nd and you'll never be anything
different. I ought to fire you--ought to of done it long ago; but I fire
my own men--they don't fire theirselfs. Go eat."

"Can't you eat none now, too, Colonel?" I ast him.

"Not yet," says he. "Maybe after a while."

I went out and got the first square meal I'd had for two days. When I
couldn't eat no more right then, I sort of taken a pasear around the
house, which was looking like hell by now. When I come back I seen a
electric brougham out at our front yard. Tom Kimberly was just coming
in. Out in the brougham I seen two girls. One was Katherine and the
other seemed like it was Sally Henderson.

"I shan't try to say anything, Mr. Wright," says Tom Kimberly after a
while to the old man--"only, whatever Bonnie Bell's done, she's done
because she's thought it was best. She's tried to do what was honest and
fair. If she didn't love me it wouldn't have been fair to marry me. She
never said she'd marry me; she said she'd tell me sometime. It was her
right to decide for herself. I wish her well, hard as that is for me to
say."

"Yes; I know," says the old man. "She was a fine girl, Tom. But she
ain't the only one in the world at that; and she had freckles,
some--they get worse when they get old. There's plenty girls in the
world handsomer'n her--always is plenty. If I hadn't happened to marry
her ma, Tom, I'd of married any other of half a dozen more girls, like,
just as they come along. They're all alike, anyways, you see; so don't
take it hard."

He was a damn old liar! He never would of married no other woman in the
world but the one he did marry, and he knew it; but he was trying to
make Tom feel more comfortable. So Tom he set there and lit a cigarette.
His trousers was right short, and when he hitched 'em up I seen he wore
garters--blue ones. I was reconciled then.

After a time he got up and said good-by to us. Then he went out to where
the brougham was standing in the street. One of the girls inside opened
the door for him to get in--maybe Sally Henderson.

XXVIII

THE HOLE IN THE WALL

A paper come out, with a picture of the Wisner fence, showing the place
where the hole had been broke through. It was marked with a star to show
where it was at. The man that wrote the story said here was a modern
case of Pyramus and Thisbe. Who they was I don't know; but like enough
they lived on the South Side. There was pictures this time of our
William and their Emmy. I didn'