"How about that saloonkeeper?" Billy asked. "How come it he
adopted you?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know, except that all my
relatives were hard up. It seemed they just couldn't get on. They
managed to scratch a lean living for themselves, and that was
all. Cady--he was the saloonkeeper--had been a soldier in my
father's company, and he always swore by Captain Kit, which was
their nickname for him. My father had kept the surgeons from
amputating his leg in the war, and he never forgot it. He was
making money in the hotel and saloon, and I found out afterward
he helped out a lot to pay the doctors and to bury my mother
alongside of father. I was to go to Uncle Will--that was my
mother's wish; but there had been fighting up in the Ventura
Mountains where his ranch was, and men had been killed. It was
about fences and cattlemen or something, and anyway he was in
jail a long time, and when he got his freedom the lawyers had got
his ranch. He was an old man, then, and broken, and his wife took
sick, and he got a job as night watchman for forty dollars a
month. So he couldn't do anything for me, and Cady adopted me.

"Cady was a good man, if he did run a saloon. His wife was a big,
handsome-looking woman. I don't think she was all right . . . and
I've heard so since. But she was good to me. I don't care what
they say about her, or what she was. She was awful good to me.
After he died, she went altogether bad, and so I went into the
orphan asylum. It wasn't any too good there, and I had three
years of it. And then Tom had married and settled down to steady
work, and he took me out to live with him. And--well, I've been