Then Ham got a long, cotton bag, from which he produced several handfuls of pinion nuts.  They were always the introduction to the camp-fire stories.  He seated himself, drew his knees up close to his body, leaned back against the great tree trunk, and shouted:  “All aboard, let her flicker.  What’s first?  Mr. Allen, let’s have that promised story you didn’t get out of Dad.  I believe you just side-tracked him on purpose, so you could tell it yourself.  Come, now, wasn’t that it?” He began to whistle in a low tone as he waited for the story.  Fat stretched himself at full length before the fire, his head resting on his blanket roll.  Phil had backed up on one side of Mr. Allen and Willis on the other.  Everybody was waiting.

“Well, once upon a time, long, long ago, there lived a little fairy,” began Mr. Allen.

“You don’t say so,” interrupted Ham, as he tossed a stick into the fire in a disgusted manner.  “Was it fairy long ago?  I can recite Mother Goose rhymes myself.  You’ll have to do better than that.”

Phil nudged Mr. Allen in the ribs and chuckled to himself.

“Well, then, how’s this:  Not many years ago, in a wonderful little village, there—­”

“Was a wooden wedding at which two Poles were married,” interrupted Ham, with a mischievous grin on his face.

“You’re kind of hard to please, Ham,” suggested Fat, as he rolled over to warm his other side.

“How’s this?  The night was dark and stormy,” started in Mr. Allen.  Ham settled back contentedly.  “That’s something like it.  ’The night was dark and stormy,’ and what else?”

“Well, if you must have it.  I have heard a good many stories of how the Old Road House was burned, but they are all different.  Which one shall I tell you?  I’ll tell you the one that Daddy tells himself, because it probably comes nearest the truth.  As a matter of fact, though, I don’t believe any one knows just how it burned down.

“You know Dad spent his boyhood on a great southwestern cattle ranch, and knew at first hand a great many things about Indians and tramping and mining and ‘explorin’,’ as he calls it.  Just why he left this ranch life he never told me exactly, but I know he had his first case of real gold fever in forty-nine, and has never gotten over it.  His father was a United States marshal, and was instrumental in gathering in a number of the most notorious criminals of his day.  One of Dad’s favorite stories is of the capture of a gang of Mississippi River pirates.

“It was Dad’s father that finally cleaned out this great nuisance when he captured Mason, their leader, through the treachery of his fellows.  When the final raid was made, Dad, who was then a young man, was one of the party.  It seems that there was a certain boy in this pirate gang who escaped, after having been arrested with the others.  Several years later Dad had occasion to remember the threats this boy had made to him at the time of the raid.