in. I recollect his promise about the pancake
receipt, and I thinks I will persuade it from Miss Willella and give
it to him; and then if I catches Birdie off of Mired Mule again, I'll
make him hop the twig.

"So, along about ten o'clock, I put on a wheedling smile and says to
Miss Willella: 'Now, if there's anything I do like better than the
sight of a red steer on green grass it's the taste of a nice hot
pancake smothered in sugar-house molasses.'

"Miss Willella gives a little jump on the piano stool, and looked at
me curious.

"'Yes,' says she, 'they're real nice. What did you say was the name of
that street in Saint Louis, Mr. Odom, where you lost your hat?'

"'Pancake Avenue,' says I, with a wink, to show her that I was on
about the family receipt, and couldn't be side-corralled off of the
subject. 'Come, now, Miss Willella,' I says; 'let's hear how you make
'em. Pancakes is just whirling in my head like wagon wheels. Start her
off, now--pound of flour, eight dozen eggs, and so on. How does the
catalogue of constituents run?'

"'Excuse me for a moment, please,' says Miss Willella, and she gives
me a quick kind of sideways look, and slides off the stool. She ambled
out into the other room, and directly Uncle Emsley comes in in his
shirt sleeves, with a pitcher of water. He turns around to get a glass
on the table, and I see a forty-five in his hip pocket. 'Great post-
holes!' thinks I, 'but here's a family thinks a heap of cooking
receipts, protecting it with firearms. I've known outfits that
wouldn't do that much by a family feud.'

"'Drink this here down,' says Uncle Emsley, handing me the glass of
water. 'You've rid too far to-day, Jud, and got yourself over-excited.
Try to think about something else now.'

"'Do you know how to make them pancakes, Uncle Emsley?' I asked.

"'Well, I'm not as apprised in the anatomy of them as some,' says
Uncle Emsley, 'but I reckon you take a sifter of plaster of Paris and
a little dough and saleratus and corn meal, and mix 'em with eggs and
buttermilk as usual. Is old Bill going to ship beeves to Kansas City
again this spring, Jud?'

"That was all the pancake specifications I could get that night. I
didn't wonder that Jackson Bird found it uphill work. So I dropped the
subject and talked with Uncle Emsley for a while about hollow-horn and
cyclones. And then Miss Willella came and said 'Good-night,' and I hit
the breeze for the ranch.

"About a week afterward I met J