He smiled sourly at me. "I've held my own with this bunch uh
trouble-hunters for thirty years," he said dryly. "I guess yuh ain't got
any reason t' be alarmed. Come out uh that corner and let 'em alone."

I don't, to this day, know why I did it, but I quit hugging old King, and
the other two fell back and gave me a clear path to the door. "King was
blackguarding dad, and I couldn't stand for it," I explained to Perry
Potter as I went by. "If you're not going, I won't."

"I've got a letter to mail," he said, calm as if he were in his own
corral. "You went off before I got a chance to give it to yuh. I'll be out
in a minute."

He went and slipped the letter into the mail-box, turned his back on the
three, and walked out as if nothing had happened; perhaps he knew that I
was watching them, in a mood to do things if they offered to touch him.
But they didn't, and we mounted our horses and rode away, and Perry Potter
never mentioned the affair to me, then or after. I don't think we spoke on
the way to the ranch; I was busy wishing I'd been around in that part of
the world thirty years before, and thinking what a lot of fun I had
missed by not being as old as dad. A quarrel thirty years old is either
mighty stale and unprofitable, or else, like wine, it improves with age.
I meant to ride over to King's Highway some day, and see how he would
have welcomed dad thirty years before.




CHAPTER IV.