cared to
attend anyhow. Either he would have felt embarrassed to be present or
else the couple would, or perhaps all three. On such occasions nothing
is more superfluous than an extra bridegroom. The wedding in question
was the one uniting Melissa Grider and Homer Holmes. It was generally
unexpected--in fact, sudden.

The marriage took place on a Wednesday at high noon in the office of
Justice of the Peace Dycus. Red Hoss arrived the same afternoon, shortly
after the departure of the happy pair for Cairo, Illinois, on a
honeymoon tour. All along, Melissa had had her heart set on going to
St. Louis; but after the license had been paid for and the magistrate
had been remunerated there remained but thirty-four dollars of the fund
she had been safeguarding, dollar by dollar, as her other, or regular,
fiance earned it. So she and Homer compromised on Cairo, and by their
forethought in taking advantage of a popular excursion rate they had, on
their return, enough cash left over to buy a hanging lamp with which to
start up housekeeping.

Late that evening, while Red Hoss still wrestled mentally with the
confusing problem of being engaged to a girl who just had been married
to another, a disquieting thought came abruptly to him, jolting him like
a blow. Looking back on events, he was reminded that the sequence of
painful misadventures which had befallen him recently dated, all and
sundry, from that time when he was coming back down the Blandsville Road
after delivering Mr. Dick Bell's new cow and acquired a fresh hind foot
of a graveyard rabbit. He had been religiously toting that presumably
infallible charm against disaster ever since--and yet just see what had
happened to him! Surely here was a situation calling for interpretive
treatment by one having the higher authority. In the person of the
venerable Daddy Hannah--root, herb and conjure doctor--he found such a
one.

Before going into consultation the patriarch forethoughtedly collected a
fee of seventy-five cents from Red Hoss. At the outset he demanded two
dollars, but accepted the six bits, because that happened to be all the
money the client had. This formality concluded, he required it of Red
Hoss that he recount in their proper chronological order those various
strokes of ill fortune which lately had plagued him; after which Daddy
Hannah asked to see the talisman which coincidentally had been in the
victim's ownership from beginning to culmination of the enumerate