t least get a little
peace at my club." He glowered after his wife as she left the room.
Then, still scowling, he lurched out to the gallery where the breeze
was blowing, and flung himself into a chair.

V

SOMETHING ABOUT HEREDITY

It had required but one generation to ripen the fruits of "Old Ed"
Austin's lawlessness, and upon his son heredity had played one of her
grimmest pranks. The father had had faults, but they were those of his
virtues; he had been a strong man, at least, and had "ridden herd" upon
his unruly passions with the same thoroughness as over his wild cattle.
The result was that he had been universally respected. At first the son
seemed destined to be like his father. It was not until "Young Ed" had
reached his full manhood that his defects had become recognizable evil
tendencies, that his infirmity had developed into a disease. Like
sleeping cancers, the Austin vices had lain dormant in him during
boyhood; it had required the mutation from youth to manhood, and the
alterative effect of marriage, to rouse them; but, once awakened, their
ravages had been swift and destructive. Ed's marriage to Alaire had
been inevitable. They had been playmates, and their parents had
considered the union a consummation of their own lifelong friendship.
Upon her mother's death, Alaire had been sent abroad, and there she
remained while "Young Ed" attended an Eastern college. For any child
the experience would have been a lonesome one, and through it the
motherless Texas girl had grown into an imaginative, sentimental
person, living in a make-believe world, peopled, for the most part,
with the best-remembered figures of romance and fiction. There were, of
course, some few flesh-and-blood heroes among the rest, and of these
the finest and the noblest had been "Young Ed" Austin.

When she came home to marry, Alaire was still very much of a child, and
she still considered Ed her knight. As for him, he was captivated by
this splendid, handsome girl, whom he remembered only as a shy,
red-headed little comrade.

Never was a marriage more propitious, never were two young people more
happily situated than these two, for they were madly in love, and each
had ample means with which to make the most of life.

As Las Palmas had been the elder Austin's wedding-gift to his son, so
Alaire's dowry from her father had been La Feria, a grant of lands
across the Rio Grande beyond the twenty-league belt by which Mexico
fatuou