day?

"I told her no one in the wide world had ever been able to answer this
puzzle. There was Dave and his wife and five children, all healthy, and
eating somehow, and Dave never doing a stroke of work he could side-step.
I told her it was such a familiar puzzle we'd quit being puzzled by it.

"She said someone ought to smash his fiddle and make him work. She said
she would do something about it. I applauded. I said we needed new blood
up here and she seemed to of fetched it.

"She come back the next day with a flush of triumph on her severely
simple face. And guess the first thing she asked me to do! She asked me
to take chances in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind
words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his
fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a
chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had
to respect the woman at that moment.

"'There they are, penniless,' says she, 'and in want for the barest
necessities; and this man fiddling his time away! I had a struggle
persuading him to give up his wretched toy; but I've handled harder
cases. You should of seen the light in the mother's wan face when
he consented! The twelve dollars won't be much, though it will do
something for her and those starving children; and then he will no
longer have the instrument to tempt him.'

"I handed over a dollar for two chances right quick, and Julia went out
to the bunk-house and wormed two dollars out of the boys there. And next
day she was out selling off the other chances. She didn't dislike the
work. It give her a chance to enter our homes and see if they needed
reforming, and if the children was subjected to refining influences, and
so on. The first day she scared parties into taking fifteen tickets, and
the second day she got rid of the rest; and the next Sunday she held the
drawing over at Dave's house. The fiddle was won by a nester from over in
Surprise Valley, who had always believed he could play one if he only
had a fair chance.

"So this good deed was now completed, there being no music, and twelve
dollars in the Pickens home that night. And Mrs. Julia now felt that she
was ready for the next big feat of uplift, which was a lot more important
because it involved the very sanctity of the marriage tie. Yes, sir;
she'd come back from her prowling one night and told me in a hushed
voice, behind a closed door, about a coupl