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Page 57
"Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine. I was clerking
there then for Brady & Murchison, wholesale dry-goods and ranch
supplies. Willie and I belonged to the same german club and athletic
association and military company. He played the triangle in our
serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the welkin three nights
a week somewhere in town.
"Willie jibed with his name considerable. He weighed about as much as
a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a 'where-
is-Mary?' expression on his features so plain that you could almost
see the wool growing on him.
"And yet you couldn't fence him away from the girls with barbed wire.
You know that kind of young fellows-a kind of a mixture of fools and
angels-they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never
fail to tread when they get the chance. He was always on hand when 'a
joyful occasion was had,' as the morning paper would say, looking as
happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw
oyster served with sweet pickles. He danced like he had hind hobbles
on; and he had a vocabulary of about three hundred and fifty words
that he made stretch over four germans a week, and plagiarized from to
get him through two ice-cream suppers and a Sunday-night call. He
seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive
plant, and a member of a stranded Two Orphans company.
"I'll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial make-up,
and then I'll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.
"Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of style.
His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary. His eyes
were the same blue shade as the china dog's on the right-hand corner
of your Aunt Ellen's mantelpiece. He took things as they come, and I
never felt any hostility against him. I let him live, and so did
others.
"But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots and
lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest,
and prettiest girl in San Augustine. I tell you, she had the blackest
eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing-- Oh, no, you're
off--I wasn't a victim. I might have been, but I knew better. I kept
out. Joe Granberry was It from the start. He had everybody else beat
a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake and mound. But,
anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino, fall-clip fleece, sacked
and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone.
"One night there was an ice-cream sociable at Mrs. Colonel
Spraggins', in San Augustine. We fellows had a big room up-stairs
opened up for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair
and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweat-bands
of our hats-in short, a room to fix up in just like they have
everywhere at high-toned doings. A little farther down the hall was
the girls' room, which they used to powder up in, and so forth.
Downstairs we--that is, the San Augustine Social Cotillion and
Merrymakers' Club--had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our
dance was going on.
"Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our--cloak-room, I believe
we called it when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way
down-stairs from the girls' room. Willie was standing before the
mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot on
his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble. Myra was always
full of life and devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in our
door. She certainly was good-looking. But I knew how Joe Granberry
stood with her. So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after her
and following her around. He had a system of persistence that didn't
coincide with pale hair and light eyes.
"'Hello, Willie!' says Myra. 'What are you doing to yourself in the
glass?'
"I'm trying to look fly,' says Willie.
"'Well, you never could be fly,' says Myra, with her special laugh,
which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an
empty canteen against my saddle-horn.
"I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone. He had a kind of a
lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as
you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what
she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas of
self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could
scarcely imagine.
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