“’For God’s sake don’t mention this.  You know what Perry used to be.  He’s had the fever, and the doctor says we must humour him.’

“‘Give us the checker-board and the men, Mike,’ says Perry.  ’Come on, Buck, I’m just wild to have some excitement.’

“I went in the back room with Perry.  Before we closed the door, I says to Mike: 

“’Don’t ever let it straggle out from under your hat that you seen Buck Caperton fraternal with sarsaparilla or persona grata with a checker-board, or I’ll make a swallow-fork in your other ear.’

“I locked the door and me and Perry played checkers.  To see that poor old humiliated piece of household bric-a-brac sitting there and sniggering out loud whenever he jumped a man, and all obnoxious with animation when he got into my king row, would have made a sheep-dog sick with mortification.  Him that was once satisfied only when he was pegging six boards at keno or giving the faro dealers nervous prostration—­to see him pushing them checkers about like Sally Louisa at a school-children’s party—­why, I was all smothered up with mortification.

“And I sits there playing the black men, all sweating for fear somebody I knew would find it out.  And I thinks to myself some about this marrying business, and how it seems to be the same kind of a game as that Mrs. Delilah played.  She give her old man a hair cut, and everybody knows what a man’s head looks like after a woman cuts his hair.  And then when the Pharisees came around to guy him he was so ’shamed that he went to work and kicked the whole house down on top of the whole outfit.  ‘Them married men,’ thinks I, ’lose all their spirit and instinct for riot and foolishness.  They won’t drink, they won’t buck the tiger, they won’t even fight.  What do they want to go and stay married for?’ I asks myself.

“But Perry seems to be having hilarity in considerable quantities.

“‘Buck old hoss,’ says he, ’isn’t this just the hell-roaringest time we ever had in our lives?  I don’t know when I’ve been stirred up so.  You see, I’ve been sticking pretty close to home since I married, and I haven’t been on a spree in a long time.’

“‘Spree!’ Yes, that’s what he called it.  Playing checkers in the back room of the Gray Mule!  I suppose it did seem to him a little immoral and nearer to a prolonged debauch than standing over six tomato plants with a sprinkling-pot.

“Every little bit Perry looks at his watch and says: 

“‘I got to be home, you know, Buck, at seven.’

“‘All right,’ I’d say.  ’Romp along and move.  This here excitement’s killing me.  If I don’t reform some, and loosen up the strain of this checkered dissipation I won’t have a nerve left.’

“It might have been half-past six when commotions began to go on outside in the street.  We heard a yelling and a six-shootering, and a lot of galloping and manoeuvres.

“‘What’s that?’ I wonders.