puncher, which it had done to the limit.

"I quit the 88 that day," Racey Dawson told the girl.

"I know you did. Chuck told me. Look at the time, will you? Get your
hat. We mustn't keep Jane waiting."

"No," he said, thoughtfully, his brows puckered, "we mustn't keep Jane
waitin'. Lookit, Miss Dale, as I remember yore pa he had a moustache.
Has he still got it?"

Miss Dale puzzled, paused in the doorway. "Why, no," she told him. "He
wears a horrid chin whisker now."

"He does, huh? A chin whisker. Let's be movin' right along. I think
I've got something interesting to tell you and yore sister and Chuck."

But they did not move along. They halted in the doorway. Or, rather,
the girl halted in the doorway, and Racey looked over her shoulder.
What stopped them short in their tracks was a spectacle--the spectacle
of an elderly chin-whiskered man, very drunk and disorderly, riding in
on a paint pony.

"Father!" breathed Miss Dale in a horror-stricken whisper.

And as she spoke Father uttered a string of cheerful whoops and topped
off with a long pull at a bottle he had been brandishing in his right
hand.

"Please go," said Miss Dale to Racey Dawson.