he most engaging bedevilments for one and all. He
didn't seem to be any brighter in his studies than a brute of that age
should be, and though there was something easy and grand in his manner
that his pa and ma never had, he wasn't really any more foreign than
what I be. Of course he spoke Eastern American instead of Western, but
you forgive him that after a few minutes when you see how nice he
naturally meant to be. I admit we took to each other from the start.
They often say I'm a good mixer, but it took no talent to get next to
that boy. I woke up the first night thinking I knew what old silly would
do her darndest to adopt him if ever his poor pa and ma was to get
buttered over the right of way in some railroad accident.

"And yet I didn't see Angus, Junior, one bit the way either of his
parents saw him. Ellabelle seemed to look on him merely as a smart
dresser and social know-it-all that would be a 98 cent credit to her in
the position of society queen for which the good God had always intended
her. And his father said he wasn't any good except to idle away his time
and spend money, and would come to a bad end by manslaughter in a
high-powered car; or in the alcoholic ward of some hospital; that he
was, in fact, a mere helling scapegrace that would have been put in some
good detention home years before if he hadn't been born to a father that
was all kinds of a so-and-so old Scotch fool. There you get Angus,
_fills_, from three different slants, and I ain't saying there wasn't
justification for the other two besides mine. The boy could act in a
crowd of tea-drinking women with a finish that made his father look like
some one edging in to ask where they wanted the load of coal dumped. But
also Angus, _peer_, was merely painting the lily, as they say, when he'd
tell all the different kinds of Indian the boy was. That very summer
before he went back to the educational centre where they teach such
arts, he helped wreck a road house a few miles up the line till it
looked like one of them pictures of what a Zeppelin does to a rare old
English drug store in London. And a week later he lost a race with the
Los Angeles flyer, account of not having as good a roadbed to run on as
the train had, and having to take too short a turn with his new car.

"I remember we three was wondering where he could be that night the
telephone rung from the place where kindly strangers had hauled him for
first aid to the foolish. But it was the