f Europe. Even then she'd be
running her chances, by Ned! They grew indignant when she refused to
have their sons. They took it up with the colonel, they remonstrated,
they went into pedigrees and offered to produce documents.

There was Shelley Bryant's father, a fine, straight-backed old gentleman
with beard as white as the plumage of a dove. His son was a small,
red-faced, sandy-haired, pale-eyed chap with spaces between his big
front teeth. He traded in horses, and sometimes made as much as fifteen
dollars on a Saturday. His magnitude of glory and manly dignity as
compared to his father's was about that of a tin pan to the sun.

When Alice refused Shelley, the old general--he had won the title in
war, unlike Colonel Price--went to the colonel and laid the matter off
with a good deal of emphasis and flourishing of his knotted black stick.
If a woman demanded blood, said the general, where could she aspire
above Shelley? And beyond blood, what was there to be considered when it
came to marrying and breeding up a race of men?

Champion that he was of blood and lineage, Colonel Price was nettled by
the old gentleman's presumptuous urging of his unlikely son's cause.

"I am of the opinion, sir," Colonel Price replied, with a good bit of
hauteur and heat, "that my daughter always has given, and always will
give, the preference to brains!"

General Bryant had not spoken to the colonel for two months after that,
and his son Shelley had proved his superiority by going off to Kansas
City and taking a job reading gas-meters.

Colonel Price went to the mantel and filled his pipe from the
tobacco-jar. He sat smoking for a little while, his paper on his knee.

"The lad's in deeper trouble, I'm afraid, than he understands," said he
at last, as if continuing his reflections aloud, "and it may take a
bigger heave to pull him out than any of us think right now."

"Oh, I hope not," said Alice, looking across at him suddenly, her eyes
wide open with concern. "I understood that this was just a preliminary
proceeding, a sort of formality to conform to the legal requirements,
and that he would be released when they brought him up before Judge
Maxwell. At least, that was the impression that he gave me of the case
himself."

"Joe is an unsophisticated and honest lad," said the colonel. "There is
something in the case that he refused to disclose or discuss before the
coroner's jury, they say. I don't know what it is, but it's in rel