ment," remarked Dan Happersett in a lull of talk,
"don't have to be very weighty to fit any case. Anything she does is
justifiable. That's one reason why I always kept shy of women. I admit
that I've toyed around with some of them; have tossed my tug on one or
two just to see if they would run on the rope. But now generally I keep
a wire fence between them and myself if they show any symptoms of being
on the marry. Maybe so I was in earnest once, back on the Trinity. But
it seems that every time that I made a pass, my loop would foul or fail
to open or there was brush in the way."

"Just because you have a few gray hairs in your head you think you're
awful foxy, don't you?" said Uncle Lance to Dan. "I've seen lots of
independent fellows like you. If I had a little widow who knew her
cards, and just let her kitten up to you and act coltish, inside a week
you would he following her around like a pet lamb."

"I knew a fellow," said Nancrede, lighting his pipe with a firebrand,
"that when the clerk asked him, when he went for a license to marry, if
he would swear that the young lady--his intended--was over twenty-one,
said: 'Yes, by G--, I'll swear that she's over thirty-one.'"

At the next pause in the yarning, I inquired why a wild turkey always
deceived itself by hiding its head and leaving the body exposed. "That
it's a fact, we all know," volunteered Uncle Lance, "but the why and
wherefore is too deep for me. I take it that it's due to running to neck
too much in their construction. Now an ostrich is the same way, all neck
with not a lick of sense. And the same applies to the human family. You
take one of these long-necked cowmen and what does he know outside of
cattle. Nine times out of ten, I can tell a sensible girl by merely
looking at her neck. Now snicker, you dratted young fools, just as if
I wasn't talking horse sense to you. Some of you boys haven't got much
more sabe than a fat old gobbler."

"When I first came to this State," said June Deweese, who had been
quietly and attentively listening to the stories, "I stopped over on the
Neches River near a place called Shot-a-buck Crossing. I had an uncle
living there with whom I made my home the first few years that I lived
in Texas. There are more or less cattle there, but it is principally a
cotton country. There was an old cuss living over there on that river
who was land poor, but had a powerful purty girl. Her old man owned any
number of plantations on the