and chin and a good, big, straight mouth, and full of the most engaging bedevilments for one and all.  He didn’t seem to be any brighter in his studies than a brute of that age should be, and though there was something easy and grand in his manner that his pa and ma never had, he wasn’t really any more foreign than what I be.  Of course he spoke Eastern American instead of Western, but you forgive him that after a few minutes when you see how nice he naturally meant to be.  I admit we took to each other from the start.  They often say I’m a good mixer, but it took no talent to get next to that boy.  I woke up the first night thinking I knew what old silly would do her darndest to adopt him if ever his poor pa and ma was to get buttered over the right of way in some railroad accident.

“And yet I didn’t see Angus, Junior, one bit the way either of his parents saw him.  Ellabelle seemed to look on him merely as a smart dresser and social know-it-all that would be a 98 cent credit to her in the position of society queen for which the good God had always intended her.  And his father said he wasn’t any good except to idle away his time and spend money, and would come to a bad end by manslaughter in a high-powered car; or in the alcoholic ward of some hospital; that he was, in fact, a mere helling scapegrace that would have been put in some good detention home years before if he hadn’t been born to a father that was all kinds of a so-and-so old Scotch fool.  There you get Angus, fills, from three different slants, and I ain’t saying there wasn’t justification for the other two besides mine.  The boy could act in a crowd of tea-drinking women with a finish that made his father look like some one edging in to ask where they wanted the load of coal dumped.  But also Angus, peer, was merely painting the lily, as they say, when he’d tell all the different kinds of Indian the boy was.  That very summer before he went back to the educational centre where they teach such arts, he helped wreck a road house a few miles up the line till it looked like one of them pictures of what a Zeppelin does to a rare old English drug store in London.  And a week later he lost a race with the Los Angeles flyer, account of not having as good a roadbed to run on as the train had, and having to take too short a turn with his new car.

“I remember we three was wondering where he could be that night the telephone rung from the place where kindly strangers had hauled him for first aid to the foolish.  But it was the boy himself that was able to talk and tell his anxious parents to forget all about it.  His father took the message and as soon as he got the sense of it he begun to get hopeful that the kid had broke at least one leg—­thinking, he must have been, of the matched pacing stallions that once did himself such a good turn without meaning to.  His disappointment was pitiful as he turned to us after learning that he had lit on his head but only sustained a few bruises and sprains and concussions, with the wall-paper scraped off here and there.