“So I come back and got that place down the creek for her, and she sent out a professional architect and a landscape gardener, and some other experts that would know how to build a ranch de luxe, and the thing was soon done.  And she sent son on ahead to get slightly acquainted with the wild life.  He was a tall bent thing, about thirty, with a long squinted face and going hair, and soft, innocent, ginger-coloured whiskers, and hips so narrow they’d hardly hold his belt up.  That rowdy mother of his, in trying to make a companion of him, had near scared him to death.  He was permanently frightened.  What he really wanted to do, I found out, was to study insect life and botany and geography and arithmetic, and so on, and raise orchids, instead of being killed off in a sudden manner by his rough-neck parent.  He loved to ride a horse the same way a cat loves to ride a going stove.

“I started out with him one morning to show him over the valley.  He got into the saddle all right and he meant well, but that don’t go any too far with a horse.  Pretty soon, down on the level here, I started to canter a bit.  He grabbed for the saddle horn and caught a handful of bunch grass fifteen feet to the left of the trail.  He was game enough.  He found his glasses and wiped ’em off, and said it was too bad the mater couldn’t have seen him, because it would have been a bright spot in her life.

“Then he got on again and we took that steep trail up the side of the canon that goes over Arrowhead, me meaning to please him with some beautiful and rugged scenery, where one false step might cause utter ruin.  It didn’t work, though.  After we got pretty well up to the rim of the canon he looks down and says he supposes they could recover one if one fell over there.  I says:  ’Oh, yes; they could recover one.  They’d get you, all right.  Of course you wouldn’t look like anything!’

“He shudders at that and gets off to lead his horse, begging me to do the same.  I said I never tried to do anything a horse could do better, and stayed on.  Then he got confidential and told me a lot of interesting crimes this mater of his had committed in her mad efforts to make a companion of him.  Once she’d tramped on the gas of a ninety-horsepower racer and socked him against a stone wall at a turn some fool had made in the road; and another time she near drowned him in the Arctic Ocean when she was off there for the polar-bear hunting; and she’d got him well clawed by a spotted leopard in India, that was now almost the best skin in her collection; and once in Switzerland he fell off the side of an Alp she was making him climb, causing her to be very short with him all day because it delayed the trip.  Tied to a rope he was and hanging out there over nothing for about fifteen minutes—­he must have looked like a sash weight.