ide. When we dared to call at the house again May Martha Mangum and
her father were gone. Gone! The house they had rented was closed. Their
little store of goods and chattels was gone also.

And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha--not a white,
fluttering note pinned to the hawthorn-bush; not a chalk-mark on the
gate-post nor a post-card in the post-office to give us a clew.

For two months Goodloe Banks and I--separately--tried every scheme
we could think of to track the runaways. We used our friendship and
influence with the ticket-agent, with livery-stable men, railroad
conductors, and our one lone, lorn constable, but without results.

Then we became better friends and worse enemies than ever. We
forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon every afternoon after
work, and played dominoes, and laid conversational traps to find out
from each other if anything had been discovered. That is the way of
rivals.

Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own learning
and putting me in the class that was reading "Poor Jane Ray, her bird
is dead, she cannot play." Well, I rather liked Goodloe, and I had
a contempt for his college learning, and I was always regarded as
good-natured, so I kept my temper. And I was trying to find out if he
knew anything about May Martha, so I endured his society.

In talking things over one afternoon he said to me:

"Suppose you do find her, Ed, whereby would you profit? Miss Mangum has
a mind. Perhaps it is yet uncultured, but she is destined for higher
things than you could give her. I have talked with no one who seemed to
appreciate more the enchantment of the ancient poets and writers and
the modern cults that have assimilated and expended their philosophy of
life. Don't you think you are wasting your time looking for her?"

"My idea," said I, "of a happy home is an eight-room house in a grove of
live-oaks by the side of a _charco_ on a Texas prairie. A piano," I went
on, "with an automatic player in the sitting-room, three thousand head
of cattle under fence for a starter, a buckboard and ponies always
hitched at a post for 'the missus'--and May Martha Mangum to spend the
profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, and put my
slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be found of
evenings. That," said I, "is what is to be; and a fig--a dried, Smyrna,
dago-stand fig--for your curriculums, cults, and philosophy."

"