. Quite the contrary.

"'Thank the stars I've come in time!' I gasps as I rushes in on her, for there's the poor girl before her mirror in a pair of these same Non Plush Ultras and looking as pleased with herself as if she had some reason to be.

"'Back into your skirts quick!' I says. 'I'm a strong woman and all that, but still I can be affected more than you'd think.'

"Poor Hetty stutters and turns red and her chin begins to quiver, so I gentled her down and tried to explain, though seeing quick that I must tell her everything but the truth. I reckon nothing in this world can look funnier than a woman wearing them things that had never ought to for one reason or another. There was more reasons than that in Hetty's case. Dignity was the first safe bet I could think of with her, so I tried that.

"'I know all you would say,' says the poor thing in answer, 'but isn't it true that men rather like one to be—oh, well, you know—just the least bit daring?'

"'Truest thing in the world,' I says, 'but bless your heart, did you suspicion riding breeches was daring on a woman? Not so. A girl wearing 'em can't be any more daring after the first quick shock is over than—well, you read the magazines, don't you? You've seen those pictures of family life in darkest Africa that the explorers and monkey hunters bring home, where the wives, mothers, and sweethearts, God bless 'em! wear only what the scorching climate demands. Didn't it strike you that one of them women without anything on would have a hard time if she tried to be daring—or did it? No woman can be daring without the proper clothes for it,' I says firmly, 'and as for you, I tell you plain, get into the most daring and immodest thing that was ever invented for woman—which is the well-known skirt.'

"'Oh, Ma Pettengill,' cries the poor thing, 'I never meant anything horrid and primitive when I said daring. As a matter of fact, I think these are quite modest to the intelligent eye.'

"'Just what I'm trying to tell you,' I says. 'Exactly that; they're modest to any eye whatever. But here you are embarked on a difficult enterprise, with a band of flinty-hearted cutthroats trying to beat you to it, and, my dear child, you have a staunch nature and a heart of gold, but you simply can't afford to be modest.'

"'I don't understand,' says she, looking at herself in the glass again.

"'Trust me, anyway,' I implores. 'Let others wear their Non Plush Ultras which are No. 9872'—she tries to correct my pronunciation, but I wouldn't stop for that. 'Never mind how it's pronounced,' I says, 'because I know well the meaning of it in a foreign language. It means the limit, and it's a very desirable limit for many, but for you,' I says plainly, 'it's different. Your Non Plush Ultra will have to be a neat, ankle-length riding skirt. You got one, haven't you?'

"'I have,' says she, 'a very pretty one of tan corduroy, almost new, but I had looked forward to these, and I don't see yet—'

"Then I thought of another way I might get to her without blurting out the truth. 'Listen, Hetty,' I says, 'and remember not only that I'm your friend but that I know a heap more about this fool world than you do. I've had bitter experiences, and one of them got me at the time I first begun to wear riding pants myself, which must have been about the time you was beginning to bite dents into your silver mug that Aunt Caroline sent. I was a handsome young hellion, I don't mind telling you, and they looked well on me, and when Lysander John urged me to be brave and wear 'em outside I was afraid all the men within a day's ride was going to sneak round to stare at me. My! I was so embarrassed, also with that same feeling you got in your heart this minute that it was taking an unfair advantage of any man—you know! I felt like I was using all the power of my young beauty for unworthy ends.