.

"Shut up! He's confessin'--let him alone an' he'll get it out of his
conscience sooner or later!"

"Had a what?" Parker urged sympathetically. "Maybe you didn't have
one--maybe you only imagined you did!"

"Had a brother--anyhow a half a one--our mothers was the same but
different fathers on account of mine dyin' when I was little and his
marrying our mother again; we was playmates together in our innocent
childhood and infancy until I run away and went to sea and finally
anchored on the Kiowa and got to raisin' cattle--"

"Where does he come in at?" Parker questioned.

"He said it was a female, to start with," Skinny added.

"--and his name is Simeon Dixon on account of his father's being the
same thing, and he went in the street railroad business in a place named
Hartville in Connecticut, and he got married and had a wife--she was
Zithia Forbes, and she's dead, and I knowed that, and he's rich I reckon
and--"

"An' Amrak begat Meshak an' Meshak begat Zimri an' Zimri was th' founder
of th' House of Old Heck," the Ramblin' Kid chanted. "What in thunder
does details amount to, anyhow?"

"But you was mournin' about a she!" Parker insisted.

"Well, I reckon it ain't a wife--at least not the one I was thinking
about," Chuck murmured disappointedly, "but I bet he's had one somewhere
in his vari'gated career and is hiding out from her in fear an'
tremblin'--"

"And there will not be the grand, the beautiful murder?" Pedro sighed,
questioningly.

"Wait a minute," Skinny pleaded, "--give him air!"

"--and he's got a female daughter--and I didn't know that--and he's--oh,
Gawd!--he's sending her out to the Quarter Circle KT!"

"How big is she?" Parker whispered.

"She's--she's twenty-two--"

"Inches around or what?" Charley gasped.

"--and Ophelia is coming with her--Ophelia Cobb--C-o-double-b it is--is
coming with her for a chaperon--"

"Great guns!" Skinny breathed,"--two females!"

"Hold still and I'll read it--no, you do it, Parker--I'm too full of
emotion--my voice'd quiver--"

Parker read:

"Josiah Heck, Eagle Butte, Texas:

"Am sending my daughter, Carolyn June, out to your ranch
for a while. She needs a change. She has broke all the
he-human hearts in Hartville--that is all of them old
enough or young enough to be broke--and is what's called
a love-stimulator and won't settle. She is twenty-two
and it's time she was calmed. Hoping six months on the
Kiowa ran