Custer devoured the same books; but he never suspected his father of the crime of plagiarism, nor guessed that his choicest morsels of adventure involved a felony.  Mrs. Shrimplin felt it necessary to protest: 

“No telling with what nonsense you are filling that boy’s head!”

“I hope,” said Mr. Shrimplin, narrowing his eyes to a slit, as if he expected to see pictured on the back of their lids the panorama of Custer’s future, “I hope I am filling his head with just nonsense enough so he will never crawfish, no matter what kind of a proposition he goes up against!”

Custer colored almost guiltily.  Could he ever hope to attain to the grim standard his father had set for him?

“I wasn’t much older than him when I shot Murphy at Fort Worth,” continued Mr. Shrimplin, “You’ve heard me tell about him, son—­old one-eye Murphy of Texarcana?”

“He died, I suppose!” said.  Mrs. Shrimplin, wringing out her dish-rag.  “Dear knows!  I wonder you ain’t been hung long ago!”

“Did he die!” rejoined Mr. Shrimplin ironically.  “Well, they usually die when I begin to throw lead!” He tugged fiercely at the ends of his drooping flaxen mustache and gazed into the wide and candid eyes of his son.

“Like I should give you the particulars, Custer?” he inquired.

Custer nodded eagerly, and Mr. Shrimplin cleared his throat.

“He was called one-eye Murphy because he had only one eye—­he’d lost the other in a rough-and-tumble fight; it had been gouged out by a feller’s thumb.  Murphy got the feller’s ear, chewed it off as they was rolling over and over on the floor, so you might say they swapped even.”

“I wonder you’d pick on an afflicted person like that,” observed Mrs. Shrimplin.

“Afflicted!  Well, he could see more and see further with that one eye than most men could with four!”

“I should think four eyes would be confusin’,” said Mrs. Shrimplin.

Mr. Shrimplin folded his arms across his narrow chest and permitted his glance to follow Mrs. Shrimplin’s ample figure as she moved to and fro about the room; and when he spoke again a gentle melancholy had crept into his tone.

“I dunno but a man makes a heap of sacrifices he never gets no credit for when he marries and settles down.  The ladies ain’t what they used to be.  They look on a man now pretty much as a meal-ticket.  I guess if a feller chewed off another feller’s ear in Mount Hope he’d never hear the last of it!”

As neither Mrs. Shrimplin nor Custer questioned this point, Mr. Shrimplin reverted to his narrative.

“I started in to tell you how I put Murphy out of business, didn’t I, son?  The facts brought out by the coroner’s jury,” embarking on what he conceived to be a bit of happy and elaborate realism, “was that I’d shot him in self-defense after he’d drawed a gun on me.  He had heard I was at Fort Worth—­not that I was looking for trouble, which I never done; but I never turned