Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Ladies and Gentlemen

“Now, then, I put one-half of this bill into my pocket,” proceeded Finburg; “and the other half I’m handing over to you” – doing so. “Separated this way, these halves are no use to anybody – none to me, none to you. But paste them together again and you’ve got a thousand-dollar bill that’s just as good as it ever was. For the time being, you keep your half and I’ll keep my half. I’ll have it right here handy on my person and ready to slip it over to you when the contract that I’ve been speaking of is completed.

“Now, I expect to be seeing our sick friend tomorrow. Tonight I’ll be fixing up a document or two for him to sign and I’m going to take them up to where he is in the morning. I’ll tell him of this little arrangement between us and I’m certain he’ll endorse it. I may not see him again until the twenty-seventh of this month.” He dwelt meaningly upon the date. “It looks as though he couldn’t last much longer than that – not more than a few hours. And on the twenty-seventh, if the prospects are that he’ll pass out within the next twenty-four hours – which, as I say, is the present outlook – I’ll pay him a farewell visit. If everything has worked out right – if you’ve done him any little last favor that he’s counting on – why, he’ll tip me the word while we’re alone together. You won’t have to wait much longer than that for what’s coming to you. Just as soon as he gives me the word I’ll meet you in some private corner that we’ll decide on, and hand you over the other half of your bill. Is everything understood – everything agreeable to you?”

Still mute, Isgrid nodded. They shook hands on it after Isgrid had named a suitable place for their rendezvous on the twenty-seventh; then the silent caller took himself away. All told, he had not contributed a hundred words, counting in grunts as words, to the dialogue.

Being left alone, Mr. Finburg mentally hugged himself before he set to the task of drawing up the papers for his client’s signature. This same Sunday he decided not to go to the governor of that near-by state with any futile plea for executive clemency. He’d tell Scarra, of course, that he was going; would pretend he had gone. But what was the use of a man wasting his breath on a quest so absolutely hopeless? He salved his conscience – or the place where his conscience had been before he wore it out – with this reflection, and by an effort of the will put from him any prolonged consideration of the real underlying reason. It resolved itself into this: Why should a man trifle with his luck? With Scarra wiped out – and certainly Scarra deserved wiping out, if ever a red-handed brute did – the ends of justice would be satisfied and the case might serve as a warning to other criminals. But if that governor should turn mush-headed and withhold from Scarra his just punishment, where would Scarra’s lawyer be? He’d be missing a delectable chunk of jack by a hair – that’s where he would be.

Let the law take its course!

The law did. It took its racking course at quarter past one o’clock on the morning of the twenty-eighth.

Those who kept ward on Tony Scarra, considering him as scientists might consider an inoculated guinea-pig waiting patiently for this or that expected symptom of organic disorder to show itself, marveled more and more as the night wore on at the bearing of the condemned man. His, they dispassionately decided among themselves, was not the rehearsed but transparent bravado of the ordinary thug. That sort of thing they had observed before; they could bear testimony that very often toward the finish this make-believe fortitude melted beneath the lifting floods of a mortal terror and a mortal anguish, so that the subject lost the use of his members and the smoothness of his tongue, and babbled wild meaningless prayers and flapped with his legs and must be half-dragged, half-borne along on that first, last, short journey of his through the painted iron door to what awaited him beyond.

Or, fifty-fifty, it might be that imminent dread acted upon him as a merciful drug which soothed him into a sort of obedient coma wherein he yielded with a pitiful docility to the wishes of his executioners and mechanically did as they bid him, and went forth from his cell meek as a lamb, thereby simplifying and easing for them their not altogether agreeable duties. These experienced observers had come to count on one or the other of these manifestations. In Scarra neither of them was developed.

He seemed defiantly insulated against collapse by some indefinable power derived from within; it was as though a hidden secret reservoir of strength sustained him. He gibed the death-watch and he made a joke of the prison chaplain coming in the face of repeated rebuffs to offer the sustaining comfort of his Gospels. He betrayed no signs whatsoever of weakening – and this, to those who officiated at those offices, seemed most remarkable of all – when they clipped the hair off the top of his skull for the pad of the electrodes and again, later in the evening, when they brought him the black trousers with the left leg split up the inside seam.

All at once though, at the beginning of the second hour after midnight, when the witnesses were assembled and waiting in the lethal chamber, his jaunty confidence – if so, for lack of a better description, it might be termed – drained from him in a single gush. He had called, a minute or two before, for a drink of water, complaining of a parched throat. A filled cup was brought to him. Sitting on a stool in his cell he turned his back upon the bringer and took the draught down at a gulp, then rose and stood looking through the bars at the keepers, with a mocking, puzzling grin on his lips and over all his face and in his eyes a look of expectancy. The grin vanished, the look changed to one of enormous bewilderment, then to one of the intensest chagrin, and next he was mouthing with shocking vile words toward the eternity waiting for him. He resisted them when they went in then to fetch him out, and fought with them and screamed out and altogether upset the decorum of the death-house, so that the surviving inmates became excessively nervous and unhappy.

He did not curse those whose task it was now to subdue and, if possible, to calm him. He cursed somebody or other – person or persons unknown – for having deceived him in a vital matter, crying out that he had been imposed on, that he had been double-crossed. He raved of a pill – whatever that might mean – but so frightful a state was he in, so nearly incoherent in his frenzy of rage and distress and disappointment, that the meaning of what he spoke was swallowed up and lost.

Anyhow, his sweating handlers had no time to listen. Their task was to muffle his blasphemy and get him to the chair, which they did. Practically, they had to gag him with their hands, and one of the men had a finger bitten to the bone.

Since he continued to struggle in the presence of the audience, the proceedings from this point on were hurried along more than is common. His last understandable words, coming from beneath the mask clamped over the upper part of his distorted face, had reference to this mysterious double-crossing of which plainly, even in that extremity, he regarded himself the victim, and on which, as was equally plain, his final bitter thoughts dwelt. The jolt of the current cut him off in a panted, choking mid-speech, and the jaw dropped and the body strained up against the stout breast-harness, and the breath wheezed and rasped out across the teeth and past the lips, which instantly had turned purple, and there was a lesser sound, a curious hissing, whispering, slightly unpleasant sound as though the life were so eager to escape from this flesh that it came bursting through the pores of the darkening skin. Also, there was a wisp of rising blue smoke and a faint, a very faint smell of something burning. There nearly always is; a feature which apparently cannot be avoided. Still, after all, that’s but a detail.

For absolute certainty of result, they gave Scarra’s body a second shock, and the physicians present observed with interest how certain of the muscles, notably certain of the neck muscles, twitched in response to the throb and flow of the fluid through the tissues. But of course the man was dead. It merely was a simple galvanic reaction – like eel-meat twisting on a hot griddle, or severed frogs’ legs jumping when you sprinkle salt on them – interesting, perhaps, but without significance. Except for Scarra’s unseemly behavior immediately after drinking the water, this execution, as executions go, and they nearly always go so, was an entire success.

Conceded that as to its chief purpose, the plan unaccountably had gone amiss, Mr. Finburg nevertheless felt no concern over the outcome. Privately he preferred that it should have been thus – there being no reason for any official inquiry, naturally there would be no official inquiry. Happy anticipations uplifted him as, sundry legal formulas having been complied with, he went as Scarra’s heir to Scarra’s bank on Third Avenue and opened Scarra’s safe-deposit box.

It would seem that he, also, had been double-crossed. All the box contained was a neat small kit of burglars’ tools. It was indeed a severe disappointment to Mr. Finburg, a blow to his faith in human nature. We may well feel for Mr. Finburg.

Of that triumvirate of East Side connivers, there remains the third and least important member, Isgrid, he who, scheming on his own account and in his own protection, had played for safety by smuggling to the late Scarra not number twelve, the poisonous capsule, but number eleven, the harmless one. Let us not spend all our sympathy upon Mr. Finburg but rather let us reserve some portion of it for Isgrid. For this one, he too suffered a grievous disappointment. It befell when, having patched the parted halves of his thousand-dollar bill, he undertook to pass it. It was refused, not because it was pasted together but because it was counterfeit.

The Cowboy and the Lady – And Her Pa

From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist about in the traces and, with six ’cello-shaped heads stretched over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate its outspread glories while they got their wind back. It was evident Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down through the spicy dry air.

“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, and you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of firecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up, you scenery-lovin’ so-and-soes!”

There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint and fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation.

“How prodigal nature is out here in these Western wilds!” she said.

“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter, Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother’s were.

“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightly that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such picturesque types everywhere!”

“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” said Mr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving his gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at all, so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”

“Mong père, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured Miss Gatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in his native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”

Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and looked through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.

Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and well-tailored breeches and with a gay little sweater drawn snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a white sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have been lichened tombs for Babylon’s kings.

“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls, if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’re putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you’ll remember, we darn’ near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish gastric juices – chow and lots of it!”

Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on his brow. A deer-fly alighted where he was baldest and promenaded to and fro there, across the great open spaces. The thinker too deeply was abstracted to shoo away the little stranger; he let her promenade.

“Mmph!” he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her attention – that mmphing sound was. Lacking vowels though it did, its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears.

“What’s wrong, dear?” she asked. “Still sore from all that dreadful horseback riding?”

“It’s that girl,” he told her; “that Shirley of ours. She’s the one I’m worried about.”

“Why, goodness gracious!” she cried; “what’s wrong with Shirley?”

“Look at her. That’s all I ask – just look at her.”

Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one, squinted at the withdrawing figure.

“Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life,” she protested, still peering. “Why, only last Monday – or was it Tuesday; no, Monday – I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was the day we got caught in the snow-storm coming through Swift Current Pass – only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy she was looking.”

“I don’t mean that – she’s a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look where she’s going! That’s what I mean. Look what she’s doing!”

“Why, what is she doing that’s out of the way, I’d like to know?” demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her young.

“She’s doing what she’s been doing every chance she got these last four-five days, that’s what.” Mr. Gatling was manifesting an attitude somewhat common in husbands and fathers when dealing with their domestic problems. He preferably would flank the subject rather than bore straight at it, hoping by these round-about tactics to obtain confirmation for his suspicions before he ever voiced them. “Got eyes in your head, haven’t you? All right then, use ’em.”

“Hector Gatling, for a sane man, you do get the queerest notions in your brain sometimes! What on earth possesses you? Hasn’t the child a perfect right to stroll down there and watch those three guides packing up? You know she’s been trying to learn to make that pearl knot or turquoise knot or whatever it is they call it. What possible harm can there be in her learning how to tie a pearl knot?”

“Diamond hitch, diamond hitch,” he corrected her testily. “Not pearls, but diamonds; not knots, but hitches! You’d better try to remember it, too – diamonds and hitches usually figure in the thing that I’ve got on my mind. And, if you’ll be so kind as to observe her closely, you’ll see that it isn’t those three guides she’s so interested in. It’s one guide out of the three. And it’s getting serious, or I’m all wrong. Now then, do you get my drift, or must I make plans and specifications?”

“Oh!” The exclamation was freighted with shock and with sorrow but with incredulity too.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Gatling again and now she was fluttering her feathers in alarm, if a middle-aged lady dressed in tweed knickerbockers and a Boy Scout’s shirt may be said to have any feathers to flutter. “Oh, Hector, you don’t mean it! You can’t mean it! A child who’s traveled and seen the world! A child who’s had every advantage that wealth and social position and all could give her! A child who’s a member of the Junior League! A child who’s – who – Hector, you’re crazy. Hector, you know it’s utterly impossible – utterly! It’s preposterous!” Womanlike, she debated against a growing private dread. Then, still being womanlike, she pressed the opposing side for proof to destroy her counter-argument: “Hector, you’ve seen something – you’ve overheard something. Tell me this minute what it was you overheard!”

“I’ve overheard nothing. Think I’m going snooping around eavesdropping and spying on Shirley? I’ve never done any of that on her yet and I’m too old to begin now – and too fat. But I’ve seen a-plenty.”

“Oh, pshaw! I guess if there’d been anything afoot I’d have seen it myself first, what with my mother’s intuition and all! Oh, pshaw!” But Mrs. Gatling’s derisive rejoinder lacked conviction.

“I’ve had the feeling for longer than just these last few days,” continued Mr. Gatling despondently. “But I couldn’t put my hand on it, not at first. I tried to fool myself by saying it was this Wild Western flubdub and stuff getting into her blood and she’d get over it, soon as the attack had run its course. First loading up with all that Indian junk, then saying she felt as though she never wanted to do anything but be natural and stay out here and rough it for the rest of her life, and now here all of a sudden getting so much more flip and slangy than usual. That’s the worst symptom yet – that slang is.

“In your day, ma’am, when a girl fell in love or thought she had, she went and got all mushed-up and sentimental; went mooning around sentimentalizing and rhapsodizing and romanticking and everything. All of you but the strong-minded ones did and I guess they must have mushed-up some too, on the sly. Yes’m, that’s what you did – you mushed-up.” His tone was accusing, condemning, as though he dealt with ancient offenses which not even the passage of the years might condone. “But now it’s different with them. They get slangier and flippier and they let on to make fun of their own affections. And that’s what Miss Shirley is doing right now, this very minute, or else I’m the worst misled man in the entire state of Montana.”

“Maybe – maybe – ” The matron sputtered as her distress mounted. “Of course I’m not admitting that you’re right, Hector – the mere suggestion of such a thing is simply incredible – but on the bare chance that the child might be getting silly notions into her head, maybe I’d better speak to her. I’m so much older than she is that – ”

“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted. “You’re so much older than she is; that’s your trouble. And I’m suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who’ve got children growing up go around bleating that young people are different from the way young people were when we were young. They’re not. They’re just the same as we were – same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same everything – but they’ve got a new way of expressing ’em. And then we say we can’t understand them. Knock thirty years off of our lives and we’d understand all right because then we’d be just the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to that youngster of ours – not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.” Grammar, considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling, that masterful, self-educated man.

“But if I pointed out a few things to her – if I warned her – ”

“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so terribly happy over the prospect when I started sparking you. After I’d come courting and had gone on home again I guess it was as much as the old man could do to keep from taking a shovel and shoveling my tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense enough to keep his mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose he’d tried to influence you against me, tried to break off the match – what would have happened? You’d have thought you were oppressed and persecuted and you’d have grabbed for me even quicker than you did.”

“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed – ”

“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw and took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course, and the consequence was we got married in the First Methodist Church with bridesmaids and old shoes and kins folks and all the other painful details instead of me sneaking you out of a back window some dark night and us running off together in a side-bar buggy. No, ma’am, if you’ll take a tip from an old retired yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and boy, with one road, you’ll – ”

“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”

“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re to keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in our reserved seats up in the grandstand and see how the game comes out. A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting – that’s our line and we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for future developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little campaign. With your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”

With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned, the disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner rather of a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she continually oppressed by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It would have deceived no one who closely studied the lady’s bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the party closely studied these.

The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient backs of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They overtook and passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with provender for the highway contractors on up under the cloud-combing parapet of the Garden Wail Wall, and behind them heard for a while his frank and aboveboard reflections upon the immediate ancestries, the present deplorable traits, the darkened future prospects of his work stock. They swung away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback trail and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and two jeweled glaciers.

They stretched their legs and uncramped their backs; they ate and remounted and on through the afternoon single-filed along the farther slope where a family herd of mountain-goats browsed among the stones and paid practically no heed to them. They saw a solitary bighorn ram with a twisted double cornucopia springing out of his skull and likewise they saw a pair of indifferent mule-deer and enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the world; for complete particulars consult the official guide-book of Our National Playgrounds.

Evening brought them across a bony hip of the Divide to within sight of the distant rear boundary of the governmental domain. So they pitched the tents and coupled up the collapsible stove there in a sheltered small cove in the Park’s back yard and watched the sun go down in his glory. When the moon rose it was too good to believe. You almost could reach up and jingle the tambourines of little circling stars; anyhow, you almost thought you could. It was a magic hour, an ideal place for love-making among the young of the species. Realizing the which, Mrs. Gatling had a severe sinking and apprehensive sensation directly behind the harness buckle on the ample belt which girthed her weary form amidships. She’d been apprehensive all day but now the sinking was more pronounced.

She strained at the tethers of her patience though until supper was over and it was near hushaby-time for the tired forms of the middle-aged. Within the shelter of their small tent she spoke then to her husband, touching on the topic so stedfastly uppermost in her brain.

“Oh, Hector,” she quavered, “I’m actually beginning to be afraid you’re right. They’ve been together this livelong day. Neither one of them had eyes for anything or anybody else. The way he helped her on and off her horse! The way he fetched and carried for her! And the way she let him do it! And they’re – they’re together outside now. Oh, Hector!”

“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in that infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded turtle-doves. Why in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight – good and hard? Romola, I don’t want to harry you up any more than’s necessary but you take, say, about two or three more nights like this and they’re liable to do considerable damage to tender hearts.”

“Don’t I know it? O-oh, Hector!”

“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was quite plain that he did.

He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and peeped through the opening.

The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill and their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous blue-black space, it revealed their supple figures in strong, sharp relief. The youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel blouse with its flaunting big buttons; his Angora chaps with wings on them that almost were voluminous enough for an eagle’s wings; his red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved bone ring to fit a throat which Mr. Gatling knew to be sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy mahogany-brown; his beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed, high-heeled, silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy – they all matched and modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.

His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No Name, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary. Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and given to deporting himself accordingly.

At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura all about him.

The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his daughter’s body and he caught the sounds but did not make out the sense of words that passed between them. Then the two silhouettes swung apart and the boy laughed contentedly and flung an arm aloft in a parting salute and began singing a catch as he went teetering off toward the spot where his mates of the outfit already were making the low tilt of a tarpaulin roof above them pulse to some very sincere snoring. But before she betook herself to quarters, the girl bided for a long minute on the verge of the cliff and looked off and away into the studded void beyond her. She seemed to be checking up on the minor stars to see whether any of them were missing. But her father knew better than that. The sidewise cant of her head showed that one of the things she did was to listen while her late companion served due notice on the night to such effect as this:

 
“You monkey with my Lulu,
Tell you what I’ll do:
Take out a gun and shoot you,
And carve you plenty too!”
 

Mr. Gatling drew the flaps together in an abstracted way and mmphed several times.

“Pretty dog-gone spry-looking young geezer at that,” he remarked absently. “Yes, sir, pretty spry-looking.”

“Who?”

“Him.”

“You actually mean that cowboy?”

“None other than which.”

“Oh, Hector! That – that vulgarian, that country bumpkin, that clodhopper!”

“Now hold on there, Romola. Let’s try to be just even if we are prejudiced. All the clods that kid ever hopped you could put ’em in your eye without interfering with your eyesight. He’s no farm-hand; he’s a cow-hand or was before he got this job of steering tourists around through these mountains – and that’s a very different thing, I take it. And what he knows he knows blame’ well. I wish I could mingle in with a horse the way he does. When he gets in a saddle he’s riveted there but I only come loose and work out of the socket. And I’d give about five years off my life to be able to handle a trout-rod like he can. I claim that in his departments he’s a fairly high-grade proposition. He’s aware of it, too, but I don’t so much blame him for that, either. If you don’t think well of yourself who else is going to?”

“Why, Hector Gatling, I believe you’re really – but no, you couldn’t be! Look at the difference in their stations! Look at their different environments! Look at their different view-points!”

“I’m looking – just as hard as you are. You don’t get what I’m driving at. I wouldn’t fancy having this boy for a son-in-law any more than you would – although at that I’m not saying I couldn’t maybe make some use of him in another capacity. Still, you needn’t mind worrying so much about their respective stations in life. I didn’t have any station in life to start from myself – it was a whistling-post. And yet I’ve managed to stagger along fairly well. I’d a heap rather see Shirley tied up to pretty near any decent, ambitious, self-respecting young cuss that came along than to have her fall for one of those plush-headed lounge-lizards that keep hanging round her back home. I know the breed. In my day they used to be guitar-pickers – and some of ’em played a snappy game of Kelly pool. Now they’re Charleston dancers and the only place most of ’em carry any weight is on the hip.