at the
headway they was making. Old Bristow was thinking of the farm up at
Ball's Landing; Pelican was thinking of the one he was on. After a
time, Pelican and Lettie was married. Bristow give a dance and ice cream
supper and charged fifty cents admission. There was dancing, singing and
a cuttin' scrape and the couple felt that the occasion had been one of
success. Pelican certainly married into old Bristow's family for he
never made any move toward looking for another home, and it wasn't long
before Bristow begin to screw up his face.

"Time passed and then come the twins, a boy and a girl, and Pelican was
proud of the boy, for he had the Pelican nose, but old Bristow rose up
in his wrath and said that they would have to go, and so Pelican and his
wife come down into my neighborhood to live in a shanty-boat on the
river, but they didn't git along, and fit and cussed from mornin' till
night. Bristow come down to patch up matters. Pelican knocked him off
the boat with an oar, and as he floundered out to the shore and wrung
the water out of his whiskers he said, 'Fix yer own troubles--far'well.'
Two weeks after the fight Mrs. Pelican Smith went back to live with her
father and Pelican went into the fishin' and 'blind tiger' business. I
had two new nets and a set of trot lines, and we bunched into a sort of
partnership. I couldn't git him to say anything about his family or
whether he wanted to see them again. But one night we set together on
the shore. We had run out of bait and was tryin' to make plans to git
some, as the lines was dry upon the shore and the fish would be runnin'
with the gentle rise comin' in the river. We set on an old sycamore log
together. The moon had just swung over the hill and I could see the
white rim of it above the edge of Pelican's nose.

"'Pelican,' I said, 'why don't you go back to your wife and children and
try to live happy with them?' He made no answer and I pressed on him,
'Pelican, them two little twins air dependent on you, and if you had a
little home to yourself, where the vines could run over your doorway and
the birds sing in your own trees, with your wife and children beside
you, your life would be happy--think of them, Pelican, your wife and
children.'"

"Pelican rose up, his face turned to the river. Ah, I had him at last
thinking of his dear ones.

"'What are you thinkin' of, Pelican?'

"'I was thinkin' wher'n the hell we'd git that bait' said he."

CHAPTER V