I suppose it was all you could expect from a born debutante that had been brought up to be nice to college boys on a moonlit porch, allowing them to put another sofa pillow back of her, and wearing their class pins, and so forth.  And here she was come to thirty, with fudge and cheese straws and the ukulele still bounding her mental horizon, yet looking far above her station to one of Oswald’s serious magnitude.

I never have made out what she saw in him.  But then we never do.  She used to kid about him—­and kid him, for that matter.  She’d say to me:  “He does care frightfully about himself, doesn’t he?” And she said to me and said to him that he had mice in his wainscoting.  Mice or rats, I forget which.  Any wise bookmaker would of posted her up in this race as a hundred-to-one shot.  She had plenty of blandishment for Oswald, but not his kind.  She’d try to lure him with furtive femininity and plaintive melodies when she ought to have been putting on a feverish interest in organic fauna.  Oswald generally looked through or past her.  He give a whole lot more worry to whether his fountain pen would clog up on him.  They was both set in their ways, and they was different ways; it looked to me like they never could meet.  They was like a couple of trained seals that have learned two different lines of tricks.

Of course Oswald was sunk at last, sunk by a chance shot; and there was no doubt about his being destroyed, quantities of oil marking the surface where he went down.  But it seemed like pure chance.  Yet, if you believe Oswald and scientific diagnosis, he’d been up against it since the world was first started, twenty million or five hundred million years ago—­I don’t really know how many; but what’s a few million years between scientists?  I don’t know that I really care.  It’s never kept me wakeful a night yet.  I’d sooner know how to get eighty-five per cent. of calves.

Anyway, it was Oswald’s grand new wardrobe trunk that had been predestined from the world’s beginning to set him talkative about his little flower with bones and a voice; this same new wardrobe trunk that was the pride of his barren life and his one real worry because he might sometime lose the keys to it.

It’s an affecting tale.  It begun the night Oswald wanted the extra table put in his room.  They’d come in that day with a good haul of the oldest inhabitants round here that had passed to their long rest three million years ago—­petrified fishworms and potato bugs, and so forth, and rocks with bird tracks on ’em.  Oswald was as near human as I’d seen him, on account of having found a stone caterpillar or something—­I know it had a name longer than it was; it seemed to be one like no one else had, and would therefore get him talked about, even if it had passed away three million years before the Oregon Short Line was built.