mony! This from Buck Caperton! But I maintain that the
cigarettes were impeccable, and crave absolution for myself.

"We just brought in Jim and Bud Granberry," said Buck. "Train
robbing, you know. Held up the Aransas Pass last month. We caught
'em in the Twenty-Mile pear flat, south of the Nueces."

"Have much trouble corralling them?" I asked, for here was the meat
that my hunger for epics craved.

"Some," said Buck; and then, during a little pause, his thoughts
stampeded off the trail. "It's kind of queer about women," he went
on, "and the place they're supposed to occupy in botany. If I was
asked to classify them I'd say they was a human loco weed. Ever see
a bronc that had been chewing loco? Ride him up to a puddle of water
two feet wide, and he'll give a snort and fall back on you. It looks
as big as the Mississippi River to him. Next trip he'd walk into a
canon a thousand feet deep thinking it was a prairie-dog hole. Same
way with a married man.

"I was thinking of Perry Rountree, that used to be my sidekicker
before he committed matrimony. In them days me and Perry hated
indisturbances of any kind. We roamed around considerable, stirring
up the echoes and making 'em attend to business. Why, when me and
Perry wanted to have some fun in a town it was a picnic for the
census takers. They just counted the marshal's posse that it took to
subdue us, and there was your population. But then there came along
this Mariana Goodnight girl and looked at Perry sideways, and he was
all bridle-wise and saddle-broke before you could skin a yearling.

"I wasn't even asked to the wedding. I reckon the bride had my
pedigree and the front elevation of my habits all mapped out, and
she decided that Perry would trot better in double harness without
any unconverted mustang like Buck Caperton whickering around on the
matrimonial range. So it was six months before I saw Perry again.

"One day I was passing on the edge of town, and I see something
like a man in a little yard by a little house with a sprinkling-pot
squirting water on a rose-bush. Seemed to me, I'd seen something
like it before, and I stopped at the gate, trying to figure out its
brands. 'Twas not Perry Rountree, but 'twas the kind of a curdled
jellyfish matrimony had made out of him.

"Homicide was what that Mariana had perpetrated. He was looking
well enough, but he had on a white collar and shoes, and you could
tell in a minute that he'd speak polite and pay taxe