the strong, good-hearted, manly boy, better than all the other
sons in the world. She believed in him; he worshipped her; and it
was not until he was well up in the twenties that he stopped to
think that she was not the only good woman in the world who deserved
respect.

Up in Albany lived the Widow Coleman and her two pretty daughters.
Mrs. Coleman's husband died on the battlefield, and she, like many
women in the North and the South, after years of moderate prosperity,
was compelled to support herself and her family. She had been
a pretty woman, and one readily could see where her daughters got
their personal attractiveness. Not many doors from the boisterous
little eating-house in which the railroad men snatched their meals
as they went through, the widow opened a book and newsstand. Her
home was on the floor above the stand, and it was there she brought
her little girls to womanhood. Good-looking, harum-scarum Dave
Cable saw Frances Coleman one evening as he dropped in to purchase
a newspaper. It was at the end of June, in 1876, and the country
was in the throes of excitement over the first news of the Custer
massacre on the Little Big Horn River.

Cable was deeply interested, for he had seen Custer fighting at
the front in the sixties. Frances Coleman, the prettiest girl he
had ever seen, sold him the newspaper. After that, he seldom went
through Albany without visiting the little book shop.

Tempestuous, even arrogant in love, Cable, once convinced that he
cared for her, lost no time in claiming her, whether or no. In less
than three months after the Custer massacre they were married.