head keeps black, it's a sign he uses his jaw more'n he does his brains.
An' that yaller-headed doll-baby o' his'n--the peert thing:--I'll lay
fifty cents she never washed a dish. To think o' her sayin' a thing like
that about Markis-dee!--an' there's more o' the Peables in him to-day--But
I s'pose she don't know no better." And Mrs. Ruggles rose from the table,
while the corner of her apron made a sudden journey to the corner of her
eye. It was evident her moral nature had received a wound that rankled.

A year before this time the marquis and his playmates had watched several
vigorous fellows plant a theodolite on the bank of Crawfish Creek, very
much as the natives must have watched the Spaniards plant their first
cross on San Salvador. The contract for grading the new railway bed was in
the hands of a stranger named Miller, who was said to have known better
days, and in the time of his prosperity had been thought a proper person
to be called Colonel. He was a bluff man of forty years, who appeared to
have known both the ups and downs of life, and whose determination to wear
a black beard was equaled only by its determination to be gray. Rumor said
that he had been a railroad president, that he made and spent vast sums of
money, and that his home was somewhere in the East.

His only child, Alice, ten or twelve years old, bright, fair, full of
animal spirits, who was indulged to the last degree by the roughly
generous colonel, sometimes accompanied him about the half-developed
country, searching for strange birds and blossoms in the woods or watching
demurely the laborers ply their picks and shovels while he inspected their
work.

The two rode almost daily between Thompson City and the line of
excavation, passing the house of Mrs. Ruggles and a cool spring by the
roadside near it, whence that lady had obtained the water which made the