sor were laid in succession on the
table.

Buttermilk Brown wept with rage and pain.

"Four times five is twenty. Dig up twenty dollars for professional
services," said Pete.

His tearful patient paid the fee. This was the most painful, violent,
and high-handed episode of Buttermilk's young life. Never in
Shelbyville, Indiana, from which town he had migrated hopefully westward
with his diploma, had such outrages been heard of.

The instruments of Providence are sometimes strange ones. Nobody would
have picked Pete Dinsmore for a reformer, but he changed the course of
one young dentist's life. Buttermilk fled from the Southwest in horror,
took the pledge eagerly, returned to Shelbyville and married the belle
of the town. He became a specialist in bridge-work, of which he carried
a golden example in his own mouth. His wife has always understood that
Dr. Brown--nobody ever called him Buttermilk in his portly, prosperous
Indiana days--lost his teeth trying to save a child from a runaway. Be
that as it may, there is no record that he ever again pulled the wrong
tooth for a patient.

Having completed his deed of justice, Dinsmore in high good humor with
himself set out to call on Clint Wadley. He had made an inoffensive
human being suffer, and that is always something to a man's credit. If
he could not do any better, Pete would bully a horse, but he naturally
preferred humans. They were more sensitive to pain.

CHAPTER XXVII

CLINT FREES HIS MIND

Wadley was sitting on the porch with Ramona. He was still a
semi-invalid, and when he exercised too much his daughter scolded him
like the little mother she was.

"Keep me here much longer, an' I'll turn into a regular old gossip in
breeches," he complained. "I'll be Jumbo Wilkins Number Two, like as
not."

"Is Jumbo a specialist in gossip?" asked Ramona. She liked to get her
father at reminiscences. It helped to pass time that hung heavy on his
hands.

"Is he? Girl, he could talk a hind leg off'n a buckskin mule, Jumbo
could." He stopped to chuckle. "Oncet, when we were drivin' a bunch of
yearlin's on the Brazos, one of the boys picked up an old skull. Prob'ly
some poor fellow killed by the Indians. Anyhow, that night when Jumbo
was wound up good, one of the lads pretended to discover that skull an'
brought it into the camp-fire light. Some one had wrote on it: 'Talked
to death by Jumbo Wilkins.'"

'Mona rather missed the point. She was watching a man slouc