be a heap handier for me to explain to St. Peter at
the gate the things I've done than if he'd ask me about Lige's
record."

The general scratched along, without answering, and the colonel looked
meditatively into the street; then he began to smile, and the smile
glowed into a beam that bespread his countenance and sank into a mood
that set his vest to shaking "like a bowl full of jelly." "I was just
thinking," he said to nobody in particular, "that if Lige was jumped out
of his grave right quick by Gabriel and hauled up before St. Peter and
asked to justify my record, he'd have some trouble too--considerable
difficulty, I may say. I reckon it's all a matter of having to live with
your sins till you get a good excuse thought up."

The general pushed aside his work impatiently and tilted back in his
chair. "Come, Martin Culpepper, come, come! That won't do. You know
better than that. What's the use of your pretending to be as bad as
Lige Bemis? You know better and I know better and the whole town knows
better. He's little, and he's mean, and snooping, and crooked as a
dog's hind leg. Why, he was in here yesterday--actually in here to
see me. Yes, sir--what do you think of that? Wants to be state
senator."

"So I hear," smiled the colonel.

"Well," continued the general, "he came in here yesterday as pious as
a deacon, and he said that his friends were insisting on his running
because his enemies were bringing up that 'old trouble' on him. He
calls his horse stealing and cattle rustling 'that old trouble.'
Honestly, Martin, you'd think he was being persecuted. It was all I
could do to keep from sympathizing with him. He said he couldn't
afford to retreat under fire, and then he told me how he had been
trying to be a better man, and win the respect of the people--and I
couldn't stand it any longer, and I rose up and shook my fist in his
face and said: 'Lige Bemis, you disreputable, horse-stealing cow
thief, what right have you to ask my help? What right have you got to
run for state senator, anyway?' And, Martin, the brazen whelp reared
back and looked me squarely in the eye and answered without blinking,
'Because, Phil Ward, I want the job.' What do you think of that for
brass?"

The colonel slapped his campaign hat on his leg and laughed. There was
always, even to the last, something feminine in Martin Culpepper's
face when he laughed--a kind of alternating personality of the other
sex seemed to tiptoe up to his c