nd never had been and never
could be a hero to Mrs. Shrimplin. She saw in him only what the world
saw--a stoop-shouldered little man who spent six days of the seven in
overalls that were either greasy or pasty.

It was a vagary of Mr. Shrimplin's that ten reckless years of his life
had been spent in the West, the far West, the West of cow-towns and bad
men; that for this decade he had flourished on bucking broncos and in
gilded bars, the admired hero of a variety of deft homicides. Out of his
inner consciousness he had evolved a sprightly epic of which he was the
central figure, a figure, according to Custer's firm belief, sinister,
fateful with big jingling silver spurs at his heels and iron on his
hips, whose specialty was manslaughter.

In the creation of his romance he might almost be said to have acquired
a literary habit of mind, to which he was measurably helped by the
fiction he read.

Custer devoured the same books; but he never suspected his father of the
crime of plagiarism, nor guessed that his choicest morsels of adventure
involved a felony. Mrs. Shrimplin felt it necessary to protest:

"No telling with what nonsense you are filling that boy's head!"

"I hope," said Mr. Shrimplin, narrowing his eyes to a slit, as if he
expected to see pictured on the back of their lids the panorama of
Custer's future, "I hope I am filling his head with just nonsense
enough so he will never crawfish, no matter what kind of a proposition
he goes up against!"

Custer colored almost guiltily. Could he ever hope to attain to the grim
standard his father had set for him?

"I wasn't much older than him when I shot Murphy at Fort Worth,"
continued Mr. Shrimplin, "You've heard me tell about him, son--old
one-eye Murphy of Texarcana?"

"He died, I suppose!" said. Mrs. Shrimplin, wringing out her dish-rag.
"Dear knows! I wonder you ain't been hung long ago!"

"Did he die!" rejoined Mr. Shrimplin ironically. "Well, they usually die
when I begin to throw lead!" He tugged fiercely at the ends of his
drooping flaxen mustache and gazed into the wide and candid eyes of his
son.

"Like I should give you the particulars, Custer?" he inquired.

Custer nodded eagerly, and Mr. Shrimplin cleared his throat.

"He was called one-eye Murphy because he had only one eye--he'd lost the
other in a rough-and-tumble fight; it had been gouged out by a feller's
thumb. Murphy got the feller's ear, chewed it off as they was rolling
over and ove