crick in his back that he got loading hay one hot day in Huron
County, Ohio, 'before the army.' The 'old trouble,' as you will
remember, bothers your pa a good deal, and your ma thinks that his
father must have been a pretty hard-hearted man to let him work so hard
when he was a boy. Your pa likes to have you and your ma think that when
he was a boy he did nothing but work and go to prayer-meeting and go
around doing noble deeds out of the third reader, but a number of the
old boys of the Eleventh Kansas, who knew your pa in the sixties, are
prepared to do a lot of forgetting for him whenever he asks it. The
truth about your pa's 'old trouble' is that he was down at Fort
Leavenworth just after the close of the war, and after filling up on
laughing-water at a saloon, he got into a fight with the bartender, was
kicked out of the saloon, and slept in the alley all night. That was his
last whizz. He took an invoice of his stock and found that he had some
of the most valuable experiences that a man can acquire, and he
straightened up and came out here and grew up with the country. Your ma
met him at a basket-meeting, and she thought he was an extremely pious
young man, and they made a go of it.

"So, Bub, when you think that by breathing on your coat sleeve to kill
the whisky you can fool your pa, you are wrong. Your pa in his day ate
three carloads of cardamon seeds and cloves and used listerine by the
barrel. He knew which was the creaky step on the stairs in his father's
house and used to avoid it coming in at night, just as you do now, and
he knows just what you are doing. More than that, your pa speaks from
the bitterest kind of experience when he pleads with you to quit. It is
no goody-goody talk of a mutton-headed old deacon that he is giving you;
it has taken him a year to get his courage up to speak to you, and every
word that he speaks is boiled out of an agony of bitter memories. He
knows where boys that start as you are starting end if they don't turn
back. Your pa turned, but he recollects the career of the Blue boys, who
are divided between the penitentiary, the poor-house and the southwest
corner of hell; he recalls the Winklers--one dead, one a porter in a
saloon in Peoria, one crazy; and he looks at you, and it seems to him
that he must take you in his arms as he did when you were a little child
in the prairie fire, and run to safety with you. And when he talks to
you with his bashful, halting speech, you ju