e came bounding up to the house one of the most
marvellous Limousine touring cars that ever drew up at the home of a
judge on a modest salary of three thousand dollars. When it stopped
there sprang from it an excited man in a long sealskin coat--worn not
for the luxury of it at all but from the sheer chilliness of the autumn
evening. And it was, as of course you know, Pupkin's father. He had seen
the news of his son's death in the evening paper in the city. They drove
the car through, so the chauffeur said, in two hours and a quarter, and
behind them there was to follow a special trainload of detectives and
emergency men, but Pupkin senior had cancelled all that by telegram half
way up when he heard that Peter was still living.

For a moment as his eye rested on young Pupkin you would almost have
imagined, had you not known that he came from the Maritime Provinces,
that there were tears in them and that he was about to hug his son to
his heart. But if he didn't hug Peter to his heart, he certainly did
within a few moments clasp Zena to it, in that fine fatherly way in
which they clasp pretty girls in the Maritime Provinces. The strangest
thing is that Pupkin senior seemed to understand the whole situation
without any explanations at all.

Judge Pepperleigh, I think, would have shaken both of Pupkin senior's
arms off when he saw him; and when you heard them call one another
"Ned" and "Phillip" it made you feel that they were boys again attending
classes together at the old law school in the city.

If Pupkin thought that his father wouldn't make a hit in Mariposa,
it only showed his ignorance. Pupkin senior sat there on the judge's
verandah smoking a corn cob pipe as if he had never heard of Havana
cigars in his life. In the three days that he spent in Mariposa that
autumn, he went in and out of Jeff Thorpe's barber shop and Eliot's drug
store, shot black ducks in the marsh and played poker every evening at
a hundred matches for a cent as if he had never lived any other life in
all his days. They had to send him telegrams enough to fill a satchel to
make him come away.

So Pupkin and Zena in due course of time were married, and went to live
in one of the enchanted houses on the hillside in the newer part of the
town, where you may find them to this day.

You may see Pupkin there at any time cutting enchanted grass on a little
lawn in as gaudy a blazer as ever.

But if you step up to speak to him or walk with him int