The youth Fernando was more inclined to mental than physical activity, and his parents, possessing an abundance of common sense, decided not to force him to engage in an occupation distasteful to him.

What school should he enter? was a question which the father long debated.  There were Harvard and Yale, both famous seats of learning, and there were any number of academies all over the country.  Captain Stevens finally decided to allow the youth to make his own selection, giving him money sufficient to take a little tour in the eastern States, before settling down.

Captain Stevens had a well-to-do neighbor, who lived across Bear Creek, by the name of Winners.  Old Zeb Winners was one of those quaint products of the West.  He was an easy-going man, proverbially slow of speech and movement, and certainly the last person on earth one would expect to become rich; yet he was wealthy.  With all his slothfulness he was shrewd, and could drive a better bargain than many men twice as active in mind and body.  One morning after it had become noised abroad that Fernando was going away to college, Mr. Winners rode up to the house on his big sorrel mare, her colt following, and, dismounting, tied the mare to the rail fence and entered the gate.

“Good mornin’, cap’in, good mornin’,” said the visitor.

“Come in, Mr. Winners.  Glad to see you.  Hope you are all well!”

“Oh, yes, middlin’ like,” answered the farmer entering the house without the ceremony of removing his hat.  A chair was offered, and he sat for a moment with his hands spread out before the fireplace, his hat still on his head.  There was no fire in the fireplace, for it was late in May; but Mr. Winners held his hands before it, from habit.

“Wall, cap’in, I do hear as how yer goin’ ter send yer boy Fernando to college.”

“I am.”

“Wall, that air a good notion.  Now I ain’t got no book larnin’ myself; but I don’t object to nobody else gittin’ none.  I’ve made up my mind to send one of my boys along with ’im, ef ye’ve no objection.”

Of course Captain Stevens had no objection.  Which of his boys was he going to send?

“I kinder thought az how I’d send Sukey.”

Sukey was a nickname given a tall, lazy youth named Richard Winners.  Why he had been nicknamed Sukey we have never been able to ascertain; but the sobriquet, attached to him in childhood, clung to him all through life.  Sukey was like his father, brave, slow, careful, but a steadfast friend and possessed of considerable dry humor.  He took the world easy and thought “one man as good as another so long as he behaved himself.”

It was arranged that Sukey and Fernando should start in a week for New York, from which point they might select any college or school they chose.  The mail stage passed the door of farmer Winners, crossed the big bridge and then passed the home of Captain Stevens.  Captain Stevens’ house was no longer a cabin in the wilderness.  It was a large, substantial two-story farm mansion, with chimneys of brick instead of sticks and mud.  The forests had shrunk back for miles, making place for vast fields, and the place had the appearance of a thrifty farm.