got it.  The girl looked to me nice enough even for Angus, Junior, but his pa denounced her as a yellow-haired pest with none but frivolous aims in life, who wouldn’t know whether a kitchen was a room in a house or a little woolly animal from Paraguay.  We had some nice, friendly breakfasts, I believe not, whilst they discussed this poisonous topic, old Angus being only further embittered when it comes out that the train-robber is also dead set against this here alliance because his only daughter needs a decent, reputable man who would come home nights from some low mahogany den in a bank building, and not a worthless young hound that couldn’t make a dollar of his own and had displayed no talent except for winning the notice of head waiters and policemen.  Old Angus says he knows well enough his son can be arrested out of most crowds just on that description alone, but who is this So-and-So old thug to be saying it in public?

“And so it went, with Ellabelle living in high hopes and young Angus busy inventing new ways to bump himself off, and old Angus getting more and more seething—­quiet enough outside, but so desperate inside that it wasn’t any time at all till I saw he was just waiting for a good chance to make some horrible Scotch exhibition of himself.

“Then comes the fatal polo doings, with young Angus playing on the side that won, and Ellabelle being set up higher than ever till she actually begins to snub people here and there at the game that look like they’d swallow it, and old Angus ashamed and proud and glaring round as if he’d like to hear some one besides himself call his son a worthless young hound—­if they wanted to start something.

“And the polo victory of course had to be celebrated by a banquet at the hotel, attended by all the players and their huskiest ruffian friends.  They didn’t have the ponies there, but I guess they would of if they’d thought of it.  It must have been a good banquet, with vintages and song and that sort of thing—­I believe they even tried to have food at first—­and hearty indoor sports with the china and silver and chairs that had been thoughtlessly provided and a couple of big mirrors that looked as if you could throw a catsup bottle clear through them, only you couldn’t, because it would stop there after merely breaking the glass, and spatter in a helpless way.

“And of course there was speeches.  The best one, as far as I could learn, was made by the owner of the outraged premises at a late hour—­when the party was breaking up—­as you might put it.  He said the bill would be about eighteen hundred dollars, as near as he could tell at first glance.  He was greeted with hearty laughter and applause from the high-spirited young incendiaries and retired hastily through an unsuspected door to the pantry as they rushed for him.  It was then they found out what to do with the rest of the catsup—­and did it—­so the walls and ceiling wouldn’t look so monotonous, and fixed the windows so they would let out the foul tobacco smoke, and completed a large painting of the Yosemite that hung on the wall, doing several things to it that hadn’t occurred to the artist in his hurry, and performed a serious operation on the piano without the use of gas.  The tables, I believe, was left flat on their backs.