of his pocket and plunked her down
before the minister, 'Shoot,' says he. 'You're faded.'

"Well. there old Scraggs--I say 'old,' but the man weren't more
than forty--celebrated his eighty-first marriage in that old
bull-pen, and they lived as happy ever after as any story book.
Which knocks general principles. Probably it was because that no
man was ever treated whiter than she treated him, and no woman was
ever treated whiter than he treated her; he had the knack of bein'
awful good and loving to her, without being foolish. Experience
will tell, and he'd experienced a heap of the other side.

"And now, what do you think of Aleck? The scare we threw into him
that night wound up his moanin' and grievin' about the other girl.
He never cheeped once after that, but got fat and hearty, and when
I left the ranch he was makin' up to a widow with four children, as
bold as brass. There was more poetry in E. G. W, than there was in
Aleck, after all."

II

IN THE TOILS

Mr. Ezekiel George Washington Scraggs, late of Missouri, later of
Utah, and latest of North Dakota, stood an even six-foot unshod.
He had an air of leanness, almost emaciation, not borne out by any
fact of anatomy. We make our hasty estimates from the face.
Brother Scraggs's face was gaunt. Misfortune had written there, in
a large, angular hand, "It might have been"--those saddest words of
tongue or pen. The pensive sorrow of E. G. W.'s countenance had
misled many people--not but what the sorrow was genuine enough
(Scraggsy explained it in four words, "I've been a Mormon"), but
the expression of a blighted, helpless youth carried into early
middle age was an appearance only: I mean it was nothing to bank on
in dealing with Zeke. Still, if you could see those eyes, dimmed
with a settled melancholy; those mustachios, which, absorbing all
the capillary possibilities of his head, drooped like weeping
willows from his upper lip; and above, the monumental nose--that
springing prow that once so grandly parted the waves of adverse
circumstance, until, blown by the winds of ambition, his bark was
cast ruined on the shores of matrimony--you would not so much blame
the man who mistook E. G. Washington Scraggs for a something not
too difficult. Red Saunders said that Scraggsy looked like a
forlorn hope lost in a fog, but when you came to cash in on that
basis it was most astonishing. In general a man of few words, on
occasions he would tip back his