“Well, Ben,” said I, with judicial seriousness, “I think we might safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three—­to ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom he either possesses or desires to possess.”

Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.

“I reckon,” said he, “that your diagnosis about covers the case according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical readers.  But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a person I used to know.  I’ll tell you about him before I close up the store, if you don’t mind listening.

“Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine.  I was clerking there then for Brady & Murchison, wholesale dry-goods and ranch supplies.  Willie and I belonged to the same german club and athletic association and military company.  He played the triangle in our serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the welkin three nights a week somewhere in town.

“Willie jibed with his name considerable.  He weighed about as much as a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a ‘Where-is-Mary?’ expression on his features so plain that you could almost see the wool growing on him.

“And yet you couldn’t fence him away from the girls with barbed wire.  You know that kind of young fellows—­a kind of a mixture of fools and angels—­they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never fail to tread when they get the chance.  He was always on hand when ’a joyful occasion was had,’ as the morning paper would say, looking as happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw oyster served with sweet pickles.  He danced like he had hind hobbles on; and he had a vocabulary of about three hundred and fifty words that he made stretch over four germans a week, and plagiarized from to get him through two ice-cream suppers and a Sunday-night call.  He seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive plant, and a member of a stranded ‘Two Orphans’ company.

“I’ll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial make-up, and then I’ll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.

“Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of style.  His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary.  His eyes were the same blue shade as the china dog’s on the right-hand corner of your Aunt Ellen’s mantelpiece.  He took things as they came, and I never felt any hostility against him.  I let him live, and so did others.

“But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots and lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest, and prettiest girl in San Augustine.  I tell you, she had the blackest eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing—­Oh, no, you’re off—­I wasn’t a victim.  I might have been, but I knew better.  I kept out.  Joe Granberry was It from the start.  He had everybody else beat a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake and mound.  But, anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino, fall-clip fleece, sacked and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone.