“Then he told about learning to run a motor car all by himself, just to please the mater.  The first time he made the sharp turns round their country house he took nine shingles off the corner and crumpled a fender like it was tissue paper; but he stuck to it till he got the score down to two or three shingles only.  He seemed right proud of that, like it was bogey for the course, as you might say.  He wasn’t the greatest humourist in the world, being too high-minded, but he appealed to all my better instincts; he was trying so hard to make the grade out of respect for his bedizened and homicidal mother.

“And his poor sister, that come along later, was very much like him, being severe of outline and wearing the same kind of spectacles, and not fussing much about the fripperies of dress that engross so many of our empty-headed sex and get ’em the notice of the male.  Her complexion was brutally honest, which was about all her very best-wishers could say for it, but she was kind-hearted and earnest, and thought a good deal about the real or inner meaning of life.  What she really yearned for was to stay in Boston and go to concerts, holding the music on her lap and checking off the notes with a gold pencil when the fiddlers played them.  I watched her do it one night.  I don’t know what her notion was, keeping cases on the orchestra that way; but it seemed to give her a secret satisfaction.  She was also interested in bird life and other studies of a high character, and she didn’t want to be made a companion of by her rabid parent any more than brother did.  They was just a couple of lambkins born to a tiger.

“Pretty soon the ranch buildings was all complete and varnished and polished, like you seen to-day, and the family moved in with all kinds of uniformed servants that looked unhappy and desperate.  They had a pained butler in a dress suit that never once set foot outside the house the whole five months they was here.  He’d of been thought too gloomy for good taste, even at a funeral.  He had me nervous every time I went there, thinking any minute he was going to break down and sob.

“And this lady loses no time making companions of her children that didn’t want to be.  First she tried to make ’em chase steers on horseback.  A fact!  That was one of her ideas of ranch life.  When I asked her what she was going to stock her ranch with she said didn’t I have some good heads of stock I could sell her?  And I said yes, I had some good heads, and showed her a bunch of my thoroughbreds, thinking none but the best would satisfy her.  She looked ’em over with a glittering eye and said they was too fat to run well.  I didn’t get her.  I said it was true; I hadn’t raised ’em for speed.  I said I didn’t have an animal on the place that could hit better than three miles an hour, and not that for long.  I cheerfully admitted I didn’t have a thoroughbred on the place that wouldn’t be a joke on any track in the country; but I wanted to know what of it.