iff in one knee--a rheumatic legacy of office inherited by
reason of wet nights in the open and a too-diligent devotion to
duty--but in no other respect did he believe his age to be apparent.
His smoke-blue eyes were as bright as ever, his hand was quick;
realization that he had been shunted upon a side track filled him with
surprise and bewilderment. It was characteristic of the man that he
still considered himself a bulwark of law and order, a _de facto_
guardian of the peace, and that from force of habit he still sat facing
the door and never passed between a lighted lamp and a window.

Among the late comers to Wichita Falls, where he lived, Tom was known
as a quiet-spoken, emotionless old fellow with an honorable past, but
with a gift for tiresome reminiscence quite out of place in the new and
impatient order of things, and none but old-timers and his particular
cronies were aware of the fact that he had another side to his
character. It was not generally known, for instance, that he was a kind
and indulgent father and had a daughter whom he worshiped with blind
adulation. This ignorance was not strange, for Miss Barbara Parker had
been away at college for four years now, and during that time she had
not once returned home.

There was a perfectly good reason for this protracted separation of
father and daughter; since Old Tom was no longer on pay, it took all he
could rake and scrape to meet her bills, and railroad fares are high.
That Hudson River institution was indeed a finishing school; not only
had it polished off Barbara, but also it had about administered the
_coup de grace_ to her father. There had been a ranch over near Electra
with some "shallow production," from which Tom had derived a small
royalty--this was when Barbara Parker went East and before the
Burk-burnett wells hit deep sand--but income from that source had been
used up faster than it had come in, and "Bob," as Tom insisted upon
calling her, would have had to come home had it not been for an
interesting discovery on her father's part--_viz._, the discovery of a
quaint device of the law entitled a "mortgage." Mortgages had to do
with a department of the law unfamiliar to Tom, his wit, his
intelligence, and his dexterity of hand having been exercised solely in
upholding the dignity of the criminal branch, but once he had realized
that a mortgage, so called, was no more than a meaningless banking term
used to cloak the impulsive generosity of mon