cherry coloured velvet across her forehead, but she was wearing the
first ankle watch ever seen in Red Gap. I couldn't begin to tell you the
fussy improvements them ladies had made in themselves--and all, mind
you, for the passing child of Nature who had never paid a bill for 'em
in his life.

"Oh, it was a gay, careless throng with the mad light of pleasure in its
eyes, and all of 'em milling round Wilfred Lennox, who was eating it up.
Some bantered him roguishly and some spoke in chest tones of what was
the real inner meaning of life after all. Henrietta Templeton Price
hovered near with the glad light of capture in her eyes. Silent but
proud Henrietta was, careless but superior, reminding me of the hunter
that has his picture taken over in Africa with one negligent foot on
the head of a two-horned rhinoceros he's just killed.

"But again the husbands was kind of lurking in the background, bunched
up together. They seemed abashed by this strange frenzy of their
womenfolks. How'd they know, the poor dubs, that a poet wasn't something
a business man had ought to be polite and grovelling to? They affected
an easy manner, but it was poor work. Even Judge Ballard, who seems nine
feet tall in his Prince Albert, and usually looks quite dignified and
hostile with his long dark face and his moustache and goatee--even the
good old judge was rattled after a brief and unhappy effort to hold a
bit of converse with the guest of honour. Him and Jeff Tuttle went to
the grillroom twice in ten minutes. The judge always takes his with a
dash of pepper sauce in it, but now it only seemed to make him more
gloomy.

"Well, I was listening along, feeling elated that I'd put Alonzo and Ben
Sutton out of the way and wondering when the show would begin--Beryl Mae
in her high, innocent voice had just said to the poet: 'But seriously
now, are you sincere?' and I was getting some plenty of that, when up
the road in the dusk I seen Bush Jones driving a dray-load of furniture.
I wondered where in time any family could be moving out that way. I
didn't know any houses beyond the club and I was pondering about this,
idly as you might say, when Bush Jones pulls his team up right in front
of the clubhouse, and there on the load is the two I had tried to lose.
In a big armchair beside a varnished centre table sits Ben Sutton
reading something that I recognized as the yellow card with Wilfred's
verses on it. And across the dray from him on a red-plush