on, Buck, I'm just wild to have some excitement.'

"I went in the back room with Perry. Before we closed the door, I
says to Mike:

"'Don't ever let it straggle out from under your hat that you seen
Buck Caperton fraternal with sarsaparilla or _persona grata_ with a
checker-board, or I'll make a swallow-fork in your other ear.'

"I locked the door and me and Perry played checkers. To see that
poor old humiliated piece of household bric-a-brac sitting there and
sniggering out loud whenever he jumped a man, and all obnoxious with
animation when he got into my king row, would have made a sheep-dog
sick with mortification. Him that was once satisfied only when he
was pegging six boards at keno or giving the faro dealers nervous
prostration--to see him pushing them checkers about like Sally
Louisa at a school-children's party--why, I was all smothered up
with mortification.

"And I sits there playing the black men, all sweating for fear
somebody I knew would find it out. And I thinks to myself some about
this marrying business, and how it seems to be the same kind of a
game as that Mrs. Delilah played. She give her old man a hair cut,
and everybody knows what a man's head looks like after a woman cuts
his hair. And then when the Pharisees came around to guy him he was
so 'shamed that he went to work and kicked the whole house down on
top of the whole outfit. 'Them married men,' thinks I, 'lose all
their spirit and instinct for riot and foolishness. They won't
drink, they won't buck the tiger, they won't even fight. What do
they want to go and stay married for?' I asks myself.

"But Perry seems to be having hilarity in considerable quantities.

"'Buck old hoss,' says he, 'isn't this just the hell-roaringest time
we ever had in our lives? I don't know when I've been stirred up so.
You see, I've been sticking pretty close to home since I married,
and I haven't been on a spree in a long time.'

"'Spree!' Yes, that's what he called it. Playing checkers in the
back room of the Gray Mule! I suppose it did seem to him a little
immoral and nearer to a prolonged debauch than standing over six
tomato plants with a sprinkling-pot.

"Every little bit Perry looks at his watch and says:

"'I got to be home, you know, Buck, at seven.'

"'All right,' I'd say. 'Romp along and move. This here excitement's
killing me. If I don't reform some, and loosen up the strain of this
checkered dissipation I won't have a nerve left.'

"It