they'd got her
prize-winning beagles licked by a common cat that wouldn't be let into
any bench show on earth! Her spirit was broke.

"'My poor son,' she says, 'I shall allow to go his silly way after this
outrageous bit of double-dealing. I think it useless to strive further
with him. He has not only confessed all the foul details, but he came
brazenly out with the assertion that a man has a right to lead his own
life--and he barely thirty!'

"She goes on to say that it's this terrible twentieth-century modernism
that has infected him. She says that, first woman sets up a claim to
live her own life, and now men are claiming the same right, even one as
carefully raised and guarded as her boy has been; and what are we coming
to? But, anyway, she did her best for him.

"Pretty soon Broadmoor was closed like you seen it to-day. Sister is now
back in Boston, keeping tabs on orchestras and attending lectures on the
higher birds; and brother at last has his orchid ranch somewhere down in
California. He's got one pet orchid that I heard cost twelve thousand
dollars--I don't know why. But he's very happy living his own life. The
last I heard of mother she was exploring the headwaters of the Amazon
River, hunting crocodiles and jaguars and natives, and so on.

"She was a good old sport, though. She showed that by the way she
simmered down about Cousin Egbert's cat before she left. At first, she
wanted to lay for it and put a bullet through its cowardly heart. Then
she must of seen the laugh was on her, all right; for what did she do?
Why, the last thing she done was to box up all these silver cups her
beagles had won and send 'em over to Kate, in care of his owner--all the
eye-cups and custard bowls, and so on. Cousin Egbert shows 'em off to
every one.

"'Just a few cups that Kate won,' he'll say. 'I want to tell you he's
some beetle-cat! Look what he's come up to--and out of nothing, you
might say!'"

VIII

PETE'S B'OTHER-IN-LAW

On the Arrowhead Ranch it was noon by the bell that Lew Wee loves to
clang. It may have been half an hour earlier or later on other ranches,
for Lew Wee is no petty precisian. Ma Pettengill had ridden off at dawn;
and, rather than eat luncheon in solitary state, I joined her retainers
for the meal in the big kitchen, which is one of my prized privileges. A
dozen of us sat at the long oilcloth-covered table and assuaged the more
urgent pangs of hunger in a haste that was speechless and