brown, tender
eyes were staring right at me--she was reading my very soul. I let her
read.

"I had been jacking up a gilly of a gafter who had referred to his
mother as "the old woman," and I didn't let the four females disturb me.
I meant to hold up a looking-glass for that young whelp to look into. I
hate a man that don't love his mother.

"Why," says I, "you miserable example of Divine carelessness, do you
know what that 'old woman' mother has done for you, you drivelin' idiot,
a-thankin' God that you're alive and forgetting the very mother that
bore you; if you could see the tears that she has shed, if you could
count the sleepless nights that she has put in, the heartaches, the
pain, the privation that she has humbly, silently, even thankfully borne
that you might simply live, you'd squander your last cent and your last
breath to make her life a joy, from this day until her light goes out. A
man that don't respect his mother is lost to all decency; a man who will
hear her name belittled is a Judas, and a man who will call his mother
'old woman' is a no-good, low-down, misbehaven whelp. Why, damn it, I'd
fight a buzz-saw, if it called my mother 'old woman'--and she's been
dead a long time; gone to that special, exalted, gilt-edged and glorious
heaven for mothers. No one but mothers have a right to expect to go to a
heaven, and the only question that'll be asked is, 'Have you been a
mother?'

[Illustration: "He was the first man I ever killed."]

"Well, sir, I had forgot about the women, but they clapped their hands
and I looked around, and there were tears in the eyes of that one woman.

"She got up; came to our table and laid a card by my plate, and said, 'I
beg your pardon; but won't you call on me? Please do.'

"I was completely knocked out, but told her I would, and she went out
alone; the others finished their breakfast.

"She had no sooner gone than Cy Nash, my conductor, commenced to
giggle--'Made a mash on the flyest woman in town,' he tittered; 'ain't a
blood in town but what would give his head for your boots, old man;
that's Mabel Verne--owns the Odeon dance hall, and the Tontine, in
Carson.'

"I glanced at the card, and it did read, 'Mabel Verne, 21 Flood
avenue.'

"Well, Flood avenue is no slouch of a street, the best folks live
there," I answered.

"'Yes, that's her private residence, and if you go there and are let in,
you'd be the first man ever seen around there. She's a curious critter