of the town where gas-lamps were as yet unknown. He still further added
to his income by bill-posting and paper-hanging, for he belonged to the
rank and file of life, with a place in the procession well toward the
tail.

But Custer had no suspicion of this. He never saw his father as the
world saw him. He would have described his eye as piercing; he would
have said, in spite of the slouching uncertainty that characterized all
his movements, that he was as quick as a cat; and it was only Custer who
detected the note of authority in the meek tones of his father's voice.

And Custer was as like the senior Shrimplin as it was possible for
fourteen to be like forty-eight. His mother said, "He certainly looks
for all the world like his pa!" but her manner of saying it left doubt
as to whether she rejoiced in the fact; for, while Mr. Shrimplin was
undoubtedly a hero to Custer, he was not and never had been and never
could be a hero to Mrs. Shrimplin. She saw in him only what the world
saw--a stoop-shouldered little man who spent six days of the seven in
overalls that were either greasy or pasty.

It was a vagary of Mr. Shrimplin's that ten reckless years of his life
had been spent in the West, the far West, the West of cow-towns and bad
men; that for this decade he had flourished on bucking broncos and in
gilded bars, the admired hero of a variety of deft homicides. Out of his
inner consciousness he had evolved a sprightly epic of which he was the
central figure, a figure, according to Custer's firm belief, sinister,
fateful with big jingling silver spurs at his heels and iron on his
hips, whose specialty was manslaughter.

In the creation of his romance he might almost be said to have acquired