air of superiority, that conscious patronage, as now, when
Uncle Clem, breaking off his conversation with the invalid in the next
room about the price of mutton on the hoof and the chances of the
Democrats' getting in again, stopped fiddling with his thick plated
watch chain and grinned across at big Tom to fling his undeviating
flower of wit:

"Runnin' all to beef, hain't ye, Tom, boy? Come on down to the market
an' we'll git some A-1 sirloins outen ye, anyway. Do your folks that
much good."

It was things like this that made Luke want to burn, poison, or shoot
Uncle Clem. He was not a bad man, Uncle Clem--a thick sandy chunk of a
fellow, given to bright neckties and a jocosity that took no account of
feelings. Shaped a little like a log, he was--back of his head and back
of his neck--all of a width. Little lively green eyes and bristling red
mustaches. A complexion a society bud might have envied. Why was it a
butcher got so pink and white and sleek? Pork, that's what Uncle Clem
resembled, Luke thought--a nice, smooth, pale-fleshed pig, ready to be
skinned.

His turn next! When crops and politics failed and the joke at poor
Tom--Tom always giggled inordinately at it, too--had come off, there was
sure to be the one about himself and the lame duck next. To divert
himself of bored expectation, Luke turned to stare at his cousin,
S'norta.

S'norta, sitting quietly in a chair across the room, was seldom known to
be emotional. Indeed, there were times when Luke wondered whether she
had not died in her chair. One had that feeling about S'norta, so
motionless was she, so uncompromising of glance. She was very
prosperous-looking, as became the heiress to the Cheesman meat
business--a fat little girl of twelve, dressed with a profusion of
ruffles, glass pearls, gilt buckles, and thick tawny curls that might
have come straight from the sausage hook in her papa's shop.

S'norta had been consecrated early in life to the unusual. Even her name
was not ordinary. Her romantic mother, immersed in the prenatal period
in the hair-lifting adventures of one Senorita Carmena, could think of
no lovelier appellation when her darling came than the first portion of
that sloe-eyed and restless lady's title, which she conceived to be
baptismal; and in due course she had conferred it, together with her own
pronunciation, on her child. A bold man stopping in at Uncle Clem's
market, as Luke knew, had once tried to pronounce and expound the