“I quit the 88 that day,” Racey Dawson told the girl.

“I know you did.  Chuck told me.  Look at the time, will you?  Get your hat.  We mustn’t keep Jane waiting.”

“No,” he said, thoughtfully, his brows puckered, “we mustn’t keep Jane waitin’.  Lookit, Miss Dale, as I remember yore pa he had a moustache.  Has he still got it?”

Miss Dale puzzled, paused in the doorway.  “Why, no,” she told him.  “He wears a horrid chin whisker now.”

“He does, huh?  A chin whisker.  Let’s be movin’ right along.  I think I’ve got something interesting to tell you and yore sister and Chuck.”

But they did not move along.  They halted in the doorway.  Or, rather, the girl halted in the doorway, and Racey looked over her shoulder.  What stopped them short in their tracks was a spectacle—­the spectacle of an elderly chin-whiskered man, very drunk and disorderly, riding in on a paint pony.

“Father!” breathed Miss Dale in a horror-stricken whisper.

And as she spoke Father uttered a string of cheerful whoops and topped off with a long pull at a bottle he had been brandishing in his right hand.

“Please go,” said Miss Dale to Racey Dawson.

He hesitated.  He was in a quandary.  He did not relish leaving her with—­At that instant Mr. Dale decided Racey’s course for him.  Mr. Dale pulled a gun and, still whooping cheerily, shook five shots into the atmosphere.  Then Mr. Dale fumblingly threw out his cylinder and began to reload.

“I’d better get his gun away from him,” Racey said, apologetically, over his shoulder, as he ran forward.

But the old man would have none of him.  He cunningly discerned an enemy in Racey and tried to shoot him.  It was lucky for Racey that the old fellow was as drunk as a fiddler, or certainly Racey would have been buried the next day.  As it was, the first bullet went wide by a yard.  The second went straight up into the blue, for by then Racey had the old man’s wrist.

“There, there,” soothed Racey, “you don’t want that gun, Nawsir.  Not you.  Le’s have it, that’s a good feller now.”

So speaking he twisted the sixshooter from the old man’s grasp and jammed it into the waistband of his own trousers.  The old man burst into frank tears.  Incontinently he slid sidewise from the saddle and clasped Racey round the neck.

  “I’m wild an’ woolly an’ full o’ fleas
  I’m hard to curry below the knees—­”

Thus he carolled loudly two lines of the justly popular song.

“Luke,” he bawled, switching from verse to prose, “why didja leave me, Luke?”

Strangely enough, he did not stutter.  Without the slightest difficulty he leaped that pitfall of the drunken, the letter L.

“Luke,” repeated Racey Dawson, struck by a sudden thought.  “What’s this about Luke?  You mean Luke Tweezy?”

The old man rubbed his shaving-brush adown Racey’s neck-muscles.  “I mean Luke Tweezy,” he said.  “Lots o’ folks don’t like Luke.  They say he’s mean.  But they ain’t nothin’ mean about Luke.  He’s frien’ o’ mine, Luke is.”