“I told her no one in the wide world had ever been able to answer this puzzle.  There was Dave and his wife and five children, all healthy, and eating somehow, and Dave never doing a stroke of work he could side-step.  I told her it was such a familiar puzzle we’d quit being puzzled by it.

“She said someone ought to smash his fiddle and make him work.  She said she would do something about it.  I applauded.  I said we needed new blood up here and she seemed to of fetched it.

“She come back the next day with a flush of triumph on her severely simple face.  And guess the first thing she asked me to do!  She asked me to take chances in a raffle for Dave’s fiddle.  Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home.  I had to respect the woman at that moment.

“‘There they are, penniless,’ says she, ’and in want for the barest necessities; and this man fiddling his time away!  I had a struggle persuading him to give up his wretched toy; but I’ve handled harder cases.  You should of seen the light in the mother’s wan face when he consented!  The twelve dollars won’t be much, though it will do something for her and those starving children; and then he will no longer have the instrument to tempt him.’

“I handed over a dollar for two chances right quick, and Julia went out to the bunk-house and wormed two dollars out of the boys there.  And next day she was out selling off the other chances.  She didn’t dislike the work.  It give her a chance to enter our homes and see if they needed reforming, and if the children was subjected to refining influences, and so on.  The first day she scared parties into taking fifteen tickets, and the second day she got rid of the rest; and the next Sunday she held the drawing over at Dave’s house.  The fiddle was won by a nester from over in Surprise Valley, who had always believed he could play one if he only had a fair chance.

“So this good deed was now completed, there being no music, and twelve dollars in the Pickens home that night.  And Mrs. Julia now felt that she was ready for the next big feat of uplift, which was a lot more important because it involved the very sanctity of the marriage tie.  Yes, sir; she’d come back from her prowling one night and told me in a hushed voice, behind a closed door, about a couple that had been for years living in a state of open immorality.

“I didn’t get her, at first, not thinking of Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie.  But she meant just them two.  I give her a good hearty laugh, at first; but it pained her so much I let her talk.  It seems she’d gone there to sell raffle tickets, and they’d taken four, and cooked food for her, and give her some cherry cordial, which she took on account of being far from a strong woman; and then Aunt Mollie had told all her past life, with this horrid scandal about the notary public sticking innocently out of it.