It was the younger man’s turn to hesitate.  “Well, I don’t feel anything when I’m mad,” he confessed.  “I’m plumb crazy, I guess.  But I feel plenty bad afterwards.”

There was a flicker of the judge’s eyelids.

Dave went on musingly:  “I dare say it’s inherited.  They tell me my father was the same.  He was—­a killer.”

“Yes.  He was all of that.”

“Say!  Was he my father?”

Ellsworth started.  “What do you mean?”

Dave lifted an abstracted gaze from the Pullman carpet.  “I hardly know what I mean, Judge.  But you’ve had hunches, haven’t you?  Didn’t you ever know that something you thought was true wasn’t true at all?  Well, I never felt as if I had Frank Law’s blood in me.”

“This is interesting!” Ellsworth stirred and leaned forward.  “Whatever made you doubt it, Dave?”

“Um-m.  Nothing definite.  That’s what’s so unsatisfactory.  But, for instance, my mother was Mexican—–­”

“Spanish.”

“All right.  Am I Spanish?  Have I any Spanish blood in me?”

“She didn’t look Spanish.  She was light-complexioned, for one thing.  We both know plenty of people with a Latin strain in them who look like Anglo-Saxons.  Isn’t there anything else?”

“Nothing I can lay my finger on, except some kid fancies and—­that hunch I spoke about.”

Ellsworth sat back with a deep breath.  “You were educated in the North, and your boyhood was spent at school and college, away from everything Mexican.”

“That probably accounts for it,” Law agreed; then his face lit with a slow smile.  “By the way, don’t tell Mrs. Austin that I’m a sort of college person.  She thinks I’m a red-neck, and she sends me books.”

Ellsworth laughed silently.  “Your talk is to blame, Dave.  Has she sent you The Swiss Family Robinson?”

“No.  Mostly good, sad romances with an uplift—­stories full of lances at rest, and Willie-boys in tin sweaters.  Life must have been mighty interesting in olden days, there was so much loving and killing going on.  The good women were always beautiful, too, and the villains never had a redeeming trait.  It’s a shame how human nature has got mixed up since then, isn’t it?  There isn’t a ‘my-lady’ in all those books who could bust a cow-pony or run a ranch like Las Palmas.  Say, Judge, how’d you like to have to live with a perfect lady?”

“Don’t try your damned hog-Latin on me,” chided the lawyer.  “Alaire Austin’s romance is sadder than any of those novels.”

Dave nodded.  “But she doesn’t cry about it.”  Then he asked, gravely:  “Why didn’t she pick a real fellow, who’d kneel and kiss the hem of her dress and make a man of himself?  That’s what she wants—­love and sacrifice, and lots of both.  If I were Ed Austin I’d wear her glove in my bosom and treat her like those queens in the stories.  Incense and adoration and—–­”

“What’s the matter with you?” queried the judge.