[HotW] Fixup dashes

src/epub/text/chapter-1.xhtml

@@ -19,12 +19,12 @@
 			<p>“What?” asked Webb, with a hopeful look in his pale-blue eyes.</p>
 			<p>“You’re a prince-consort.”</p>
 			<p>“Go easy,” said Webb. “I never blackguarded you none.”</p>
-			<p>“It’s a title,” explained Baldy, “up among the picture-cards; but it don’t take no tricks. I’ll tell you, Webb. It’s a brand they’re got for certain animals in Europe. Say that you or me or one of them Dutch dukes marries in a royal family. Well, by and by our wife gets to be queen. Are we king? Not in a million years. At the coronation ceremonies we march between little casino and the Ninth Grand Custodian of the Royal Hall Bedchamber. The only use we are is to appear in photographs, and accept the responsibility for the heir- apparent. That ain’t any square deal. Yes, sir, Webb, you’re a prince- consort; and if I was you, I’d start a interregnum or a habeus corpus or somethin’; and I’d be king if I had to turn from the bottom of the deck.”</p>
+			<p>“It’s a title,” explained Baldy, “up among the picture-cards; but it don’t take no tricks. I’ll tell you, Webb. It’s a brand they’re got for certain animals in Europe. Say that you or me or one of them Dutch dukes marries in a royal family. Well, by and by our wife gets to be queen. Are we king? Not in a million years. At the coronation ceremonies we march between little casino and the Ninth Grand Custodian of the Royal Hall Bedchamber. The only use we are is to appear in photographs, and accept the responsibility for the heir-rpparent. That ain’t any square deal. Yes, sir, Webb, you’re a prince-eonsort; and if I was you, I’d start a interregnum or a habeus corpus or somethin’; and I’d be king if I had to turn from the bottom of the deck.”</p>
 			<p>Baldy emptied his glass to the ratification of his Warwick pose.</p>
 			<p>“Baldy,” said Webb, solemnly, “me and you punched cows in the same outfit for years. We been runnin’ on the same range, and ridin’ the same trails since we was boys. I wouldn’t talk about my family affairs to nobody but you. You was line-rider on the Nopalito Ranch when I married Santa McAllister. I was foreman then; but what am I now? I don’t amount to a knot in a stake rope.”</p>
 			<p>“When old McAllister was the cattle king of West Texas,” continued Baldy with Satanic sweetness, “you was some tallow. You had as much to say on the ranch as he did.”</p>
 			<p>“I did,” admitted Webb, “up to the time he found out I was tryin’ to get my rope over Santa’s head. Then he kept me out on the range as far from the ranch-house as he could. When the old man died they commenced to call Santa the ‘cattle queen.’ I’m boss of the cattle⁠—that’s all. She ‘tends to all the business; she handles all the money; I can’t sell even a beef-steer to a party of campers, myself. Santa’s the ‘queen’; and I’m <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Nobody.”</p>
-			<p>“I’d be king if I was you,” repeated Baldy Woods, the royalist. “When a man marries a queen he ought to grade up with her⁠—on the hoof⁠—dressed⁠—dried⁠—corned⁠—any old way from the chaparral to the packing- house. Lots of folks thinks it’s funny, Webb, that you don’t have the say-so on the Nopalito. I ain’t reflectin’ none on Miz Yeager⁠—she’s the finest little lady between the Rio Grande and next Christmas⁠—but a man ought to be boss of his own camp.”</p>
+			<p>“I’d be king if I was you,” repeated Baldy Woods, the royalist. “When a man marries a queen he ought to grade up with her⁠—on the hoof⁠—dressed⁠—dried⁠—corned⁠—any old way from the chaparral to the packing-gouse. Lots of folks thinks it’s funny, Webb, that you don’t have the say-so on the Nopalito. I ain’t reflectin’ none on Miz Yeager⁠—she’s the finest little lady between the Rio Grande and next Christmas⁠—but a man ought to be boss of his own camp.”</p>
 			<p>The smooth, brown face of Yeager lengthened to a mask of wounded melancholy. With that expression, and his rumpled yellow hair and guileless blue eyes, he might have been likened to a schoolboy whose leadership had been usurped by a youngster of superior strength. But his active and sinewy seventy-two inches, and his girded revolvers forbade the comparison.</p>
 			<p>“What was that you called me, Baldy?” he asked. “What kind of a concert was it?”</p>
 			<p>“A ‘consort,’ ” corrected Baldy⁠—“a ‘prince-consort.’ It’s a kind of short-card pseudonym. You come in sort of between Jack-high and a four-card flush.”</p>
@@ -34,15 +34,15 @@
 			<p>The two compañeros mounted their ponies and trotted away from the little railroad settlement, where they had foregathered in the thirsty morning.</p>
 			<p>At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting cigarette. For miles they had ridden in silence save for the soft drum of the ponies’ hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of the chaparral against their wooden stirrups. But in Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. So, without apology, Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles away.</p>
 			<p>“You remember, yourself, Baldy, that there was a time when Santa wasn’t quite so independent. You remember the days when old McAllister was keepin’ us apart, and how she used to send me the sign that she wanted to see me? Old man Mac promised to make me look like a colander if I ever come in gunshot of the ranch. You remember the sign she used to send, Baldy⁠—the heart with a cross inside of it?”</p>
-			<p>“Me?” cried Baldy, with intoxicated archness. “You old sugar-stealing coyote! Don’t I remember! Why, you dad-blamed old long-horned turtle- dove, the boys in camp was all cognoscious about them hiroglyphs. The ‘gizzard-and-crossbones’ we used to call it. We used to see ’em on truck that was sent out from the ranch. They was marked in charcoal on the sacks of flour and in lead-pencil on the newspapers. I see one of ’em once chalked on the back of a new cook that old man McAllister sent out from the ranch⁠—danged if I didn’t.”</p>
+			<p>“Me?” cried Baldy, with intoxicated archness. “You old sugar-stealing coyote! Don’t I remember! Why, you dad-blamed old long-horned turtle-eove, the boys in camp was all cognoscious about them hiroglyphs. The ‘gizzard-and-crossbones’ we used to call it. We used to see ’em on truck that was sent out from the ranch. They was marked in charcoal on the sacks of flour and in lead-pencil on the newspapers. I see one of ’em once chalked on the back of a new cook that old man McAllister sent out from the ranch⁠—danged if I didn’t.”</p>
 			<p>“Santa’s father,” explained Webb gently, “got her to promise that she wouldn’t write to me or send me any word. That heart-and-cross sign was her scheme. Whenever she wanted to see me in particular she managed to put that mark on somethin’ at the ranch that she knew I’d see. And I never laid eyes on it but what I burnt the wind for the ranch the same night. I used to see her in that coma mott back of the little horse-corral.”</p>
 			<p>“We knowed it,” chanted Baldy; “but we never let on. We was all for you. We knowed why you always kept that fast paint in camp. And when we see that gizzard-and-crossbones figured out on the truck from the ranch we knowed old Pinto was goin’ to eat up miles that night instead of grass. You remember Scurry⁠—that educated horse-wrangler we had⁠—the college fellow that tangle-foot drove to the range? Whenever Scurry saw that come-meet-your-honey brand on anything from the ranch, he’d wave his hand like that, and say, ‘Our friend Lee Andrews will again swim the Hell’s point tonight.’ ”</p>
 			<p>“The last time Santa sent me the sign,” said Webb, “was once when she was sick. I noticed it as soon as I hit camp, and I galloped Pinto forty mile that night. She wasn’t at the coma mott. I went to the house; and old McAllister met me at the door. ‘Did you come here to get killed?’ says he; ‘I’ll disoblige you for once. I just started a Mexican to bring you. Santa wants you. Go in that room and see her. And then come out here and see me.’</p>
 			<p>“Santa was lyin’ in bed pretty sick. But she gives out a kind of a smile, and her hand and mine lock horns, and I sets down by the bed⁠—mud and spurs and chaps and all. ‘I’ve heard you ridin’ across the grass for hours, Webb,’ she says. ‘I was sure you’d come. You saw the sign?’ she whispers. ‘The minute I hit camp,’ says I. ”Twas marked on the bag of potatoes and onions.’ ‘They’re always together,’ says she, soft like⁠—‘always together in life.’ ‘They go well together,’ I says, ‘in a stew.’ ‘I mean hearts and crosses,’ says Santa. ‘Our sign⁠—to love and to suffer⁠—that’s what they mean.’</p>
 			<p>“And there was old Doc Musgrove amusin’ himself with whisky and a palm-leaf fan. And by and by Santa goes to sleep; and Doc feels her forehead; and he says to me: ‘You’re not such a bad febrifuge. But you’d better slide out now; for the diagnosis don’t call for you in regular doses. The little lady’ll be all right when she wakes up.’</p>
 			<p>“I seen old McAllister outside. ‘She’s asleep,’ says I. ‘And now you can start in with your colander-work. Take your time; for I left my gun on my saddle-horn.’</p>
-			<p>“Old Mac laughs, and he says to me: ‘Pumpin’ lead into the best ranch- boss in West Texas don’t seem to me good business policy. I don’t know where I could get as good a one. It’s the son-in-law idea, Webb, that makes me admire for to use you as a target. You ain’t my idea for a member of the family. But I can use you on the Nopalito if you’ll keep outside of a radius with the ranch-house in the middle of it. You go upstairs and lay down on a cot, and when you get some sleep we’ll talk it over.’ ”</p>
-			<p>Baldy Woods pulled down his hat, and uncurled his leg from his saddle- horn. Webb shortened his rein, and his pony danced, anxious to be off. The two men shook hands with Western ceremony.</p>
+			<p>“Old Mac laughs, and he says to me: ‘Pumpin’ lead into the best ranch-hoss in West Texas don’t seem to me good business policy. I don’t know where I could get as good a one. It’s the son-in-law idea, Webb, that makes me admire for to use you as a target. You ain’t my idea for a member of the family. But I can use you on the Nopalito if you’ll keep outside of a radius with the ranch-house in the middle of it. You go upstairs and lay down on a cot, and when you get some sleep we’ll talk it over.’ ”</p>
+			<p>Baldy Woods pulled down his hat, and uncurled his leg from his saddle-eorn. Webb shortened his rein, and his pony danced, anxious to be off. The two men shook hands with Western ceremony.</p>
 			<p>“Adios, Baldy,” said Webb, “I’m glad I seen you and had this talk.”</p>
 			<p>With a pounding rush that sounded like the rise of a covey of quail, the riders sped away toward different points of the compass. A hundred yards on his route Baldy reined in on the top of a bare knoll, and emitted a yell. He swayed on his horse; had he been on foot, the earth would have risen and conquered him; but in the saddle he was a master of equilibrium, and laughed at whisky, and despised the centre of gravity.</p>
 			<p>Webb turned in his saddle at the signal.</p>
@@ -71,7 +71,7 @@
 			<p>“Kingdoms and queendoms,” said Webb, “don’t suit me unless I am in the pictures, too. I punch the cattle and you wear the crown. All right. I’d rather be High Lord Chancellor of a cow-camp than the eight-spot in a queen-high flush. It’s your ranch; and Barber gets the beeves.”</p>
 			<p>Webb’s horse was tied to the rack. He walked into the house and brought out his roll of blankets that he never took with him except on long rides, and his “slicker,” and his longest stake-rope of plaited rawhide. These he began to tie deliberately upon his saddle. Santa, a little pale, followed him.</p>
 			<p>Webb swung up into the saddle. His serious, smooth face was without expression except for a stubborn light that smouldered in his eyes.</p>
-			<p>“There’s a herd of cows and calves,” said he, “near the Hondo water- hole on the Frio that ought to be moved away from timber. Lobos have killed three of the calves. I forgot to leave orders. You’d better tell Simms to attend to it.”</p>
+			<p>“There’s a herd of cows and calves,” said he, “near the Hondo water-role on the Frio that ought to be moved away from timber. Lobos have killed three of the calves. I forgot to leave orders. You’d better tell Simms to attend to it.”</p>
 			<p>Santa laid a hand on the horse’s bridle, and looked her husband in the eye.</p>
 			<p>“Are you going to leave me, Webb?” she asked quietly.</p>
 			<p>“I am going to be a man again,” he answered.</p>

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@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
 			</h2>
 			<p>“The dispositions of woman,” said Jeff Peters, after various opinions on the subject had been advanced, “run, regular, to diversions. What a woman wants is what you’re out of. She wants more of a thing when it’s scarce. She likes to have souvenirs of things that never happened. She likes to be reminded of things she never heard of. A one-sided view of objects is disjointing to the female composition.</p>
 			<p>“ ’Tis a misfortune of mine, begotten by nature and travel,” continued Jeff, looking thoughtfully between his elevated feet at the grocery stove, “to look deeper into some subjects than most people do. I’ve breathed gasoline smoke talking to street crowds in nearly every town in the United States. I’ve held ’em spellbound with music, oratory, sleight of hand, and prevarications, while I’ve sold ’em jewelry, medicine, soap, hair tonic, and junk of other nominations. And during my travels, as a matter of recreation and expiation, I’ve taken cognisance some of women. It takes a man a lifetime to find out about one particular woman; but if he puts in, say, ten years, industrious and curious, he can acquire the general rudiments of the sex. One lesson I picked up was when I was working the West with a line of Brazilian diamonds and a patent fire kindler just after my trip from Savannah down through the cotton belt with Dalby’s Anti-explosive Lamp Oil Powder. ’Twas when the Oklahoma country was in first bloom. Guthrie was rising in the middle of it like a lump of self-raising dough. It was a boom town of the regular kind⁠—you stood in line to get a chance to wash your face; if you ate over ten minutes you had a lodging bill added on; if you slept on a plank at night they charged it to you as board the next morning.</p>
-			<p>“By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering choice places wherein to feed. So I looked around and found a proposition that exactly cut the mustard. I found a restaurant tent just opened up by an outfit that had drifted in on the tail of the boom. They had knocked together a box house, where they lived and did the cooking, and served the meals in a tent pitched against the side. That tent was joyful with placards on it calculated to redeem the world-worn pilgrim from the sinfulness of boarding houses and pick-me- up hotels. ‘Try Mother’s Homemade Biscuits,’ ‘What’s the Matter with Our Apple Dumplings and Hard Sauce?’ ‘Hot Cakes and Maple Syrup Like You Ate When a Boy,’ ‘Our Fried Chicken Never Was Heard to Crow’⁠—there was literature doomed to please the digestions of man! I said to myself that mother’s wandering boy should munch there that night. And so it came to pass. And there is where I contracted my case of Mame Dugan.</p>
+			<p>“By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering choice places wherein to feed. So I looked around and found a proposition that exactly cut the mustard. I found a restaurant tent just opened up by an outfit that had drifted in on the tail of the boom. They had knocked together a box house, where they lived and did the cooking, and served the meals in a tent pitched against the side. That tent was joyful with placards on it calculated to redeem the world-worn pilgrim from the sinfulness of boarding houses and pick-me-ep hotels. ‘Try Mother’s Homemade Biscuits,’ ‘What’s the Matter with Our Apple Dumplings and Hard Sauce?’ ‘Hot Cakes and Maple Syrup Like You Ate When a Boy,’ ‘Our Fried Chicken Never Was Heard to Crow’⁠—there was literature doomed to please the digestions of man! I said to myself that mother’s wandering boy should munch there that night. And so it came to pass. And there is where I contracted my case of Mame Dugan.</p>
 			<p>“Old Man Dugan was six feet by one of Indiana loafer, and he spent his time sitting on his shoulder blades in a rocking-chair in the shanty memorialising the great corn-crop failure of ’96. Ma Dugan did the cooking, and Mame waited on the table.</p>
 			<p>“As soon as I saw Mame I knew there was a mistake in the census reports. There wasn’t but one girl in the United States. When you come to specifications it isn’t easy. She was about the size of an angel, and she had eyes, and ways about her. When you come to the kind of a girl she was, you’ll find a belt of ’em reaching from the Brooklyn Bridge west as far as the courthouse in Council Bluffs, Ia. They earn their own living in stores, restaurants, factories, and offices. They’re chummy and honest and free and tender and sassy, and they look life straight in the eye. They’ve met man face to face, and discovered that he’s a poor creature. They’ve dropped to it that the reports in the Seaside Library about his being a fairy prince lack confirmation.</p>
 			<p>“Mame was that sort. She was full of life and fun, and breezy; she passed the repartee with the boarders quick as a wink; you’d have smothered laughing. I am disinclined to make excavations into the insides of a personal affection. I am glued to the theory that the diversions and discrepancies of the indisposition known as love should be as private a sentiment as a toothbrush. ’Tis my opinion that the biographies of the heart should be confined with the historical romances of the liver to the advertising pages of the magazines. So, you’ll excuse the lack of an itemised bill of my feelings toward Mame.</p>
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
 			<p>“So Collier and me begins the race; the grub department lays in new supplies; Mame waits on us, jolly and kind and agreeable, and it looks like an even break, with Cupid and the cook working overtime in Dugan’s restaurant.</p>
 			<p>“ ’Twas one night in September when I got Mame to take a walk after supper when the things were all cleared away. We strolled out a distance and sat on a pile of lumber at the edge of town. Such opportunities was seldom, so I spoke my piece, explaining how the Brazilian diamonds and the fire kindler were laying up sufficient treasure to guarantee the happiness of two, and that both of ’em together couldn’t equal the light from somebody’s eyes, and that the name of Dugan should be changed to Peters, or reasons why not would be in order.</p>
 			<p>“Mame didn’t say anything right away. Directly she gave a kind of shudder, and I began to learn something.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry you spoke. I like you as well as any of them, but there isn’t a man in the world I’d ever marry, and there never will be. Do you know what a man is in my eye? He’s a tomb. He’s a sarcophagus for the interment of Beafsteakporkchopsliver’nbaconham- andeggs. He’s that and nothing more. For two years I’ve watched men eat, eat, eat, until they represent nothing on earth to me but ruminant bipeds. They’re absolutely nothing but something that goes in front of a knife and fork and plate at the table. They’re fixed that way in my mind and memory. I’ve tried to overcome it, but I can’t. I’ve heard girls rave about their sweethearts, but I never could understand it. A man and a sausage grinder and a pantry awake in me exactly the same sentiments. I went to a matinee once to see an actor the girls were crazy about. I got interested enough to wonder whether he liked his steak rare, medium, or well done, and his eggs over or straight up. That was all. No, Jeff; I’ll marry no man and see him sit at the breakfast table and eat, and come back to dinner and eat, and happen in again at supper to eat, eat, eat.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry you spoke. I like you as well as any of them, but there isn’t a man in the world I’d ever marry, and there never will be. Do you know what a man is in my eye? He’s a tomb. He’s a sarcophagus for the interment of Beafsteakporkchopsliver’nbaconham-mndeggs. He’s that and nothing more. For two years I’ve watched men eat, eat, eat, until they represent nothing on earth to me but ruminant bipeds. They’re absolutely nothing but something that goes in front of a knife and fork and plate at the table. They’re fixed that way in my mind and memory. I’ve tried to overcome it, but I can’t. I’ve heard girls rave about their sweethearts, but I never could understand it. A man and a sausage grinder and a pantry awake in me exactly the same sentiments. I went to a matinee once to see an actor the girls were crazy about. I got interested enough to wonder whether he liked his steak rare, medium, or well done, and his eggs over or straight up. That was all. No, Jeff; I’ll marry no man and see him sit at the breakfast table and eat, and come back to dinner and eat, and happen in again at supper to eat, eat, eat.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘But, Mame,’ says I, ‘it’ll wear off. You’ve had too much of it. You’ll marry some time, of course. Men don’t eat always.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘As far as my observation goes, they do. No, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.’ Mame turns, sudden, to animation and bright eyes. ‘There’s a girl named Susie Foster in Terre Haute, a chum of mine. She waits in the railroad eating house there. I worked two years in a restaurant in that town. Susie has it worse than I do, because the men who eat at railroad stations gobble. They try to flirt and gobble at the same time. Whew! Susie and I have it all planned out. We’re saving our money, and when we get enough we’re going to buy a little cottage and five acres we know of, and live together, and grow violets for the Eastern market. A man better not bring his appetite within a mile of that ranch.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Don’t girls ever⁠—’ I commenced, but Mame heads me off, sharp.</p>
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Hello, Curiosity,’ says I. ‘Get still a minute and let’s have a look at your freakship. How do you like being the willopus-wallopus or the bim-bam from Borneo, or whatever name you are denounced by in the sideshow business?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Jeff Peters,’ says Collier, in a weak voice. ‘Turn me loose, or I’ll slug you one. I’m in the extremest kind of a large hurry. Hands off!’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Tut, tut, Eddie,’ I answers, holding him hard; ‘let an old friend gaze on the exhibition of your curiousness. It’s an eminent graft you fell onto, my son. But don’t speak of assaults and battery, because you’re not fit. The best you’ve got is a lot of nerve and a mighty empty stomach.’ And so it was. The man was as weak as a vegetarian cat.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I’d argue this case with you, Jeff,’ says he, regretful in his style, ‘for an unlimited number of rounds if I had half an hour to train in and a slab of beefsteak two feet square to train with. Curse the man, I say, that invented the art of going foodless. May his soul in eternity be chained up within two feet of a bottomless pit of red- hot hash. I’m abandoning the conflict, Jeff; I’m deserting to the enemy. You’ll find Miss Dugan inside contemplating the only living mummy and the informed hog. She’s a fine girl, Jeff. I’d have beat you out if I could have kept up the grubless habit a little while longer. You’ll have to admit that the fasting dodge was aces-up for a while. I figured it out that way. But say, Jeff, it’s said that love makes the world go around. Let me tell you, the announcement lacks verification. It’s the wind from the dinner horn that does it. I love that Mame Dugan. I’ve gone six days without food in order to coincide with her sentiments. Only one bite did I have. That was when I knocked the tattooed man down with a war club and got a sandwich he was gobbling. The manager fined me all my salary; but salary wasn’t what I was after. ’Twas that girl. I’d give my life for her, but I’d endanger my immortal soul for a beef stew. Hunger is a horrible thing, Jeff. Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I’d argue this case with you, Jeff,’ says he, regretful in his style, ‘for an unlimited number of rounds if I had half an hour to train in and a slab of beefsteak two feet square to train with. Curse the man, I say, that invented the art of going foodless. May his soul in eternity be chained up within two feet of a bottomless pit of red-dot hash. I’m abandoning the conflict, Jeff; I’m deserting to the enemy. You’ll find Miss Dugan inside contemplating the only living mummy and the informed hog. She’s a fine girl, Jeff. I’d have beat you out if I could have kept up the grubless habit a little while longer. You’ll have to admit that the fasting dodge was aces-up for a while. I figured it out that way. But say, Jeff, it’s said that love makes the world go around. Let me tell you, the announcement lacks verification. It’s the wind from the dinner horn that does it. I love that Mame Dugan. I’ve gone six days without food in order to coincide with her sentiments. Only one bite did I have. That was when I knocked the tattooed man down with a war club and got a sandwich he was gobbling. The manager fined me all my salary; but salary wasn’t what I was after. ’Twas that girl. I’d give my life for her, but I’d endanger my immortal soul for a beef stew. Hunger is a horrible thing, Jeff. Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!’</p>
 			<p>“In such language Ed Collier discoursed to me, pathetic. I gathered the diagnosis that his affections and his digestions had been implicated in a scramble and the commissary had won out. I never disliked Ed Collier. I searched my internal admonitions of suitable etiquette to see if I could find a remark of a consoling nature, but there was none convenient.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’d be glad, now,’ says Ed, ‘if you’ll let me go. I’ve been hard hit, but I’ll hit the ration supply harder. I’m going to clean out every restaurant in town. I’m going to wade waist deep in sirloins and swim in ham and eggs. It’s an awful thing, Jeff Peters, for a man to come to this pass⁠—to give up his girl for something to eat⁠—it’s worse than that man Esau, that swapped his copyright for a partridge⁠—but then, hunger’s a fierce thing. You’ll excuse me, now, Jeff, for I smell a pervasion of ham frying in the distance, and my legs are crying out to stampede in that direction.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘A hearty meal to you, Ed Collier,’ I says to him, ‘and no hard feelings. For myself, I am projected to be an unseldom eater, and I have condolence for your predicaments.’</p>
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘You mean Ed Collier?’ says Mame.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I do,’ I answers; ‘and a pity it is that he has gone back to crime again. I met him outside the tent, and he exposed his intentions of devastating the food crop of the world. ’Tis enormously sad when one’s ideal descends from his pedestal to make a seventeen-year locust of himself.’</p>
 			<p>“Mame looked me straight in the eye until she had corkscrewed my reflections.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says she, ‘it isn’t quite like you to talk that way. I don’t care to hear Ed Collier ridiculed. A man may do ridiculous things, but they don’t look ridiculous to the girl he does ’em for. That was one man in a hundred. He stopped eating just to please me. I’d be hard- hearted and ungrateful if I didn’t feel kindly toward him. Could you do what he did?’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says she, ‘it isn’t quite like you to talk that way. I don’t care to hear Ed Collier ridiculed. A man may do ridiculous things, but they don’t look ridiculous to the girl he does ’em for. That was one man in a hundred. He stopped eating just to please me. I’d be hard-dearted and ungrateful if I didn’t feel kindly toward him. Could you do what he did?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I know,’ says I, seeing the point, ‘I’m condemned. I can’t help it. The brand of the consumer is upon my brow. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Eve settled that business for me when she made the dicker with the snake. I fell from the fire into the frying-pan. I guess I’m the Champion Feaster of the Universe.’ I spoke humble, and Mame mollified herself a little.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Ed Collier and I are good friends,’ she said, ‘the same as me and you. I gave him the same answer I did you⁠—no marrying for me. I liked to be with Ed and talk with him. There was something mighty pleasant to me in the thought that here was a man who never used a knife and fork, and all for my sake.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Wasn’t you in love with him?’ I asks, all injudicious. ‘Wasn’t there a deal on for you to become <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Curiosity?’</p>

src/epub/text/chapter-11.xhtml

@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
 			<p>Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid’s pastimes to shoot Mexicans “to see them kick”: if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with “<i xml:lang="es">quien sabes</i>” and denials of the Kid’s acquaintance.</p>
 			<p>But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing⁠—a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking.</p>
 			<p>“No use to ask them Mexicans,” he said to Sandridge. “They’re afraid to tell. This hombre they call the Kid⁠—Goodall is his name, ain’t it?⁠—he’s been in my store once or twice. I have an idea you might run across him at⁠—but I guess I don’t keer to say, myself. I’m two seconds later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth thinking about. But this Kid’s got a half-Mexican girl at the Crossing that he comes to see. She lives in that jacal a hundred yards down the arroyo at the edge of the pear. Maybe she⁠—no, I don’t suppose she would, but that jacal would be a good place to watch, anyway.”</p>
-			<p>Sandridge rode down to the jacal of Perez. The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the grass- thatched hut. The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral near by. A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves. The old Mexican lay upon a blanket on the grass, already in a stupor from his mescal, and dreaming, perhaps, of the nights when he and Pizarro touched glasses to their New World fortunes⁠—so old his wrinkled face seemed to proclaim him to be. And in the door of the jacal stood Tonia. And Lieutenant Sandridge sat in his saddle staring at her like a gannet agape at a sailorman.</p>
+			<p>Sandridge rode down to the jacal of Perez. The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the grass-shatched hut. The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral near by. A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves. The old Mexican lay upon a blanket on the grass, already in a stupor from his mescal, and dreaming, perhaps, of the nights when he and Pizarro touched glasses to their New World fortunes⁠—so old his wrinkled face seemed to proclaim him to be. And in the door of the jacal stood Tonia. And Lieutenant Sandridge sat in his saddle staring at her like a gannet agape at a sailorman.</p>
 			<p>The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and successful assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that at a simple exchange of glances two persons, in whose minds he had been looming large, suddenly abandoned (at least for the time) all thought of him.</p>
 			<p>Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this. He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather. He seemed to illuminate the shadow of the pear when he smiled, as though the sun were rising again. The men she had known had been small and dark. Even the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled the noonday.</p>
 			<p>As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the hummingbird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.</p>
@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@
 			<p>While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was a single-minded man of conventional ideas. He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it. It was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its beginning as near as may be to these words:</p>
 			<blockquote epub:type="z3998:song">
 				<p>
-					<span>Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl<span>
+					<span>Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl</span>
 					<br/>
 					<span>Or I'll tell you what I'll do—</span>
 				</p>
@@ -49,8 +49,8 @@
 			<p>But even the poorest singer will, after a certain time, gain his own consent to refrain from contributing to the world’s noises. So the Kid, by the time he was within a mile or two of Tonia’s jacal, had reluctantly allowed his song to die away⁠—not because his vocal performance had become less charming to his own ears, but because his laryngeal muscles were aweary.</p>
 			<p>As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand. Then, where the pear was thinner, he caught sight of the grass roof of the jacal and the hackberry tree on the edge of the arroyo. A few yards farther the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the prickly openings. Then he dismounted, dropped the roan’s reins, and proceeded on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian. The roan, knowing his part, stood still, making no sound.</p>
 			<p>The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and reconnoitred between the leaves of a clump of cactus.</p>
-			<p>Ten yards from his hiding-place, in the shade of the jacal, sat his Tonia calmly plaiting a rawhide lariat. So far she might surely escape condemnation; women have been known, from time to time, to engage in more mischievous occupations. But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six- strand plait.</p>
-			<p>Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar. A gun- scabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a six- shooter suddenly. But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia’s fingers needed close attention.</p>
+			<p>Ten yards from his hiding-place, in the shade of the jacal, sat his Tonia calmly plaiting a rawhide lariat. So far she might surely escape condemnation; women have been known, from time to time, to engage in more mischievous occupations. But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six-xtrand plait.</p>
+			<p>Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar. A gun-ncabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a six-xhooter suddenly. But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia’s fingers needed close attention.</p>
 			<p>And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of the Kid.</p>
 			<p>“Remember, then,” said Tonia, “you must not come again until I send for you. Soon he will be here. A vaquero at the tienda said today he saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago. When he is that near he always comes. If he comes and finds you here he will kill you. So, for my sake, you must come no more until I send you the word.”</p>
 			<p>“All right,” said the stranger. “And then what?”</p>
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
 			<p>“He ain’t a man to surrender, that’s sure,” said Sandridge. “It’s kill or be killed for the officer that goes up against <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cisco Kid.”</p>
 			<p>“He must die,” said the girl. “Otherwise there will not be any peace in the world for thee and me. He has killed many. Let him so die. Bring your men, and give him no chance to escape.”</p>
 			<p>“You used to think right much of him,” said Sandridge.</p>
-			<p>Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon- tinted arm over the ranger’s shoulder.</p>
+			<p>Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon-ninted arm over the ranger’s shoulder.</p>
 			<p>“But then,” she murmured in liquid Spanish, “I had not beheld thee, thou great, red mountain of a man! And thou art kind and good, as well as strong. Could one choose him, knowing thee? Let him die; for then I will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me.”</p>
 			<p>“How can I know when he comes?” asked Sandridge.</p>
 			<p>“When he comes,” said Tonia, “he remains two days, sometimes three. Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the <i xml:lang="es">lavendera</i>, has a swift pony. I will write a letter to thee and send it by him, saying how it will be best to come upon him. By Gregorio will the letter come. And bring many men with thee, and have much care, oh, dear red one, for the rattlesnake is not quicker to strike than is ‘<i xml:lang="es">El Chivato</i>,’ as they call him, to send a ball from his <i xml:lang="es">pistola</i>.”</p>
@@ -73,7 +73,7 @@
 			<p>The Kid kissed her affectionately.</p>
 			<p>“Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me,” said he. “But if you’ll run in, chica, and throw a pot of coffee together while I attend to the caballo, I’ll be a good deal obliged.”</p>
 			<p>Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he admired himself greatly. He was <i xml:lang="es">muy caballero</i>, as the Mexicans express it, where the ladies were concerned. For them he had always gentle words and consideration. He could not have spoken a harsh word to a woman. He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman. Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come under the spell of his politeness declared their disbelief in the stories circulated about <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kid. One shouldn’t believe everything one heard, they said. When confronted by their indignant men folk with proof of the /caballero’s/ deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow.</p>
-			<p>Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding- place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.</p>
+			<p>Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding-glace in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.</p>
 			<p>At the end of the short twilight they gathered around a supper of frijoles, goat steaks, canned peaches, and coffee, by the light of a lantern in the jacal. Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corralled, smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a grey blanket. Tonia washed the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour-sacking towel. Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of her small world since the Kid’s last visit; it was as all his other homecomings had been.</p>
 			<p>Then outside Tonia swung in a grass hammock with her guitar and sang sad <i xml:lang="es">canciones de amor</i>.</p>
 			<p>“Do you love me just the same, old girl?” asked the Kid, hunting for his cigarette papers.</p>
@@ -92,14 +92,14 @@
 			<p>At midnight a horseman rode into the rangers’ camp, blazing his way by noisy “halloes” to indicate a pacific mission. Sandridge and one or two others turned out to investigate the row. The rider announced himself to be Domingo Sales, from the Lone Wolf Crossing. he bore a letter for Señor Sandridge. Old Luisa, the <i xml:lang="es">lavendera</i>, had persuaded him to bring it, he said, her son Gregorio being too ill of a fever to ride.</p>
 			<p>Sandridge lighted the camp lantern and read the letter. These were its words:</p>
 			<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
-				<p><span epub:type="salutation">Dear One:</span> He has come. Hardly had you ridden away when he came out of the pear. When he first talked he said he would stay three days or more. Then as it grew later he was like a wolf or a fox, and walked about without rest, looking and listening. Soon he said he must leave before daylight when it is dark and stillest. And then he seemed to suspect that I be not true to him. He looked at me so strange that I am frightened. I swear to him that I love him, his own Tonia. Last of all he said I must prove to him I am true. He thinks that even now men are waiting to kill him as he rides from my house. To escape he says he will dress in my clothes, my red skirt and the blue waist I wear and the brown mantilla over the head, and thus ride away. But before that he says that I must put on his clothes, his <i xml:lang="es">pantalones</i> and camisa and hat, and ride away on his horse from the jacal as far as the big road beyond the crossing and back again. This before he goes, so he can tell if I am true and if men are hidden to shoot him. It is a terrible thing. An hour before daybreak this is to be. Come, my dear one, and kill this man and take me for your Tonia. Do not try to take hold of him alive, but kill him quickly. Knowing all, you should do that. You must come long before the time and hide yourself in the little shed near the jacal where the wagon and saddles are kept. It is dark in there. He will wear my red skirt and blue waist and brown mantilla. I send you a hundred kisses. Come surely and shoot quickly and straight. Thine Own Tonia.</p>
+				<p><span epub:type="salutation">Dear One:</span> He has come. Hardly had you ridden away when he came out of the pear. When he first talked he said he would stay three days or more. Then as it grew later he was like a wolf or a fox, and walked about without rest, looking and listening. Soon he said he must leave before daylight when it is dark and stillest. And then he seemed to suspect that I be not true to him. He looked at me so strange that I am frightened. I swear to him that I love him, his own Tonia. Last of all he said I must prove to him I am true. He thinks that even now men are waiting to kill him as he rides from my house. To escape he says he will dress in my clothes, my red skirt and the blue waist I wear and the brown mantilla over the head, and thus ride away. But before that he says that I must put on his clothes, his <i xml:lang="es">pantalones</i> and camisa and hat, and ride away on his horse from the jacal as far as the big road beyond the crossing and back again. This before he goes, so he can tell if I am true and if men are hidden to shoot him. It is a terrible thing. An hour before daybreak this is to be. Come, my dear one, and kill this man and take me for your Tonia. Do not try to take hold of him alive, but kill him quickly. Knowing all, you should do that. You must come long before the time and hide yourself in the little shed near the jacal where the wagon and saddles are kept. It is dark in there. He will wear my red skirt and blue waist and brown mantilla. I send you a hundred kisses. Come surely and shoot quickly and straight. <span epub:type="valediction">Thine Own</span> <span epub:type="z3998:signature">Tonia</span>.</p>
 			</blockquote>
 			<p>Sandridge quickly explained to his men the official part of the missive. The rangers protested against his going alone.</p>
 			<p>“I’ll get him easy enough,” said the lieutenant. “The girl’s got him trapped. And don’t even think he’ll get the drop on me.”</p>
 			<p>Sandridge saddled his horse and rode to the Lone Wolf Crossing. He tied his big dun in a clump of brush on the arroyo, took his Winchester from its scabbard, and carefully approached the Perez jacal. There was only the half of a high moon drifted over by ragged, milk-white gulf clouds.</p>
 			<p>The wagon-shed was an excellent place for ambush; and the ranger got inside it safely. In the black shadow of the brush shelter in front of the jacal he could see a horse tied and hear him impatiently pawing the hard-trodden earth.</p>
 			<p>He waited almost an hour before two figures came out of the jacal. One, in man’s clothes, quickly mounted the horse and galloped past the wagon-shed toward the crossing and village. And then the other figure, in skirt, waist, and mantilla over its head, stepped out into the faint moonlight, gazing after the rider. Sandridge thought he would take his chance then before Tonia rode back. He fancied she might not care to see it.</p>
-			<p>“Throw up your hands,” he ordered loudly, stepping out of the wagon- shed with his Winchester at his shoulder.</p>
+			<p>“Throw up your hands,” he ordered loudly, stepping out of the wagon-nhed with his Winchester at his shoulder.</p>
 			<p>There was a quick turn of the figure, but no movement to obey, so the ranger pumped in the bullets⁠—one⁠—two⁠—three⁠—and then twice more; for you never could be too sure of bringing down the Cisco Kid. There was no danger of missing at ten paces, even in that half moonlight.</p>
 			<p>The old ancestor, asleep on his blanket, was awakened by the shots. Listening further, he heard a great cry from some man in mortal distress or anguish, and rose up grumbling at the disturbing ways of moderns.</p>
 			<p>The tall, red ghost of a man burst into the jacal, reaching one hand, shaking like a tule reed, for the lantern hanging on its nail. The other spread a letter on the table.</p>
@@ -107,8 +107,12 @@
 			<p>“/Ah, Dios/! it is Señor Sandridge,” mumbled the old man, approaching. “/Pues, señor/, that letter was written by ‘<i xml:lang="es">El Chivato</i>,’ as he is called⁠—by the man of Tonia. They say he is a bad man; I do not know. While Tonia slept he wrote the letter and sent it by this old hand of mine to Domingo Sales to be brought to you. Is there anything wrong in the letter? I am very old; and I did not know. <i xml:lang="es">Valgame Dios</i>! it is a very foolish world; and there is nothing in the house to drink⁠—nothing to drink.”</p>
 			<p>Just then all that Sandridge could think of to do was to go outside and throw himself face downward in the dust by the side of his hummingbird, of whom not a feather fluttered. He was not a caballero by instinct, and he could not understand the niceties of revenge.</p>
 			<p>A mile away the rider who had ridden past the wagon-shed struck up a harsh, untuneful song, the words of which began:</p>
-			<blockquote>
-				<pre>Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl Or I'll tell you what I'll do-- </pre>
+			<blockquote epub:type="z3998:song">
+				<p>
+					<span>Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl</span>
+					<br/>
+					<span>Or I'll tell you what I'll do—</p>
+				</p>
 			</blockquote>
 		</section>
 	</body>

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@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@
 			<p>“Well,” he began, without any embarrassment, “this is about the way I size up the difficulty: Of course Redruth was jostled a good deal by this duck who had money to play ball with who tried to cut him out of his girl. So he goes around, naturally, and asks her if the game is still square. Well, nobody wants a guy cutting in with buggies and gold bonds when he’s got an option on a girl. Well, he goes around to see her. Well, maybe he’s hot, and talks like the proprietor, and forgets that an engagement ain’t always a lead-pipe cinch. Well, I guess that makes Alice warm under the lacy yoke. Well, she answers back sharp. Well, he⁠—”</p>
 			<p>“Say!” interrupted the passenger who was nobody in particular, “if you could put up a windmill on every one of them ‘wells’ you’re using, you’d be able to retire from business, wouldn’t you?”</p>
 			<p>The windmill man grinned good-naturedly.</p>
-			<p>“Oh, I ain’t no Guy de Mopassong,” he said, cheerfully. “I’m giving it to you in straight American. Well, she says something like this: ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gold Bonds is only a friend,’ says she; ‘but he takes me riding and buys me theatre tickets, and that’s what you never do. Ain’t I to never have any pleasure in life while I can?’ ‘Pass this chatfield- chatfield thing along,’ says Redruth;⁠—‘hand out the mitt to the Willie with creases in it or you don’t put your slippers under my wardrobe.’</p>
+			<p>“Oh, I ain’t no Guy de Mopassong,” he said, cheerfully. “I’m giving it to you in straight American. Well, she says something like this: ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gold Bonds is only a friend,’ says she; ‘but he takes me riding and buys me theatre tickets, and that’s what you never do. Ain’t I to never have any pleasure in life while I can?’ ‘Pass this chatfield-dhatfield thing along,’ says Redruth;⁠—‘hand out the mitt to the Willie with creases in it or you don’t put your slippers under my wardrobe.’</p>
 			<p>“Now that kind of train orders don’t go with a girl that’s got any spirit. I bet that girl loved her honey all the time. Maybe she only wanted, as girls do, to work the good thing for a little fun and caramels before she settled down to patch George’s other pair, and be a good wife. But he is glued to the high horse, and won’t come down. Well, she hands him back the ring, proper enough; and George goes away and hits the booze. Yep. That’s what done it. I bet that girl fired the cornucopia with the fancy vest two days after her steady left. George boards a freight and checks his bag of crackers for parts unknown. He sticks to Old Booze for a number of years; and then the aniline and aquafortis gets the decision. ‘Me for the hermit’s hut,’ says George, ‘and the long whiskers, and the buried can of money that isn’t there.’</p>
 			<p>“But that Alice, in my mind, was on the level. She never married, but took up typewriting as soon as the wrinkles began to show, and kept a cat that came when you said ‘weeny⁠—weeny⁠—weeny!’ I got too much faith in good women to believe they throw down the fellow they’re stuck on every time for the dough.” The windmill man ceased.</p>
 			<p>“I think,” said the lady passenger, slightly moving upon her lowly throne, “that that is a char⁠—”</p>

src/epub/text/chapter-13.xhtml

@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
 			<p>After supper the ranchman and I lugged our chairs outside the two-room house, to its floorless gallery roofed with chaparral and sacuista grass. With the rear legs of our chairs sinking deep into the hardpacked loam, each of us reposed against an elm pillar of the structure and smoked El Toro tobacco, while we wrangled amicably concerning the affairs of the rest of the world.</p>
 			<p>As for conveying adequate conception of the engaging charm of that prairie evening, despair waits upon it. It is a bold chronicler who will undertake the description of a Texas night in the early spring. An inventory must suffice.</p>
 			<p>The ranch rested upon the summit of a lenient slope. The ambient prairie, diversified by arroyos and murky patches of brush and pear, lay around us like a darkened bowl at the bottom of which we reposed as dregs. Like a turquoise cover the sky pinned us there. The miraculous air, heady with ozone and made memorably sweet by leagues of wild flowerets, gave tang and savour to the breath. In the sky was a great, round, mellow searchlight which we knew to be no moon, but the dark lantern of summer, who came to hunt northward the cowering spring. In the nearest corral a flock of sheep lay silent until a groundless panic would send a squad of them huddling together with a drumming rush. For other sounds a shrill family of coyotes yapped beyond the shearing-pen, and whippoorwills twittered in the long grass. But even these dissonances hardly rippled the clear torrent of the mockingbirds’ notes that fell from a dozen neighbouring shrubs and trees. It would not have been preposterous for one to tiptoe and essay to touch the stars, they hung so bright and imminent.</p>
-			<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinney’s wife, a young and capable woman, we had left in the house. She remained to busy herself with the domestic round of duties, in which I had observed that she seemed to take a buoyant and contented pride. In one room we had supped. Presently, from the other, as Kinney and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and brilliant music. If I could justly estimate the art of piano-playing, the construer of that rollicking fantasia had creditably mastered the secrets of the keyboard. A piano, and one so well played, seemed to me to be an unusual thing to find in that small and unpromising ranch- house. I must have looked my surprise at Rush Kinney, for he laughed in his soft, Southern way, and nodded at me through the moonlit haze of our cigarettes.</p>
+			<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinney’s wife, a young and capable woman, we had left in the house. She remained to busy herself with the domestic round of duties, in which I had observed that she seemed to take a buoyant and contented pride. In one room we had supped. Presently, from the other, as Kinney and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and brilliant music. If I could justly estimate the art of piano-playing, the construer of that rollicking fantasia had creditably mastered the secrets of the keyboard. A piano, and one so well played, seemed to me to be an unusual thing to find in that small and unpromising ranch-house. I must have looked my surprise at Rush Kinney, for he laughed in his soft, Southern way, and nodded at me through the moonlit haze of our cigarettes.</p>
 			<p>“You don’t often hear as agreeable a noise as that on a sheep-ranch,” he remarked; “but I never see any reason for not playing up to the arts and graces just because we happen to live out in the brush. It’s a lonesome life for a woman; and if a little music can make it any better, why not have it? That’s the way I look at it.”</p>
 			<p>“A wise and generous theory,” I assented. “And <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kinney plays well. I am not learned in the science of music, but I should call her an uncommonly good performer. She has technic and more than ordinary power.”</p>
 			<p>The moon was very bright, you will understand, and I saw upon Kinney’s face a sort of amused and pregnant expression, as though there were things behind it that might be expounded.</p>
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Oh, Rush,’ she says, all flushed up with esteem and gratification, ‘what do you think! Dad’s going to buy me a piano. Ain’t it grand? I never dreamed I’d ever have one.”</p>
 			<p>“ ‘It’s sure joyful,’ says I. ‘I always admired the agreeable uproar of a piano. It’ll be lots of company for you. That’s mighty good of Uncle Cal to do that.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’m all undecided,’ says Marilla, ‘between a piano and an organ. A parlour organ is nice.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Either of ’em,’ says I, ‘is first-class for mitigating the lack of noise around a sheep-ranch. For my part,’ I says, ‘I shouldn’t like anything better than to ride home of an evening and listen to a few waltzes and jigs, with somebody about your size sitting on the piano- stool and rounding up the notes.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Either of ’em,’ says I, ‘is first-class for mitigating the lack of noise around a sheep-ranch. For my part,’ I says, ‘I shouldn’t like anything better than to ride home of an evening and listen to a few waltzes and jigs, with somebody about your size sitting on the piano-otool and rounding up the notes.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Oh, hush about that,’ says Marilla, ‘and go on in the house. Dad hasn’t rode out today. He’s not feeling well.’</p>
 			<p>“Old Cal was inside, lying on a cot. He had a pretty bad cold and cough. I stayed to supper.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Going to get Marilla a piano, I hear,’ says I to him.</p>
@@ -41,10 +41,10 @@
 			<p>“I might have known that would set Uncle Cal going. Of course, a man like him, that knew everything about everything, would look at that as a reflection on his attainments.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘No, sir, it wouldn’t,’ says he, pulling at his white whiskers. ‘There ain’t a better judge of musical instruments in the whole world than what I am. I had an uncle,’ says he, ‘that was a partner in a piano-factory, and I’ve seen thousands of ’em put together. I know all about musical instruments from a pipe-organ to a cornstalk fiddle. There ain’t a man lives, sir, that can tell me any news about any instrument that has to be pounded, blowed, scraped, grinded, picked, or wound with a key.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘You get me what you like, dad,’ says Marilla, who couldn’t keep her feet on the floor from joy. ‘Of course you know what to select. I’d just as lief it was a piano or a organ or what.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I see in <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis once what they call a orchestrion,’ says Uncle Cal, ‘that I judged was about the finest thing in the way of music ever invented. But there ain’t room in this house for one. Anyway, I imagine they’d cost a thousand dollars. I reckon something in the piano line would suit Marilla the best. She took lessons in that respect for two years over at Birdstail. I wouldn’t trust the buying of an instrument to anybody else but myself. I reckon if I hadn’t took up sheep-raising I’d have been one of the finest composers or piano- and-organ manufacturers in the world.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I see in <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis once what they call a orchestrion,’ says Uncle Cal, ‘that I judged was about the finest thing in the way of music ever invented. But there ain’t room in this house for one. Anyway, I imagine they’d cost a thousand dollars. I reckon something in the piano line would suit Marilla the best. She took lessons in that respect for two years over at Birdstail. I wouldn’t trust the buying of an instrument to anybody else but myself. I reckon if I hadn’t took up sheep-raising I’d have been one of the finest composers or piano-ond-organ manufacturers in the world.’</p>
 			<p>“That was Uncle Cal’s style. But I never lost any patience with him, on account of his thinking so much of Marilla. And she thought just as much of him. He sent her to the academy over at Birdstail for two years when it took nearly every pound of wool to pay the expenses.</p>
 			<p>“Along about Tuesday Uncle Cal put out for San Antone on the last wagonload of wool. Marilla’s uncle Ben, who lived in Birdstail, come over and stayed at the ranch while Uncle Cal was gone.</p>
-			<p>“It was ninety miles to San Antone, and forty to the nearest railroad- station, so Uncle Cal was gone about four days. I was over at the Double-Elm when he came rolling back one evening about sundown. And up there in the wagon, sure enough, was a piano or a organ⁠—we couldn’t tell which⁠—all wrapped up in woolsacks, with a wagon-sheet tied over it in case of rain. And out skips Marilla, hollering, ‘Oh, oh!’ with her eyes shining and her hair a-flying. ‘Dad⁠—dad,’ she sings out, ‘have you brought it⁠—have you brought it?’⁠—and it right there before her eyes, as women will do.</p>
+			<p>“It was ninety miles to San Antone, and forty to the nearest railroad-dtation, so Uncle Cal was gone about four days. I was over at the Double-Elm when he came rolling back one evening about sundown. And up there in the wagon, sure enough, was a piano or a organ⁠—we couldn’t tell which⁠—all wrapped up in woolsacks, with a wagon-sheet tied over it in case of rain. And out skips Marilla, hollering, ‘Oh, oh!’ with her eyes shining and her hair a-flying. ‘Dad⁠—dad,’ she sings out, ‘have you brought it⁠—have you brought it?’⁠—and it right there before her eyes, as women will do.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Finest piano in San Antone,’ says Uncle Cal, waving his hand, proud. ‘Genuine rosewood, and the finest, loudest tone you ever listened to. I heard the storekeeper play it, and I took it on the spot and paid cash down.’</p>
 			<p>“Me and Ben and Uncle Cal and a Mexican lifted it out of the wagon and carried it in the house and set it in a corner. It was one of them upright instruments, and not very heavy or very big.</p>
 			<p>“And then all of a sudden Uncle Cal flops over and says he’s mighty sick. He’s got a high fever, and he complains of his lungs. He gets into bed, while me and Ben goes out to unhitch and put the horses in the pasture, and Marilla flies around to get Uncle Cal something hot to drink. But first she puts both arms on that piano and hugs it with a soft kind of a smile, like you see kids doing with their Christmas toys.</p>

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@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
 			<p>Merwin went back to his little bare office and plaited at his quirt again. About four o’clock in the afternoon he went to the First National Bank and leaned over the railing of Longley’s desk.</p>
 			<p>“I’ll try to get that money for you tonight⁠—I mean tomorrow, Bill.”</p>
 			<p>“All right, Tom,” said Longley quietly.</p>
-			<p>At nine o’clock that night Tom Merwin stepped cautiously out of the small frame house in which he lived. It was near the edge of the little town, and few citizens were in the neighbourhood at that hour. Merwin wore two six-shooters in a belt, and a slouch hat. He moved swiftly down a lonely street, and then followed the sandy road that ran parallel to the narrow-gauge track until he reached the water- tank, two miles below the town. There Tom Merwin stopped, tied a black silk handkerchief about the lower part of his face, and pulled his hat down low.</p>
+			<p>At nine o’clock that night Tom Merwin stepped cautiously out of the small frame house in which he lived. It was near the edge of the little town, and few citizens were in the neighbourhood at that hour. Merwin wore two six-shooters in a belt, and a slouch hat. He moved swiftly down a lonely street, and then followed the sandy road that ran parallel to the narrow-gauge track until he reached the water-rank, two miles below the town. There Tom Merwin stopped, tied a black silk handkerchief about the lower part of his face, and pulled his hat down low.</p>
 			<p>In ten minutes the night train for Rockdell pulled up at the tank, having come from Chaparosa.</p>
 			<p>With a gun in each hand Merwin raised himself from behind a clump of chaparral and started for the engine. But before he had taken three steps, two long, strong arms clasped him from behind, and he was lifted from his feet and thrown, face downward upon the grass. There was a heavy knee pressing against his back, and an iron hand grasping each of his wrists. He was held thus, like a child, until the engine had taken water, and until the train had moved, with accelerating speed, out of sight. Then he was released, and rose to his feet to face Bill Longley.</p>
 			<p>“The case never needed to be fixed up this way, Tom,” said Longley. “I saw Cooper this evening, and he told me what you and him talked about. Then I went down to your house tonight and saw you come out with your guns on, and I followed you. Let’s go back, Tom.”</p>

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@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
 			<p>In two minutes he had a little fire going clearly. He started, with his can, for the water hole. When within fifteen yards of its edge he saw, between the bushes, a side-saddled pony with down-dropped reins cropping grass a little distance to his left. Just rising from her hands and knees on the brink of the water hole was Josefa O’Donnell. She had been drinking water, and she brushed the sand from the palms of her hands. Ten yards away, to her right, half concealed by a clump of sacuista, Givens saw the crouching form of the Mexican lion. His amber eyeballs glared hungrily; six feet from them was the tip of the tail stretched straight, like a pointer’s. His hindquarters rocked with the motion of the cat tribe preliminary to leaping.</p>
 			<p>Givens did what he could. His six-shooter was thirty-five yards away lying on the grass. He gave a loud yell, and dashed between the lion and the princess.</p>
 			<p>The “rucus,” as Givens called it afterward, was brief and somewhat confused. When he arrived on the line of attack he saw a dim streak in the air, and heard a couple of faint cracks. Then a hundred pounds of Mexican lion plumped down upon his head and flattened him, with a heavy jar, to the ground. He remembered calling out: “Let up, now⁠—no fair gouging!” and then he crawled from under the lion like a worm, with his mouth full of grass and dirt, and a big lump on the back of his head where it had struck the root of a water-elm. The lion lay motionless. Givens, feeling aggrieved, and suspicious of fouls, shook his fist at the lion, and shouted: “I’ll rastle you again for twenty⁠—” and then he got back to himself.</p>
-			<p>Josefa was standing in her tracks, quietly reloading her silver- mounted .38. It had not been a difficult shot. The lion’s head made an easier mark than a tomato-can swinging at the end of a string. There was a provoking, teasing, maddening smile upon her mouth and in her dark eyes. The would-be-rescuing knight felt the fire of his fiasco burn down to his soul. Here had been his chance, the chance that he had dreamed of; and Momus, and not Cupid, had presided over it. The satyrs in the wood were, no doubt, holding their sides in hilarious, silent laughter. There had been something like vaudeville⁠—say Signor Givens and his funny knockabout act with the stuffed lion.</p>
+			<p>Josefa was standing in her tracks, quietly reloading her silver-rounted .38. It had not been a difficult shot. The lion’s head made an easier mark than a tomato-can swinging at the end of a string. There was a provoking, teasing, maddening smile upon her mouth and in her dark eyes. The would-be-rescuing knight felt the fire of his fiasco burn down to his soul. Here had been his chance, the chance that he had dreamed of; and Momus, and not Cupid, had presided over it. The satyrs in the wood were, no doubt, holding their sides in hilarious, silent laughter. There had been something like vaudeville⁠—say Signor Givens and his funny knockabout act with the stuffed lion.</p>
 			<p>“Is that you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Givens?” said Josefa, in her deliberate, saccharine contralto. “You nearly spoilt my shot when you yelled. Did you hurt your head when you fell?”</p>
 			<p>“Oh, no,” said Givens, quietly; “that didn’t hurt.” He stooped ignominiously and dragged his best Stetson hat from under the beast. It was crushed and wrinkled to a fine comedy effect. Then he knelt down and softly stroked the fierce, open-jawed head of the dead lion.</p>
 			<p>“Poor old Bill!” he exclaimed mournfully.</p>

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@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
 			<p>Dry Valley kept indoors closely for a week except for frequent sallies after youthful strawberry snatchers. Then, a few days later, he suddenly emerged brilliantly radiant in the hectic glow of his belated midsummer madness.</p>
 			<p>A jaybird-blue tennis suit covered him outwardly, almost as far as his wrists and ankles. His shirt was ox-blood; his collar winged and tall; his necktie a floating oriflamme; his shoes a venomous bright tan, pointed and shaped on penitential lasts. A little flat straw hat with a striped band desecrated his weather-beaten head. Lemon-coloured kid gloves protected his oak-tough hands from the benignant May sunshine. This sad and optic-smiting creature teetered out of its den, smiling foolishly and smoothing its gloves for men and angels to see. To such a pass had Dry Valley Johnson been brought by Cupid, who always shoots game that is out of season with an arrow from the quiver of Momus. Reconstructing mythology, he had risen, a prismatic macaw, from the ashes of the grey-brown phoenix that had folded its tired wings to roost under the trees of Santa Rosa.</p>
 			<p>Dry Valley paused in the street to allow Santa Rosans within sight of him to be stunned; and then deliberately and slowly, as his shoes required, entered <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien’s gate.</p>
-			<p>Not until the eleven months’ drought did Santa Rosa cease talking about Dry Valley Johnson’s courtship of Panchita O’Brien. It was an unclassifiable procedure; something like a combination of cake- walking, deaf-and-dumb oratory, postage stamp flirtation and parlour charades. It lasted two weeks and then came to a sudden end.</p>
+			<p>Not until the eleven months’ drought did Santa Rosa cease talking about Dry Valley Johnson’s courtship of Panchita O’Brien. It was an unclassifiable procedure; something like a combination of cake-ealking, deaf-and-dumb oratory, postage stamp flirtation and parlour charades. It lasted two weeks and then came to a sudden end.</p>
 			<p>Of course <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien favoured the match as soon as Dry Valley’s intentions were disclosed. Being the mother of a woman child, and therefore a charter member of the Ancient Order of the Rattrap, she joyfully decked out Panchita for the sacrifice. The girl was temporarily dazzled by having her dresses lengthened and her hair piled up on her head, and came near forgetting that she was only a slice of cheese. It was nice, too, to have as good a match as <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Johnson paying you attentions and to see the other girls fluttering the curtains at their windows to see you go by with him.</p>
 			<p>Dry Valley bought a buggy with yellow wheels and a fine trotter in San Antonio. Every day he drove out with Panchita. He was never seen to speak to her when they were walking or driving. The consciousness of his clothes kept his mind busy; the knowledge that he could say nothing of interest kept him dumb; the feeling that Panchita was there kept him happy.</p>
 			<p>He took her to parties and dances, and to church. He tried⁠—oh, no man ever tried so hard to be young as Dry Valley did. He could not dance; but he invented a smile which he wore on these joyous occasions, a smile that, in him, was as great a concession to mirth and gaiety as turning handsprings would be in another. He began to seek the company of the young men in the town⁠—even of the boys. They accepted him as a decided damper, for his attempts at sportiveness were so forced that they might as well have essayed their games in a cathedral. Neither he nor any other could estimate what progress he had made with Panchita.</p>

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@@ -17,24 +17,24 @@
 			<p>Three hours after the presentation ceremonies Cherokee’s claim played out. He had located a pocket instead of a vein. He abandoned it and staked others one by one. Luck had kissed her hand to him. Never afterward did he turn up enough dust in Yellowhammer to pay his bar bill. But his thousand invited guests were mostly prospering, and Cherokee smiled and congratulated them.</p>
 			<p>Yellowhammer was made up of men who took off their hats to a smiling loser; so they invited Cherokee to say what he wanted.</p>
 			<p>“Me?” said Cherokee, “oh, grubstakes will be about the thing. I reckon I’ll prospect along up in the Mariposas. If I strike it up there I will most certainly let you all know about the facts. I never was any hand to hold out cards on my friends.”</p>
-			<p>In May Cherokee packed his burro and turned its thoughtful, mouse- coloured forehead to the north. Many citizens escorted him to the undefined limits of Yellowhammer and bestowed upon him shouts of commendation and farewells. Five pocket flasks without an air bubble between contents and cork were forced upon him; and he was bidden to consider Yellowhammer in perpetual commission for his bed, bacon and eggs, and hot water for shaving in the event that luck did not see fit to warm her hands by his campfire in the Mariposas.</p>
+			<p>In May Cherokee packed his burro and turned its thoughtful, mouse-eoloured forehead to the north. Many citizens escorted him to the undefined limits of Yellowhammer and bestowed upon him shouts of commendation and farewells. Five pocket flasks without an air bubble between contents and cork were forced upon him; and he was bidden to consider Yellowhammer in perpetual commission for his bed, bacon and eggs, and hot water for shaving in the event that luck did not see fit to warm her hands by his campfire in the Mariposas.</p>
 			<p>The name of the father of Yellowhammer was given him by the gold hunters in accordance with their popular system of nomenclature. It was not necessary for a citizen to exhibit his baptismal certificate in order to acquire a cognomen. A man’s name was his personal property. For convenience in calling him up to the bar and in designating him among other blue-shirted bipeds, a temporary appellation, title, or epithet was conferred upon him by the public. Personal peculiarities formed the source of the majority of such informal baptisms. Many were easily dubbed geographically from the regions from which they confessed to have hailed. Some announced themselves to be “Thompsons,” and “Adamses,” and the like, with a brazenness and loudness that cast a cloud upon their titles. A few vaingloriously and shamelessly uncovered their proper and indisputable names. This was held to be unduly arrogant, and did not win popularity. One man who said he was Chesterton L. C. Belmont, and proved it by letters, was given till sundown to leave the town. Such names as “Shorty,” “Bowlegs,” “Texas,” “Lazy Bill,” “Thirsty Rogers,” “Limping Riley,” “The Judge,” and “California Ed” were in favour. Cherokee derived his title from the fact that he claimed to have lived for a time with that tribe in the Indian Nation.</p>
 			<p>On the twentieth day of December Baldy, the mail rider, brought Yellowhammer a piece of news.</p>
 			<p>“What do I see in Albuquerque,” said Baldy, to the patrons of the bar, “but Cherokee all embellished and festooned up like the Czar of Turkey, and lavishin’ money in bulk. Him and me seen the elephant and the owl, and we had specimens of this seidlitz powder wine; and Cherokee he audits all the bills, C.O.D. His pockets looked like a pool table’s after a fifteen-ball run.</p>
 			<p>“Cherokee must have struck pay ore,” remarked California Ed. “Well, he’s white. I’m much obliged to him for his success.”</p>
 			<p>“Seems like Cherokee would ramble down to Yellowhammer and see his friends,” said another, slightly aggrieved. “But that’s the way. Prosperity is the finest cure there is for lost forgetfulness.”</p>
-			<p>“You wait,” said Baldy; “I’m comin’ to that. Cherokee strikes a three- foot vein up in the Mariposas that assays a trip to Europe to the ton, and he closes it out to a syndicate outfit for a hundred thousand hasty dollars in cash. Then he buys himself a baby sealskin overcoat and a red sleigh, and what do you think he takes it in his head to do next?”</p>
+			<p>“You wait,” said Baldy; “I’m comin’ to that. Cherokee strikes a three-eoot vein up in the Mariposas that assays a trip to Europe to the ton, and he closes it out to a syndicate outfit for a hundred thousand hasty dollars in cash. Then he buys himself a baby sealskin overcoat and a red sleigh, and what do you think he takes it in his head to do next?”</p>
 			<p>“Chuck-a-luck,” said Texas, whose ideas of recreation were the gamester’s.</p>
 			<p>“Come and Kiss Me, Ma Honey,” sang Shorty, who carried tintypes in his pocket and wore a red necktie while working on his claim.</p>
 			<p>“Bought a saloon?” suggested Thirsty Rogers.</p>
-			<p>“Cherokee took me to a room,” continued Baldy, “and showed me. He’s got that room full of drums and dolls and skates and bags of candy and jumping-jacks and toy lambs and whistles and such infantile truck. And what do you think he’s goin’ to do with them inefficacious knick- knacks? Don’t surmise none⁠—Cherokee told me. He’s goin’ to lead ’em up in his red sleigh and⁠—wait a minute, don’t order no drinks yet⁠—he’s goin’ to drive down here to Yellowhammer and give the kids⁠—the kids of this here town⁠—the biggest Christmas tree and the biggest cryin’ doll and Little Giant Boys’ Tool Chest blowout that was ever seen west of the Cape Hatteras.”</p>
+			<p>“Cherokee took me to a room,” continued Baldy, “and showed me. He’s got that room full of drums and dolls and skates and bags of candy and jumping-jacks and toy lambs and whistles and such infantile truck. And what do you think he’s goin’ to do with them inefficacious knick-knacks? Don’t surmise none⁠—Cherokee told me. He’s goin’ to lead ’em up in his red sleigh and⁠—wait a minute, don’t order no drinks yet⁠—he’s goin’ to drive down here to Yellowhammer and give the kids⁠—the kids of this here town⁠—the biggest Christmas tree and the biggest cryin’ doll and Little Giant Boys’ Tool Chest blowout that was ever seen west of the Cape Hatteras.”</p>
 			<p>Two minutes of absolute silence ticked away in the wake of Baldy’s words. It was broken by the House, who, happily conceiving the moment to be ripe for extending hospitality, sent a dozen whisky glasses spinning down the bar, with the slower travelling bottle bringing up the rear.</p>
 			<p>“Didn’t you tell him?” asked the miner called Trinidad.</p>
 			<p>“Well, no,” answered Baldy, pensively; “I never exactly seen my way to.</p>
 			<p>“You see, Cherokee had this Christmas mess already bought and paid for; and he was all flattered up with self-esteem over his idea; and we had in a way flew the flume with that fizzy wine I speak of; so I never let on.”</p>
 			<p>“I cannot refrain from a certain amount of surprise,” said the Judge, as he hung his ivory-handled cane on the bar, “that our friend Cherokee should possess such an erroneous conception of⁠—ah⁠—his, as it were, own town.”</p>
 			<p>“Oh, it ain’t the eighth wonder of the terrestrial world,” said Baldy. “Cherokee’s been gone from Yellowhammer over seven months. Lots of things could happen in that time. How’s he to know that there ain’t a single kid in this town, and so far as emigration is concerned, none expected?”</p>
-			<p>“Come to think of it,” remarked California Ed, “it’s funny some ain’t drifted in. Town ain’t settled enough yet for to bring in the rubber- ring brigade, I reckon.”</p>
+			<p>“Come to think of it,” remarked California Ed, “it’s funny some ain’t drifted in. Town ain’t settled enough yet for to bring in the rubber-ring brigade, I reckon.”</p>
 			<p>“To top off this Christmas-tree splurge of Cherokee’s,” went on Baldy, “he’s goin’ to give an imitation of Santa Claus. He’s got a white wig and whiskers that disfigure him up exactly like the pictures of this William Cullen Longfellow in the books, and a red suit of fur-trimmed outside underwear, and eight-ounce gloves, and a stand-up, lay-down croshayed red cap. Ain’t it a shame that a outfit like that can’t get a chance to connect with a Annie and Willie’s prayer layout?”</p>
 			<p>“When does Cherokee allow to come over with his truck?” inquired Trinidad.</p>
 			<p>“Mornin’ before Christmas,” said Baldy. “And he wants you folks to have a room fixed up and a tree hauled and ready. And such ladies to assist as can stop breathin’ long enough to let it be a surprise for the kids.”</p>

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@@ -20,8 +20,8 @@
 			<p>Thriftiest among them was Peter Hildesmuller, Lena’s father. And that is why Lena was sent to work in the hotel at the quarries, thirty miles away. She earned three dollars every week there, and Peter added her wages to his well-guarded store. Peter had an ambition to become as rich as his neighbour, Hugo Heffelbauer, who smoked a meerschaum pipe three feet long and had wiener schnitzel and hassenpfeffer for dinner every day in the week. And now Lena was quite old enough to work and assist in the accumulation of riches. But conjecture, if you can, what it means to be sentenced at eleven years of age from a home in the pleasant little Rhine village to hard labour in the ogre’s castle, where you must fly to serve the ogres, while they devour cattle and sheep, growling fiercely as they stamp white limestone dust from their great shoes for you to sweep and scour with your weak, aching fingers. And then⁠—to have Grimm taken away from you!</p>
 			<p>Lena raised the lid of an old empty case that had once contained canned corn and got out a sheet of paper and a piece of pencil. She was going to write a letter to her mamma. Tommy Ryan was going to post it for her at Ballinger’s. Tommy was seventeen, worked in the quarries, went home to Ballinger’s every night, and was now waiting in the shadows under Lena’s window for her to throw the letter out to him. That was the only way she could send a letter to Fredericksburg. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Maloney did not like for her to write letters.</p>
 			<p>The stump of the candle was burning low, so Lena hastily bit the wood from around the lead of her pencil and began. This is the letter she wrote:</p>
-			<blockquote>
-				<pre>Dearest Mamma:--I want so much to see you. And Gretel and Claus and Heinrich and little Adolf. I am so tired. I want to see you. Today I was slapped by <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Maloney and had no supper. I could not bring in enough wood, for my hand hurt. She took my book yesterday. I mean "Grimm's Fairy Tales," which Uncle Leo gave me. It did not hurt anyone for me to read the book. I try to work as well as I can, but there is so much to do. I read only a little bit every night. Dear mamma, I shall tell you what I am going to do. Unless you send for me tomorrow to bring me home I shall go to a deep place I know in the river and drown. It is wicked to drown, I suppose, but I wanted to see you, and there is no one else. I am very tired, and Tommy is waiting for the letter. You will excuse me, mamma, if I do it. Your respectful and loving daughter, Lena. </pre>
+			<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
+				<p><span class="salutation">Dearest Mamma:</span>—I want so much to see you. And Gretel and Claus and Heinrich and little Adolf. I am so tired. I want to see you. Today I was slapped by <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Maloney and had no supper. I could not bring in enough wood, for my hand hurt. She took my book yesterday. I mean "Grimm's Fairy Tales," which Uncle Leo gave me. It did not hurt anyone for me to read the book. I try to work as well as I can, but there is so much to do. I read only a little bit every night. Dear mamma, I shall tell you what I am going to do. Unless you send for me tomorrow to bring me home I shall go to a deep place I know in the river and drown. It is wicked to drown, I suppose, but I wanted to see you, and there is no one else. I am very tired, and Tommy is waiting for the letter. You will excuse me, mamma, if I do it. <span epub:type="valediction">Your respectful and loving daughter,</span> <span epub:type="z3998:signature">Lena</span>.</p>
 			</blockquote>
 			<p>Tommy was still waiting faithfully when the letter was concluded, and when Lena dropped it out she saw him pick it up and start up the steep hillside. Without undressing she blew out the candle and curled herself upon the mattress on the floor.</p>
 			<p>At 10:30 o’clock old man Ballinger came out of his house in his stocking feet and leaned over the gate, smoking his pipe. He looked down the big road, white in the moonshine, and rubbed one ankle with the toe of his other foot. It was time for the Fredericksburg mail to come pattering up the road.</p>
@@ -46,7 +46,7 @@
 			<p>Perhaps the mail would not have been tampered with had not Ben Moody, the lieutenant, possessed certain wisdom that seemed to promise more spoils.</p>
 			<p>“Say, Cap,” he said, addressing Hondo Bill, “there’s likely to be good pickings in these mail sacks. I’ve done some hoss tradin’ with these Dutchmen around Fredericksburg, and I know the style of the varmints. There’s big money goes through the mails to that town. Them Dutch risk a thousand dollars sent wrapped in a piece of paper before they’d pay the banks to handle the money.”</p>
 			<p>Hondo Bill, six feet two, gentle of voice and impulsive in action, was dragging the sacks from the rear of the wagon before Moody had finished his speech. A knife shone in his hand, and they heard the ripping sound as it bit through the tough canvas. The outlaws crowded around and began tearing open letters and packages, enlivening their labours by swearing affably at the writers, who seemed to have conspired to confute the prediction of Ben Moody. Not a dollar was found in the Fredericksburg mail.</p>
-			<p>“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Hondo Bill to the mail- carrier in solemn tones, “to be packing around such a lot of old, trashy paper as this. What d’you mean by it, anyhow? Where do you Dutchers keep your money at?”</p>
+			<p>“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Hondo Bill to the mail-larrier in solemn tones, “to be packing around such a lot of old, trashy paper as this. What d’you mean by it, anyhow? Where do you Dutchers keep your money at?”</p>
 			<p>The Ballinger mail sack opened like a cocoon under Hondo’s knife. It contained but a handful of mail. Fritz had been fuming with terror and excitement until this sack was reached. He now remembered Lena’s letter. He addressed the leader of the band, asking that that particular missive be spared.</p>
 			<p>“Much obliged, Dutch,” he said to the disturbed carrier. “I guess that’s the letter we want. Got spondulicks in it, ain’t it? Here she is. Make a light, boys.”</p>
 			<p>Hondo found and tore open the letter to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hildesmuller. The others stood about, lighting twisted up letters one from another. Hondo gazed with mute disapproval at the single sheet of paper covered with the angular German script.</p>

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@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
 			<p>The artillery was in trim. Calliope’s hand was steady. The high, calm ecstasy of habitual battle was upon him, though slightly embittered by the sadness of Alexander in that his conquests were limited to the small world of Quicksand.</p>
 			<p>Down the street went Calliope, shooting right and left. Glass fell like hail; dogs vamosed; chickens flew, squawking; feminine voices shrieked concernedly to youngsters at large. The din was perforated at intervals by the staccato of the Terror’s guns, and was drowned periodically by the brazen screech that Quicksand knew so well. The occasions of Calliope’s low spirits were legal holidays in Quicksand. All along the main street in advance of his coming clerks were putting up shutters and closing doors. Business would languish for a space. The right of way was Calliope’s, and as he advanced, observing the dearth of opposition and the few opportunities for distraction, his ennui perceptibly increased.</p>
 			<p>But some four squares farther down lively preparations were being made to minister to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Catesby’s love for interchange of compliments and repartee. On the previous night numerous messengers had hastened to advise Buck Patterson, the city marshal, of Calliope’s impending eruption. The patience of that official, often strained in extending leniency toward the disturber’s misdeeds, had been overtaxed. In Quicksand some indulgence was accorded the natural ebullition of human nature. Providing that the lives of the more useful citizens were not recklessly squandered, or too much property needlessly laid waste, the community sentiment was against a too strict enforcement of the law. But Calliope had raised the limit. His outbursts had been too frequent and too violent to come within the classification of a normal and sanitary relaxation of spirit.</p>
-			<p>Buck Patterson had been expecting and awaiting in his little ten-by- twelve frame office that preliminary yell announcing that Calliope was feeling blue. When the signal came the city marshal rose to his feet and buckled on his guns. Two deputy sheriffs and three citizens who had proven the edible qualities of fire also stood up, ready to bandy with Calliope’s leaden jocularities.</p>
+			<p>Buck Patterson had been expecting and awaiting in his little ten-by-ywelve frame office that preliminary yell announcing that Calliope was feeling blue. When the signal came the city marshal rose to his feet and buckled on his guns. Two deputy sheriffs and three citizens who had proven the edible qualities of fire also stood up, ready to bandy with Calliope’s leaden jocularities.</p>
 			<p>“Gather that fellow in,” said Buck Patterson, setting forth the lines of the campaign. “Don’t have no talk, but shoot as soon as you can get a show. Keep behind cover and bring him down. He’s a nogood ‘un. It’s up to Calliope to turn up his toes this time, I reckon. Go to him all spraddled out, boys. And don’t git too reckless, for what Calliope shoots at he hits.”</p>
 			<p>Buck Patterson, tall, muscular, and solemn-faced, with his bright “City Marshal” badge shining on the breast of his blue flannel shirt, gave his posse directions for the onslaught upon Calliope. The plan was to accomplish the downfall of the Quicksand Terror without loss to the attacking party, if possible.</p>
 			<p>The splenetic Calliope, unconscious of retributive plots, was steaming down the channel, cannonading on either side, when he suddenly became aware of breakers ahead. The city marshal and one of the deputies rose up behind some dry-goods boxes half a square to the front and opened fire. At the same time the rest of the posse, divided, shelled him from two side streets up which they were cautiously manoeuvring from a well-executed detour.</p>

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@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
 			<p>“My name is Miss Rebosa Redd,” says she in a pained way.</p>
 			<p>“I know it,” says I. “Now, Rebosa, I’m old enough to have owed money to your father. And that old, specious, dressed-up, garbled, seasick ptomaine prancing about avidiously like an irremediable turkey gobbler with patent leather shoes on is my best friend. Why did you go and get him invested in this marriage business?”</p>
 			<p>“Why, he was the only chance there was,” answers Miss Rebosa.</p>
-			<p>“Nay,” says I, giving a sickening look of admiration at her complexion and style of features; “with your beauty you might pick any kind of a man. Listen, Rebosa. Old Mack ain’t the man you want. He was twenty- two when you was /née/ Reed, as the papers say. This bursting into bloom won’t last with him. He’s all ventilated with oldness and rectitude and decay. Old Mack’s down with a case of Indian summer. He overlooked his bet when he was young; and now he’s suing Nature for the interest on the promissory note he took from Cupid instead of the cash. Rebosa, are you bent on having this marriage occur?”</p>
+			<p>“Nay,” says I, giving a sickening look of admiration at her complexion and style of features; “with your beauty you might pick any kind of a man. Listen, Rebosa. Old Mack ain’t the man you want. He was twenty-ywo when you was /née/ Reed, as the papers say. This bursting into bloom won’t last with him. He’s all ventilated with oldness and rectitude and decay. Old Mack’s down with a case of Indian summer. He overlooked his bet when he was young; and now he’s suing Nature for the interest on the promissory note he took from Cupid instead of the cash. Rebosa, are you bent on having this marriage occur?”</p>
 			<p>“Why, sure I am,” says she, oscillating the pansies on her hat, “and so is somebody else, I reckon.”</p>
 			<p>“What time is it to take place?” I asks.</p>
 			<p>“At six o’clock,” says she.</p>

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@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
 			<p>“In a few minutes Paisley drops around, with oil of bergamot on his hair, and sits on the other side of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Jessup, and inaugurates a sad tale of adventure in which him and Pieface Lumley has a skinning-match of dead cows in ’95 for a silver-mounted saddle in the Santa Rita valley during the nine months’ drought.</p>
 			<p>“Now, from the start of that courtship I had Paisley Fish hobbled and tied to a post. Each one of us had a different system of reaching out for the easy places in the female heart. Paisley’s scheme was to petrify ’em with wonderful relations of events that he had either come across personally or in large print. I think he must have got his idea of subjugation from one of Shakespeare’s shows I see once called ‘Othello.’ There is a coloured man in it who acquires a duke’s daughter by disbursing to her a mixture of the talk turned out by Rider Haggard, Lew Dockstader, and <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Parkhurst. But that style of courting don’t work well off the stage.</p>
 			<p>“Now, I give you my own recipe for inveigling a woman into that state of affairs when she can be referred to as ‘/née/ Jones.’ Learn how to pick up her hand and hold it, and she’s yours. It ain’t so easy. Some men grab at it so much like they was going to set a dislocation of the shoulder that you can smell the arnica and hear ’em tearing off bandages. Some take it up like a hot horseshoe, and hold it off at arm’s length like a druggist pouring tincture of asafoetida in a bottle. And most of ’em catch hold of it and drag it right out before the lady’s eyes like a boy finding a baseball in the grass, without giving her a chance to forget that the hand is growing on the end of her arm. Them ways are all wrong.</p>
-			<p>“I’ll tell you the right way. Did you ever see a man sneak out in the back yard and pick up a rock to throw at a tomcat that was sitting on a fence looking at him? He pretends he hasn’t got a thing in his hand, and that the cat don’t see him, and that he don’t see the cat. That’s the idea. Never drag her hand out where she’ll have to take notice of it. Don’t let her know that you think she knows you have the least idea she is aware you are holding her hand. That was my rule of tactics; and as far as Paisley’s serenade about hostilities and misadventure went, he might as well have been reading to her a time- table of the Sunday trains that stop at Ocean Grove, New Jersey.</p>
+			<p>“I’ll tell you the right way. Did you ever see a man sneak out in the back yard and pick up a rock to throw at a tomcat that was sitting on a fence looking at him? He pretends he hasn’t got a thing in his hand, and that the cat don’t see him, and that he don’t see the cat. That’s the idea. Never drag her hand out where she’ll have to take notice of it. Don’t let her know that you think she knows you have the least idea she is aware you are holding her hand. That was my rule of tactics; and as far as Paisley’s serenade about hostilities and misadventure went, he might as well have been reading to her a time-eable of the Sunday trains that stop at Ocean Grove, New Jersey.</p>
 			<p>“One night when I beat Paisley to the bench by one pipeful, my friendship gets subsidised for a minute, and I asks <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Jessup if she didn’t think a ‘H’ was easier to write than a ‘J.’ In a second her head was mashing the oleander flower in my buttonhole, and I leaned over and⁠—but I didn’t.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘If you don’t mind,’ says I, standing up, ‘we’ll wait for Paisley to come before finishing this. I’ve never done anything dishonourable yet to our friendship, and this won’t be quite fair.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hicks,’ says <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Jessup, looking at me peculiar in the dark, ‘if it wasn’t for but one thing, I’d ask you to hike yourself down the gulch and never disresume your visits to my house.’</p>

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@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
 			<p>That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me and Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain, thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot on a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in. We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought proper.</p>
 			<p>If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won’t stand it.</p>
 			<p>When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other’s jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a edict to me. Says he:</p>
-			<p>“I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half- masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.”</p>
+			<p>“I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half-fasticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.”</p>
 			<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Green,” says I, “you having been a friend of mine once, I have some hesitations in confessing to you that if I had my choice for society between you and a common yellow, three-legged cur pup, one of the inmates of this here cabin would be wagging a tail just at present.”</p>
 			<p>This way we goes on for two or three days, and then we quits speaking to one another. We divides up the cooking implements, and Idaho cooks his grub on one side of the fireplace, and me on the other. The snow is up to the windows, and we have to keep a fire all day.</p>
 			<p>You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and doing “if John had three apples and James five” on a slate. We never felt any special need for a university degree, though we had acquired a species of intrinsic intelligence in knocking around the world that we could use in emergencies. But, snowbound in that cabin in the Bitter Roots, we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer or Greek and fractions and the higher branches of information, we’d have had some resources in the line of meditation and private thought. I’ve seen them Eastern college fellows working in camps all through the West, and I never noticed but what education was less of a drawback to ’em than you would think. Why, once over on Snake River, when Andrew McWilliams’ saddle horse got the botts, he sent a buckboard ten miles for one of these strangers that claimed to be a botanist. But that horse died.</p>
@@ -32,11 +32,11 @@
 			<p>“Why,” says he, “this here seems to be a volume by Homer K. M.”</p>
 			<p>“Homer K. M. what?” I asks.</p>
 			<p>“Why, just Homer K. M.,” says he.</p>
-			<p>“You’re a liar,” says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put me up a tree. “No man is going ’round signing books with his initials. If it’s Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, or Homer K. M. Jones, why don’t you say so like a man instead of biting off the end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothes- line?”</p>
+			<p>“You’re a liar,” says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put me up a tree. “No man is going ’round signing books with his initials. If it’s Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, or Homer K. M. Jones, why don’t you say so like a man instead of biting off the end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothes-sine?”</p>
 			<p>“I put it to you straight, Sandy,” says Idaho, quiet. “It’s a poem book,” says he, “by Homer K. M. I couldn’t get colour out of it at first, but there’s a vein if you follow it up. I wouldn’t have missed this book for a pair of red blankets.”</p>
 			<p>“You’re welcome to it,” says I. “What I want is a disinterested statement of facts for the mind to work on, and that’s what I seem to find in the book I’ve drawn.”</p>
 			<p>“What you’ve got,” says Idaho, “is statistics, the lowest grade of information that exists. They’ll poison your mind. Give me old K. M.’s system of surmises. He seems to be a kind of a wine agent. His regular toast is ‘nothing doing,’ and he seems to have a grouch, but he keeps it so well lubricated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an invitation to split a quart. But it’s poetry,” says Idaho, “and I have sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to convey sense in feet and inches. When it comes to explaining the instinct of philosophy through the art of nature, old K. M. has got your man beat by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and average annual rainfall.”</p>
-			<p>So that’s the way me and Idaho had it. Day and night all the excitement we got was studying our books. That snowstorm sure fixed us with a fine lot of attainments apiece. By the time the snow melted, if you had stepped up to me suddenly and said: “Sanderson Pratt, what would it cost per square foot to lay a roof with twenty by twenty- eight tin at nine dollars and fifty cents per box?” I’d have told you as quick as light could travel the length of a spade handle at the rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second. How many can do it? You wake up ‘most any man you know in the middle of the night, and ask him quick to tell you the number of bones in the human skeleton exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the vote of the Nebraska Legislature overrules a veto. Will he tell you? Try him and see.</p>
+			<p>So that’s the way me and Idaho had it. Day and night all the excitement we got was studying our books. That snowstorm sure fixed us with a fine lot of attainments apiece. By the time the snow melted, if you had stepped up to me suddenly and said: “Sanderson Pratt, what would it cost per square foot to lay a roof with twenty by twenty-yight tin at nine dollars and fifty cents per box?” I’d have told you as quick as light could travel the length of a spade handle at the rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second. How many can do it? You wake up ‘most any man you know in the middle of the night, and ask him quick to tell you the number of bones in the human skeleton exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the vote of the Nebraska Legislature overrules a veto. Will he tell you? Try him and see.</p>
 			<p>About what benefit Idaho got out of his poetry book I didn’t exactly know. Idaho boosted the wine-agent every time he opened his mouth; but I wasn’t so sure.</p>
 			<p>This Homer K. M., from what leaked out of his libretto through Idaho, seemed to me to be a kind of a dog who looked at life like it was a tin can tied to his tail. After running himself half to death, he sits down, hangs his tongue out, and looks at the can and says:</p>
 			<p>“Oh, well, since we can’t shake the growler, let’s get it filled at the corner, and all have a drink on me.”</p>
@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@
 			<p>One night I was waked up by folks hollering “Fire!” all around. I jumped up and dressed and went out of the hotel to enjoy the scene. When I see it was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Sampson’s house, I gave forth a kind of yell, and I was there in two minutes.</p>
 			<p>The whole lower story of the yellow house was in flames, and every masculine, feminine, and canine in Rosa was there, screeching and barking and getting in the way of the firemen. I saw Idaho trying to get away from six firemen who were holding him. They was telling him the whole place was on fire downstairs, and no man could go in it and come out alive.</p>
 			<p>“Where’s <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Sampson?” I asks.</p>
-			<p>“She hasn’t been seen,” says one of the firemen. “She sleeps up- stairs. We’ve tried to get in, but we can’t, and our company hasn’t got any ladders yet.”</p>
+			<p>“She hasn’t been seen,” says one of the firemen. “She sleeps up-ptairs. We’ve tried to get in, but we can’t, and our company hasn’t got any ladders yet.”</p>
 			<p>I runs around to the light of the big blaze, and pulls the Handbook out of my inside pocket. I kind of laughed when I felt it in my hands⁠—I reckon I was some daffy with the sensation of excitement.</p>
 			<p>“Herky, old boy,” I says to it, as I flipped over the pages, “you ain’t ever lied to me yet, and you ain’t ever throwed me down at a scratch yet. Tell me what, old boy, tell me what!” says I.</p>
 			<p>I turned to “What to do in Case of Accidents,” on page 117. I run my finger down the page, and struck it. Good old Herkimer, he never overlooked anything! It said:</p>

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@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@
 			<p>“Miss Willella gives a little jump on the piano stool, and looked at me curious.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘they’re real nice. What did you say was the name of that street in Saint Louis, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Odom, where you lost your hat?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Pancake Avenue,’ says I, with a wink, to show her that I was on about the family receipt, and couldn’t be side-corralled off of the subject. ‘Come, now, Miss Willella,’ I says; ‘let’s hear how you make ’em. Pancakes is just whirling in my head like wagon wheels. Start her off, now⁠—pound of flour, eight dozen eggs, and so on. How does the catalogue of constituents run?’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Excuse me for a moment, please,’ says Miss Willella, and she gives me a quick kind of sideways look, and slides off the stool. She ambled out into the other room, and directly Uncle Emsley comes in in his shirt sleeves, with a pitcher of water. He turns around to get a glass on the table, and I see a forty-five in his hip pocket. ‘Great post- holes!’ thinks I, ‘but here’s a family thinks a heap of cooking receipts, protecting it with firearms. I’ve known outfits that wouldn’t do that much by a family feud.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Excuse me for a moment, please,’ says Miss Willella, and she gives me a quick kind of sideways look, and slides off the stool. She ambled out into the other room, and directly Uncle Emsley comes in in his shirt sleeves, with a pitcher of water. He turns around to get a glass on the table, and I see a forty-five in his hip pocket. ‘Great post-toles!’ thinks I, ‘but here’s a family thinks a heap of cooking receipts, protecting it with firearms. I’ve known outfits that wouldn’t do that much by a family feud.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Drink this here down,’ says Uncle Emsley, handing me the glass of water. ‘You’ve rid too far today, Jud, and got yourself overexcited. Try to think about something else now.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Do you know how to make them pancakes, Uncle Emsley?’ I asked.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, I’m not as apprised in the anatomy of them as some,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘but I reckon you take a sifter of plaster of Paris and a little dough and saleratus and corn meal, and mix ’em with eggs and buttermilk as usual. Is old Bill going to ship beeves to Kansas City again this spring, Jud?’</p>
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Well, no,’ says Jackson. ‘I don’t seem to have any success in getting hold of it. Did you try?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I did,’ says I, ‘and ’twas like trying to dig a prairie dog out of his hole with a peanut hull. That pancake receipt must be a jookalorum, the way they hold on to it.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’m most ready to give it up,’ says Jackson, so discouraged in his pronunciations that I felt sorry for him; ‘but I did want to know how to make them pancakes to eat on my lonely ranch,’ says he. ‘I lie awake at nights thinking how good they are.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘You keep on trying for it,’ I tells him, ‘and I’ll do the same. One of us is bound to get a rope over its horns before long. Well, so- long, Jacksy.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘You keep on trying for it,’ I tells him, ‘and I’ll do the same. One of us is bound to get a rope over its horns before long. Well, so-oong, Jacksy.’</p>
 			<p>“You see, by this time we were on the peacefullest of terms. When I saw that he wasn’t after Miss Willella, I had more endurable contemplations of that sandy-haired snoozer. In order to help out the ambitions of his appetite I kept on trying to get that receipt from Miss Willella. But every time I would say ‘pancakes’ she would get sort of remote and fidgety about the eye, and try to change the subject. If I held her to it she would slide out and round up Uncle Emsley with his pitcher of water and hip-pocket howitzer.</p>
 			<p>“One day I galloped over to the store with a fine bunch of blue verbenas that I cut out of a herd of wild flowers over on Poisoned Dog Prairie. Uncle Emsley looked at ’em with one eye shut and says:</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Haven’t ye heard the news?’</p>

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@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
 			<p>Safe on the sidewalk, Lucullus Polk turned and shook a freckled fist at the caravansary. And, to my joy, he began to breathe deep invective in strange words:</p>
 			<p>“Rides in howdays, does he?” he cried loudly and sneeringly. “Rides on elephants in howdahs and calls himself a prince! Kings⁠—yah! Comes over here and talks horse till you would think he was a president; and then goes home and rides in a private dining-room strapped onto an elephant. Well, well, well!”</p>
 			<p>The ejecting committee quietly retired. The scorner of princes turned to me and snapped his fingers.</p>
-			<p>“What do you think of that?” he shouted derisively. “The Gaekwar of Baroda rides in an elephant in a howdah! And there’s old Bikram Shamsher Jang scorching up and down the pig-paths of Khatmandu on a motorcycle. Wouldn’t that maharajah you? And the Shah of Persia, that ought to have been Muley-on-the-spot for at least three, he’s got the palanquin habit. And that funny-hat prince from Korea⁠—wouldn’t you think he could afford to amble around on a milk-white palfrey once in a dynasty or two? Nothing doing! His idea of a Balaklava charge is to tuck his skirts under him and do his mile in six days over the hog- wallows of Seoul in a bull-cart. That’s the kind of visiting potentates that come to this country now. It’s a hard deal, friend.”</p>
+			<p>“What do you think of that?” he shouted derisively. “The Gaekwar of Baroda rides in an elephant in a howdah! And there’s old Bikram Shamsher Jang scorching up and down the pig-paths of Khatmandu on a motorcycle. Wouldn’t that maharajah you? And the Shah of Persia, that ought to have been Muley-on-the-spot for at least three, he’s got the palanquin habit. And that funny-hat prince from Korea⁠—wouldn’t you think he could afford to amble around on a milk-white palfrey once in a dynasty or two? Nothing doing! His idea of a Balaklava charge is to tuck his skirts under him and do his mile in six days over the hog-gallows of Seoul in a bull-cart. That’s the kind of visiting potentates that come to this country now. It’s a hard deal, friend.”</p>
 			<p>I murmured a few words of sympathy. But it was uncomprehending, for I did not know his grievance against the rulers who flash, meteor-like, now and then upon our shores.</p>
 			<p>“The last one I sold,” continued the displeased one, “was to that three-horse-tailed Turkish pasha that came over a year ago. Five hundred dollars he paid for it, easy. I says to his executioner or secretary⁠—he was a kind of a Jew or a Chinaman⁠—‘His Turkey Gibbets is fond of horses, then?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Him?’ says the secretary. ‘Well, no. He’s got a big, fat wife in the harem named Bad Dora that he don’t like. I believe he intends to saddle her up and ride her up and down the boardwalk in the Bulbul Gardens a few times every day. You haven’t got a pair of extra-long spurs you could throw in on the deal, have you?’ Yes, sir; there’s mighty few real roughriders among the royal sports these days.”</p>
@@ -26,9 +26,9 @@
 			<p>And it came to pass that man-servants set before us brewage; and Lucullus Polk spake unto me, relating the wherefores of his beleaguering the antechambers of the princes of the earth.</p>
 			<p>“Did you ever hear of the S.A. &amp; A.P. Railroad in Texas? Well, that don’t stand for Samaritan Actor’s Aid Philanthropy. I was down that way managing a summer bunch of the gum and syntax-chewers that play the Idlewild Parks in the Western hamlets. Of course, we went to pieces when the soubrette ran away with a prominent barber of Beeville. I don’t know what became of the rest of the company. I believe there were some salaries due; and the last I saw of the troupe was when I told them that forty-three cents was all the treasury contained. I say I never saw any of them after that; but I heard them for about twenty minutes. I didn’t have time to look back. But after dark I came out of the woods and struck the S.A. &amp; A.P. agent for means of transportation. He at once extended to me the courtesies of the entire railroad, kindly warning me, however, not to get aboard any of the rolling stock.</p>
 			<p>“About ten the next morning I steps off the ties into a village that calls itself Atascosa City. I bought a thirty-cent breakfast and a ten-cent cigar, and stood on the Main Street jingling the three pennies in my pocket⁠—dead broke. A man in Texas with only three cents in his pocket is no better off than a man that has no money and owes two cents.</p>
-			<p>“One of luck’s favourite tricks is to soak a man for his last dollar so quick that he don’t have time to look it. There I was in a swell <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis tailor-made, blue-and-green plaid suit, and an eighteen- carat sulphate-of-copper scarf-pin, with no hope in sight except the two great Texas industries, the cotton fields and grading new railroads. I never picked cotton, and I never cottoned to a pick, so the outlook had ultramarine edges.</p>
+			<p>“One of luck’s favourite tricks is to soak a man for his last dollar so quick that he don’t have time to look it. There I was in a swell <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis tailor-made, blue-and-green plaid suit, and an eighteen-narat sulphate-of-copper scarf-pin, with no hope in sight except the two great Texas industries, the cotton fields and grading new railroads. I never picked cotton, and I never cottoned to a pick, so the outlook had ultramarine edges.</p>
 			<p>“All of a sudden, while I was standing on the edge of the wooden sidewalk, down out of the sky falls two fine gold watches in the middle of the street. One hits a chunk of mud and sticks. The other falls hard and flies open, making a fine drizzle of little springs and screws and wheels. I looks up for a balloon or an airship; but not seeing any, I steps off the sidewalk to investigate.</p>
-			<p>“But I hear a couple of yells and see two men running up the street in leather overalls and high-heeled boots and cartwheel hats. One man is six or eight feet high, with open-plumbed joints and a heartbroken cast of countenance. He picks up the watch that has stuck in the mud. The other man, who is little, with pink hair and white eyes, goes for the empty case, and says, ‘I win.’ Then the elevated pessimist goes down under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of twenty- dollar gold pieces to his albino friend. I don’t know how much money it was; it looked as big as an earthquake-relief fund to me.</p>
+			<p>“But I hear a couple of yells and see two men running up the street in leather overalls and high-heeled boots and cartwheel hats. One man is six or eight feet high, with open-plumbed joints and a heartbroken cast of countenance. He picks up the watch that has stuck in the mud. The other man, who is little, with pink hair and white eyes, goes for the empty case, and says, ‘I win.’ Then the elevated pessimist goes down under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of twenty-yollar gold pieces to his albino friend. I don’t know how much money it was; it looked as big as an earthquake-relief fund to me.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’ll have this here case filled up with works,’ says Shorty, ‘and throw you again for five hundred.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’m your company,’ says the high man. ‘I’ll meet you at the Smoked Dog Saloon an hour from now.’</p>
 			<p>“The little man hustles away with a kind of Swiss movement toward a jewelry store. The heartbroken person stoops over and takes a telescopic view of my haberdashery.</p>
@@ -38,26 +38,26 @@
 			<p>“ ‘You must have knocked around a right smart,’ goes on this oil Grease-us. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you have saw towns more livelier than what Atascosa City is. Sometimes it seems to me that there ought to be some more ways of having a good time than there is here, ‘specially when you’ve got plenty of money and don’t mind spending it.’</p>
 			<p>“Then this Mother Cary’s chick of the desert sits down by me and we hold a conversationfest. It seems that he was money-poor. He’d lived in ranch camps all his life; and he confessed to me that his supreme idea of luxury was to ride into camp, tired out from a roundup, eat a peck of Mexican beans, hobble his brains with a pint of raw whisky, and go to sleep with his boots for a pillow. When this barge-load of unexpected money came to him and his pink but perky partner, George, and they hied themselves to this clump of outhouses called Atascosa City, you know what happened to them. They had money to buy anything they wanted; but they didn’t know what to want. Their ideas of spendthriftiness were limited to three⁠—whisky, saddles, and gold watches. If there was anything else in the world to throw away fortunes on, they had never heard about it. So, when they wanted to have a hot time, they’d ride into town and get a city directory and stand in front of the principal saloon and call up the population alphabetically for free drinks. Then they would order three or four new California saddles from the storekeeper, and play crack-loo on the sidewalk with twenty-dollar gold pieces. Betting who could throw his gold watch the farthest was an inspiration of George’s; but even that was getting to be monotonous.</p>
 			<p>“Was I on to the opportunity? Listen.</p>
-			<p>“In thirty minutes I had dashed off a word picture of metropolitan joys that made life in Atascosa City look as dull as a trip to Coney Island with your own wife. In ten minutes more we shook hands on an agreement that I was to act as his guide, interpreter and friend in and to the aforesaid wassail and amenity. And Solomon Mills, which was his name, was to pay all expenses for a month. At the end of that time, if I had made good as director-general of the rowdy life, he was to pay me one thousand dollars. And then, to clinch the bargain, we called the roll of Atascosa City and put all of its citizens except the ladies and minors under the table, except one man named Horace Westervelt <abbr>St.</abbr> Clair. Just for that we bought a couple of hatfuls of cheap silver watches and egged him out of town with ’em. We wound up by dragging the harness-maker out of bed and setting him to work on three new saddles; and then we went to sleep across the railroad track at the depot, just to annoy the S.A. &amp; A.P. Think of having seventy- five thousand dollars and trying to avoid the disgrace of dying rich in a town like that!</p>
+			<p>“In thirty minutes I had dashed off a word picture of metropolitan joys that made life in Atascosa City look as dull as a trip to Coney Island with your own wife. In ten minutes more we shook hands on an agreement that I was to act as his guide, interpreter and friend in and to the aforesaid wassail and amenity. And Solomon Mills, which was his name, was to pay all expenses for a month. At the end of that time, if I had made good as director-general of the rowdy life, he was to pay me one thousand dollars. And then, to clinch the bargain, we called the roll of Atascosa City and put all of its citizens except the ladies and minors under the table, except one man named Horace Westervelt <abbr>St.</abbr> Clair. Just for that we bought a couple of hatfuls of cheap silver watches and egged him out of town with ’em. We wound up by dragging the harness-maker out of bed and setting him to work on three new saddles; and then we went to sleep across the railroad track at the depot, just to annoy the S.A. &amp; A.P. Think of having seventy-yive thousand dollars and trying to avoid the disgrace of dying rich in a town like that!</p>
 			<p>“The next day George, who was married or something, started back to the ranch. Me and Solly, as I now called him, prepared to shake off our moth balls and wing our way against the arc-lights of the joyous and tuneful East.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘No way-stops,’ says I to Solly, ‘except long enough to get you barbered and haberdashed. This is no Texas feet shampetter,’ says I, ‘where you eat chili-concarne-con-huevos and then holler “Whoopee!” across the plaza. We’re now going against the real high life. We’re going to mingle with the set that carries a Spitz, wears spats, and hits the ground in high spots.’</p>
 			<p>“Solly puts six thousand dollars in century bills in one pocket of his brown ducks, and bills of lading for ten thousand dollars on Eastern banks in another. Then I resume diplomatic relations with the S.A. &amp; A.P., and we hike in a northwesterly direction on our circuitous route to the spice gardens of the Yankee Orient.</p>
 			<p>“We stopped in San Antonio long enough for Solly to buy some clothes, and eight rounds of drinks for the guests and employees of the Menger Hotel, and order four Mexican saddles with silver trimmings and white Angora <i xml:lang="es">suaderos</i> to be shipped down to the ranch. From there we made a big jump to <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis. We got there in time for dinner; and I put our thumbprints on the register of the most expensive hotel in the city.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Now,’ says I to Solly, with a wink at myself, ‘here’s the first dinner-station we’ve struck where we can get a real good plate of beans.’ And while he was up in his room trying to draw water out of the gas-pipe, I got one finger in the buttonhole of the head waiter’s Tuxedo, drew him apart, inserted a two-dollar bill, and closed him up again.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Frankoyse,’ says I, ‘I have a pal here for dinner that’s been subsisting for years on cereals and short stogies. You see the chef and order a dinner for us such as you serve to Dave Francis and the general passenger agent of the Iron Mountain when they eat here. We’ve got more than Bernhardt’s tent full of money; and we want the nose- bags crammed with all the Chief Deveries de cuisine. Object is no expense. Now, show us.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Frankoyse,’ says I, ‘I have a pal here for dinner that’s been subsisting for years on cereals and short stogies. You see the chef and order a dinner for us such as you serve to Dave Francis and the general passenger agent of the Iron Mountain when they eat here. We’ve got more than Bernhardt’s tent full of money; and we want the nose-eags crammed with all the Chief Deveries de cuisine. Object is no expense. Now, show us.’</p>
 			<p>“At six o’clock me and Solly sat down to dinner. Spread! There’s nothing been seen like it since the Cambon snack. It was all served at once. The chef called it /dinnay à la poker/. It’s a famous thing among the gormands of the West. The dinner comes in threes of a kind. There was guinea-fowls, guinea-pigs, and Guinness’s stout; roast veal, mock turtle soup, and chicken pate; shad-roe, caviar, and tapioca; canvasback duck, canvasback ham, and cottontail rabbit; Philadelphia capon, fried snails, and sloe-gin⁠—and so on, in threes. The idea was that you eat nearly all you can of them, and then the waiter takes away the discard and gives you pears to fill on.</p>
 			<p>“I was sure Solly would be tickled to death with these hands, after the bobtail flushes he’d been eating on the ranch; and I was a little anxious that he should, for I didn’t remember his having honoured my efforts with a smile since we left Atascosa City.</p>
 			<p>“We were in the main dining-room, and there was a fine-dressed crowd there, all talking loud and enjoyable about the two <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis topics, the water supply and the colour line. They mix the two subjects so fast that strangers often think they are discussing watercolours; and that has given the old town something of a rep as an art centre. And over in the corner was a fine brass band playing; and now, thinks I, Solly will become conscious of the spiritual oats of life nourishing and exhilarating his system. But /nong, mong frang/.</p>
-			<p>“He gazed across the table at me. There was four square yards of it, looking like the path of a cyclone that has wandered through a stock- yard, a poultry-farm, a vegetable-garden, and an Irish linen mill. Solly gets up and comes around to me.</p>
+			<p>“He gazed across the table at me. There was four square yards of it, looking like the path of a cyclone that has wandered through a stock-kard, a poultry-farm, a vegetable-garden, and an Irish linen mill. Solly gets up and comes around to me.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Luke,’ says he, ‘I’m pretty hungry after our ride. I thought you said they had some beans here. I’m going out and get something I can eat. You can stay and monkey with this artificial layout of grub if you want to.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Wait a minute,’ says I.</p>
 			<p>“I called the waiter, and slapped ‘S. Mills’ on the back of the check for thirteen dollars and fifty cents.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘What do you mean,’ says I, ‘by serving gentlemen with a lot of truck only suitable for deckhands on a Mississippi steamboat? We’re going out to get something decent to eat.’</p>
-			<p>“I walked up the street with the unhappy plainsman. He saw a saddle- shop open, and some of the sadness faded from his eyes. We went in, and he ordered and paid for two more saddles⁠—one with a solid silver horn and nails and ornaments and a six-inch border of rhinestones and imitation rubies around the flaps. The other one had to have a gold- mounted horn, quadruple-plated stirrups, and the leather inlaid with silver beadwork wherever it would stand it. Eleven hundred dollars the two cost him.</p>
+			<p>“I walked up the street with the unhappy plainsman. He saw a saddle-ehop open, and some of the sadness faded from his eyes. We went in, and he ordered and paid for two more saddles⁠—one with a solid silver horn and nails and ornaments and a six-inch border of rhinestones and imitation rubies around the flaps. The other one had to have a gold-dounted horn, quadruple-plated stirrups, and the leather inlaid with silver beadwork wherever it would stand it. Eleven hundred dollars the two cost him.</p>
 			<p>“Then he goes out and heads toward the river, following his nose. In a little side street, where there was no street and no sidewalks and no houses, he finds what he is looking for. We go into a shanty and sit on high stools among stevedores and boatmen, and eat beans with tin spoons. Yes, sir, beans⁠—beans boiled with salt pork.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I kind of thought we’d strike some over this way,’ says Solly.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Delightful,’ says I, ‘That stylish hotel grub may appeal to some; but for me, give me the husky /table d’goat.’</p>
-			<p>“When we had succumbed to the beans I leads him out of the tarpaulin- steam under a lamp post and pulls out a daily paper with the amusement column folded out.</p>
+			<p>“When we had succumbed to the beans I leads him out of the tarpaulin-nteam under a lamp post and pulls out a daily paper with the amusement column folded out.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘But now, what ho for a merry round of pleasure,’ says I. ‘Here’s one of Hall Caine’s shows, and a stockyard company in “Hamlet,” and skating at the Hollowhorn Rink, and Sarah Bernhardt, and the Shapely Syrens Burlesque Company. I should think, now, that the Shapely⁠—’</p>
 			<p>“But what does this healthy, wealthy, and wise man do but reach his arms up to the second-story windows and gape noisily.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Reckon I’ll be going to bed,’ says he; ‘it’s about my time. <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis is a kind of quiet place, ain’t it?’</p>

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@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
 			<p>“You ain’t seen me cash in any chips or call a turn since I told you I was broke, a minute ago, have you? Friend, chase yourself away.”</p>
 			<p>“You’re going down to my ranch,” said the cattleman, “and stay till you get well. Six months’ll fix you good as new.” He lifted McGuire with one hand, and half-dragged him in the direction of the train.</p>
 			<p>“What about the money?” said McGuire, struggling weakly to escape.</p>
-			<p>“Money for what?” asked Raidler, puzzled. They eyed each other, not understanding, for they touched only as at the gear of bevelled cog- wheels⁠—at right angles, and moving upon different axes.</p>
+			<p>“Money for what?” asked Raidler, puzzled. They eyed each other, not understanding, for they touched only as at the gear of bevelled cog-gheels⁠—at right angles, and moving upon different axes.</p>
 			<p>Passengers on the southbound saw them seated together, and wondered at the conflux of two such antipodes. McGuire was five feet one, with a countenance belonging to either Yokohama or Dublin. Bright-beady of eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit, indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither new nor unfamiliar. Raidler was the product of a different soil. Six feet two in height, miles broad, and no deeper than a crystal brook, he represented the union of the West and South. Few accurate pictures of his kind have been made, for art galleries are so small and the mutoscope is as yet unknown in Texas. After all, the only possible medium of portrayal of Raidler’s kind would be the fresco⁠—something high and simple and cool and unframed.</p>
 			<p>They were rolling southward on the International. The timber was huddling into little, dense green motts at rare distances before the inundation of the downright, vert prairies. This was the land of the ranches; the domain of the kings of the kine.</p>
 			<p>McGuire sat, collapsed into his corner of the seat, receiving with acid suspicion the conversation of the cattleman. What was the “game” of this big “geezer” who was carrying him off? Altruism would have been McGuire’s last guess. “He ain’t no farmer,” thought the captive, “and he ain’t no con man, for sure. W’at’s his lay? You trail in, Cricket, and see how many cards he draws. You’re up against it, anyhow. You got a nickel and gallopin’ consumption, and you better lay low. Lay low and see w’at’s his game.”</p>
@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@
 			<p>Ten minutes later Ylario came from McGuire’s room and stood before Raidler.</p>
 			<p>“The little señor,” he announced, “presents his compliments” (Raidler credited Ylario with the preliminary) “and desires some pounded ice, one hot bath, one gin feez-z, that the windows be all closed, toast, one shave, one Newyorkheral’, cigarettes, and to send one telegram.”</p>
 			<p>Raidler took a quart bottle of whisky from his medicine cabinet. “Here, take him this,” he said.</p>
-			<p>Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch. For a few weeks McGuire blustered and boasted and swaggered before the cow- punchers who rode in for miles around to see this latest importation of Raidler’s. He was an absolutely new experience to them. He explained to them all the intricate points of sparring and the tricks of training and defence. He opened to their minds’ view all the indecorous life of a tagger after professional sports. His jargon of slang was a continuous joy and surprise to them. His gestures, his strange poses, his frank ribaldry of tongue and principle fascinated them. He was like a being from a new world.</p>
+			<p>Thus was instituted the reign of terror at the Solito Ranch. For a few weeks McGuire blustered and boasted and swaggered before the cow-wunchers who rode in for miles around to see this latest importation of Raidler’s. He was an absolutely new experience to them. He explained to them all the intricate points of sparring and the tricks of training and defence. He opened to their minds’ view all the indecorous life of a tagger after professional sports. His jargon of slang was a continuous joy and surprise to them. His gestures, his strange poses, his frank ribaldry of tongue and principle fascinated them. He was like a being from a new world.</p>
 			<p>Strange to say, this new world he had entered did not exist to him. He was an utter egoist of bricks and mortar. He had dropped out, he felt, into open space for a time, and all it contained was an audience for his reminiscences. Neither the limitless freedom of the prairie days nor the grand hush of the close-drawn, spangled nights touched him. All the hues of Aurora could not win him from the pink pages of a sporting journal. “Get something for nothing,” was his mission in life; “Thirty-seventh” Street was his goal.</p>
 			<p>Nearly two months after his arrival he began to complain that he felt worse. It was then that he became the ranch’s incubus, its harpy, its Old Man of the Sea. He shut himself in his room like some venomous kobold or flibbertigibbet, whining, complaining, cursing, accusing. The keynote of his plaint was that he had been inveigled into a gehenna against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drumhead, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the fact that McGuire was breathing with only one lung, but his appearance remained the same.</p>
 			<p>In constant attendance upon him was Ylario, whom the coming reward of the mayordomoship must have greatly stimulated, for McGuire chained him to a bitter existence. The air⁠—the man’s only chance for life⁠—he commanded to be kept out by closed windows and drawn curtains. The room was always blue and foul with cigarette smoke; whosoever entered it must sit, suffocating, and listen to the imp’s interminable gasconade concerning his scandalous career.</p>
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@
 			<p>One day, about noon, two men drove up to the ranch, alighted, hitched, and came in to dinner; standing and general invitations being the custom of the country. One of them was a great San Antonio doctor, whose costly services had been engaged by a wealthy cowman who had been laid low by an accidental bullet. He was now being driven back to the station to take the train back to town. After dinner Raidler took him aside, pushed a twenty-dollar bill against his hand, and said:</p>
 			<p>“Doc, there’s a young chap in that room I guess has got a bad case of consumption. I’d like for you to look him over and see just how bad he is, and if we can do anything for him.”</p>
 			<p>“How much was that dinner I just ate, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Raidler?” said the doctor bluffly, looking over his spectacles. Raidler returned the money to his pocket. The doctor immediately entered McGuire’s room, and the cattleman seated himself upon a heap of saddles on the gallery, ready to reproach himself in the event the verdict should be unfavourable.</p>
-			<p>In ten minutes the doctor came briskly out. “Your man,” he said promptly, “is as sound as a new dollar. His lungs are better than mine. Respiration, temperature, and pulse normal. Chest expansion four inches. Not a sign of weakness anywhere. Of course I didn’t examine for the bacillus, but it isn’t there. You can put my name to the diagnosis. Even cigarettes and a vilely close room haven’t hurt him. Coughs, does he? Well, you tell him it isn’t necessary. You asked if there is anything we could do for him. Well, I advise you to set him digging postholes or breaking mustangs. There’s our team ready. Good- day, sir.” And like a puff of wholesome, blustery wind the doctor was off.</p>
+			<p>In ten minutes the doctor came briskly out. “Your man,” he said promptly, “is as sound as a new dollar. His lungs are better than mine. Respiration, temperature, and pulse normal. Chest expansion four inches. Not a sign of weakness anywhere. Of course I didn’t examine for the bacillus, but it isn’t there. You can put my name to the diagnosis. Even cigarettes and a vilely close room haven’t hurt him. Coughs, does he? Well, you tell him it isn’t necessary. You asked if there is anything we could do for him. Well, I advise you to set him digging postholes or breaking mustangs. There’s our team ready. Good-day, sir.” And like a puff of wholesome, blustery wind the doctor was off.</p>
 			<p>Raidler reached out and plucked a leaf from a mesquite bush by the railing, and began chewing it thoughtfully.</p>
 			<p>The branding season was at hand, and the next morning Ross Hargis, foreman of the outfit, was mustering his force of some twenty-five men at the ranch, ready to start for the San Carlos range, where the work was to begin. By six o’clock the horses were all saddled, the grub wagon ready, and the cowpunchers were swinging themselves upon their mounts, when Raidler bade them wait. A boy was bringing up an extra pony, bridled and saddled, to the gate. Raidler walked to McGuire’s room and threw open the door. McGuire was lying on his cot, not yet dressed, smoking.</p>
 			<p>“Get up,” said the cattleman, and his voice was clear and brassy, like a bugle.</p>
@@ -100,7 +100,7 @@
 			<p>“Everything all right in camp, Pete?” he managed to inquire.</p>
 			<p>“So, so,” said Pete, conservatively. “Grub give out twice. Wind scattered the cattle, and we’ve had to rake the brush for forty mile. I need a new coffeepot. And the mosquitos is some more hellish than common.”</p>
 			<p>“The boys⁠—all well?”</p>
-			<p>Pete was no optimist. Besides, inquiries concerning the health of cow- punchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity. It was not like the boss to make them.</p>
+			<p>Pete was no optimist. Besides, inquiries concerning the health of cow-wunchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity. It was not like the boss to make them.</p>
 			<p>“What’s left of ’em don’t miss no calls to grub,” the cook conceded.</p>
 			<p>“What’s left of ’em?” repeated Raidler in a husky voice. Mechanically he began to look around for McGuire’s grave. He had in his mind a white slab such as he had seen in the Alabama churchyard. But immediately he knew that was foolish.</p>
 			<p>“Sure,” said Pete; “what’s left. Cow camps change in two months. Some’s gone.”</p>

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@@ -27,8 +27,8 @@
 			<p>“That’s rather better than I hoped from you,” nodded the Easterner, approvingly. “The other meaning is that Buckley never goes into a fight without giving away weight. He seems to dread taking the slightest advantage. That’s quite close to foolhardiness when you are dealing with horse-thieves and fence-cutters who would ambush you any night, and shoot you in the back if they could. Buckley’s too full of sand. He’ll play Horatius and hold the bridge once too often some day.”</p>
 			<p>“I’m on there,” drawled the Kid; “I mind that bridge gang in the reader. Me, I go instructed for the other chap⁠—Spurious Somebody⁠—the one that fought and pulled his freight, to fight ’em on some other day.”</p>
 			<p>“Anyway,” summed up Broncho, “Bob’s about the gamest man I ever see along the Rio Bravo. Great Sam Houston! If she gets any hotter she’ll sizzle!” Broncho whacked at a scorpion with his four-pound Stetson felt, and the three watchers relapsed into comfortless silence.</p>
-			<p>How well Bob Buckley had kept his secret, since these men, for two years his side comrades in countless border raids and dangers, thus spake of him, not knowing that he was the most arrant physical coward in all that Rio Bravo country! Neither his friends nor his enemies had suspected him of aught else than the finest courage. It was purely a physical cowardice, and only by an extreme, grim effort of will had he forced his craven body to do the bravest deeds. Scourging himself always, as a monk whips his besetting sin, Buckley threw himself with apparent recklessness into every danger, with the hope of some day ridding himself of the despised affliction. But each successive test brought no relief, and the ranger’s face, by nature adapted to cheerfulness and good-humour, became set to the guise of gloomy melancholy. Thus, while the frontier admired his deeds, and his prowess was celebrated in print and by word of mouth in many camp- fires in the valley of the Bravo, his heart was sick within him. Only himself knew of the horrible tightening of the chest, the dry mouth, the weakening of the spine, the agony of the strung nerves⁠—the never- failing symptoms of his shameful malady.</p>
-			<p>One mere boy in his company was wont to enter a fray with a leg perched flippantly about the horn of his saddle, a cigarette hanging from his lips, which emitted smoke and original slogans of clever invention. Buckley would have given a year’s pay to attain that devil- may-care method. Once the debonair youth said to him: “Buck, you go into a scrap like it was a funeral. Not,” he added, with a complimentary wave of his tin cup, “but what it generally is.”</p>
+			<p>How well Bob Buckley had kept his secret, since these men, for two years his side comrades in countless border raids and dangers, thus spake of him, not knowing that he was the most arrant physical coward in all that Rio Bravo country! Neither his friends nor his enemies had suspected him of aught else than the finest courage. It was purely a physical cowardice, and only by an extreme, grim effort of will had he forced his craven body to do the bravest deeds. Scourging himself always, as a monk whips his besetting sin, Buckley threw himself with apparent recklessness into every danger, with the hope of some day ridding himself of the despised affliction. But each successive test brought no relief, and the ranger’s face, by nature adapted to cheerfulness and good-humour, became set to the guise of gloomy melancholy. Thus, while the frontier admired his deeds, and his prowess was celebrated in print and by word of mouth in many camp-pires in the valley of the Bravo, his heart was sick within him. Only himself knew of the horrible tightening of the chest, the dry mouth, the weakening of the spine, the agony of the strung nerves⁠—the never-railing symptoms of his shameful malady.</p>
+			<p>One mere boy in his company was wont to enter a fray with a leg perched flippantly about the horn of his saddle, a cigarette hanging from his lips, which emitted smoke and original slogans of clever invention. Buckley would have given a year’s pay to attain that devil-lay-care method. Once the debonair youth said to him: “Buck, you go into a scrap like it was a funeral. Not,” he added, with a complimentary wave of his tin cup, “but what it generally is.”</p>
 			<p>Buckley’s conscience was of the New England order with Western adjustments, and he continued to get his rebellious body into as many difficulties as possible; wherefore, on that sultry afternoon he chose to drive his own protesting limbs to investigation of that sudden alarm that had startled the peace and dignity of the State.</p>
 			<p>Two squares down the street stood the Top Notch Saloon. Here Buckley came upon signs of recent upheaval. A few curious spectators pressed about its front entrance, grinding beneath their heels the fragments of a plate-glass window. Inside, Buckley found Bud Dawson utterly ignoring a bullet wound in his shoulder, while he feelingly wept at having to explain why he failed to drop the “blamed masquerooter,” who shot him. At the entrance of the ranger Bud turned appealingly to him for confirmation of the devastation he might have dealt.</p>
 			<p>“You know, Buck, I’d ’a’ plum got him, first rattle, if I’d thought a minute. Come in a-masque-rootin’, playin’ female till he got the drop, and turned loose. I never reached for a gun, thinkin’ it was sure Chihuahua Betty, or <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Atwater, or anyhow one of the Mayfield girls comin’ a-gunnin’, which they might, liable as not. I never thought of that blamed Garcia until⁠—”</p>
@@ -49,9 +49,9 @@
 			<p>In this sordid spot was condemned to remain for certain hours the impotent transport of the Queen of the Serpent Tribe.</p>
 			<p>The front door of the car was open. Its forward end was curtained off into a small reception-room. Here the admiring and propitiatory reporters were wont to sit and transpose the music of Señorita Alvarita’s talk into the more florid key of the press. A picture of Abraham Lincoln hung against a wall; one of a cluster of schoolgirls grouped upon stone steps was in another place; a third was Easter lilies in a blood-red frame. A neat carpet was under foot. A pitcher, sweating cold drops, and a glass stood on a fragile stand. In a willow rocker, reading a newspaper, sat Alvarita.</p>
 			<p>Spanish, you would say; Andalusian, or, better still, Basque; that compound, like the diamond, of darkness and fire. Hair, the shade of purple grapes viewed at midnight. Eyes, long, dusky, and disquieting with their untroubled directness of gaze. Face, haughty and bold, touched with a pretty insolence that gave it life. To hasten conviction of her charm, but glance at the stacks of handbills in the corner, green, and yellow, and white. Upon them you see an incompetent presentment of the señorita in her professional garb and pose. Irresistible, in black lace and yellow ribbons, she faces you; a blue racer is spiralled upon each bare arm; coiled twice about her waist and once about her neck, his horrid head close to hers, you perceive Kuku, the great eleven-foot Asian python.</p>
-			<p>A hand drew aside the curtain that partitioned the car, and a middle- aged, faded woman holding a knife and a half-peeled potato looked in and said:</p>
+			<p>A hand drew aside the curtain that partitioned the car, and a middle-eged, faded woman holding a knife and a half-peeled potato looked in and said:</p>
 			<p>“Alviry, are you right busy?”</p>
-			<p>“I’m reading the home paper, ma. What do you think! that pale, tow- headed Matilda Price got the most votes in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">News</i> for the prettiest girl in Gallipo⁠—<em>lees</em>.”</p>
+			<p>“I’m reading the home paper, ma. What do you think! that pale, tow-weaded Matilda Price got the most votes in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">News</i> for the prettiest girl in Gallipo⁠—<em>lees</em>.”</p>
 			<p>“Shush! She wouldn’t of done it if /you’d/ been home, Alviry. Lord knows, I hope we’ll be there before fall’s over. I’m tired gallopin’ round the world playin’ we are dagoes, and givin’ snake shows. But that ain’t what I wanted to say. That there biggest snake’s gone again. I’ve looked all over the car and can’t find him. He must have been gone an hour. I remember hearin’ somethin’ rustlin’ along the floor, but I thought it was you.”</p>
 			<p>“Oh, blame that old rascal!” exclaimed the Queen, throwing down her paper. “This is the third time he’s got away. George never <em>will</em> fasten down the lid to his box properly. I do believe he’s <em>afraid</em> of Kuku. Now I’ve got to go hunt him.”</p>
 			<p>“Better hurry; somebody might hurt him.”</p>
@@ -88,8 +88,8 @@
 			<p>Then came galloping to the spot the civic authorities; and to them the ranger awarded the prostrate disturber of the peace, whom they bore away limply across the saddle of one of their mounts. But Buckley and Alvarita lingered.</p>
 			<p>Slowly, slowly they walked. The ranger regained his belt of weapons. With a fine timidity she begged the indulgence of fingering the great .45’s, with little “Ohs” and “Ahs” of newborn, delicious shyness.</p>
 			<p>The <i xml:lang="es">cañoncito</i> was growing dusky. Beyond its terminus in the river bluff they could see the outer world yet suffused with the waning glory of sunset.</p>
-			<p>A scream⁠—a piercing scream of fright from Alvarita. Back she cowered, and the ready, protecting arm of Buckley formed her refuge. What terror so dire as to thus beset the close of the reign of the never- before-daunted Queen?</p>
-			<p>Across the path there crawled a caterpillar⁠—a horrid, fuzzy, two- inch caterpillar! Truly, Kuku, thou went avenged. Thus abdicated the Queen of the Serpent Tribe⁠—<i xml:lang="es">viva la reina</i>!</p>
+			<p>A scream⁠—a piercing scream of fright from Alvarita. Back she cowered, and the ready, protecting arm of Buckley formed her refuge. What terror so dire as to thus beset the close of the reign of the never-refore-daunted Queen?</p>
+			<p>Across the path there crawled a caterpillar⁠—a horrid, fuzzy, two-onch caterpillar! Truly, Kuku, thou went avenged. Thus abdicated the Queen of the Serpent Tribe⁠—<i xml:lang="es">viva la reina</i>!</p>
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@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
 			<p>Curly the tramp sidled toward the free-lunch counter. He caught a fleeting glance from the bartender’s eye, and stood still, trying to look like a business man who had just dined at the Menger and was waiting for a friend who had promised to pick him up in his motor car. Curly’s histrionic powers were equal to the impersonation; but his makeup was wanting.</p>
 			<p>The bartender rounded the bar in a casual way, looking up at the ceiling as though he was pondering some intricate problem of kalsomining, and then fell upon Curly so suddenly that the roadster had no excuses ready. Irresistibly, but so composedly that it seemed almost absendmindedness on his part, the dispenser of drinks pushed Curly to the swinging doors and kicked him out, with a nonchalance that almost amounted to sadness. That was the way of the Southwest.</p>
 			<p>Curly arose from the gutter leisurely. He felt no anger or resentment toward his ejector. Fifteen years of tramphood spent out of the twenty-two years of his life had hardened the fibres of his spirit. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fell blunted from the buckler of his armoured pride. With especial resignation did he suffer contumely and injury at the hands of bartenders. Naturally, they were his enemies; and unnaturally, they were often his friends. He had to take his chances with them. But he had not yet learned to estimate these cool, languid, Southwestern knights of the bungstarter, who had the manners of an Earl of Pawtucket, and who, when they disapproved of your presence, moved you with the silence and despatch of a chess automaton advancing a pawn.</p>
-			<p>Curly stood for a few moments in the narrow, mesquite-paved street. San Antonio puzzled and disturbed him. Three days he had been a non- paying guest of the town, having dropped off there from a box car of an I. &amp; G.N. freight, because Greaser Johnny had told him in Des Moines that the Alamo City was manna fallen, gathered, cooked, and served free with cream and sugar. Curly had found the tip partly a good one. There was hospitality in plenty of a careless, liberal, irregular sort. But the town itself was a weight upon his spirits after his experience with the rushing, businesslike, systematised cities of the North and East. Here he was often flung a dollar, but too frequently a good-natured kick would follow it. Once a band of hilarious cowboys had roped him on Military Plaza and dragged him across the black soil until no respectable ragbag would have stood sponsor for his clothes. The winding, doubling streets, leading nowhere, bewildered him. And then there was a little river, crooked as a pothook, that crawled through the middle of the town, crossed by a hundred little bridges so nearly alike that they got on Curly’s nerves. And the last bartender wore a number nine shoe.</p>
+			<p>Curly stood for a few moments in the narrow, mesquite-paved street. San Antonio puzzled and disturbed him. Three days he had been a non-naying guest of the town, having dropped off there from a box car of an I. &amp; G.N. freight, because Greaser Johnny had told him in Des Moines that the Alamo City was manna fallen, gathered, cooked, and served free with cream and sugar. Curly had found the tip partly a good one. There was hospitality in plenty of a careless, liberal, irregular sort. But the town itself was a weight upon his spirits after his experience with the rushing, businesslike, systematised cities of the North and East. Here he was often flung a dollar, but too frequently a good-natured kick would follow it. Once a band of hilarious cowboys had roped him on Military Plaza and dragged him across the black soil until no respectable ragbag would have stood sponsor for his clothes. The winding, doubling streets, leading nowhere, bewildered him. And then there was a little river, crooked as a pothook, that crawled through the middle of the town, crossed by a hundred little bridges so nearly alike that they got on Curly’s nerves. And the last bartender wore a number nine shoe.</p>
 			<p>The saloon stood on a corner. The hour was eight o’clock. Homefarers and outgoers jostled Curly on the narrow stone sidewalk. Between the buildings to his left he looked down a cleft that proclaimed itself another thoroughfare. The alley was dark except for one patch of light. Where there was light there were sure to be human beings. Where there were human beings after nightfall in San Antonio there might be food, and there was sure to be drink. So Curly headed for the light.</p>
 			<p>The illumination came from Schwegel’s Café. On the sidewalk in front of it Curly picked up an old envelope. It might have contained a check for a million. It was empty; but the wanderer read the address, “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Otto Schwegel,” and the name of the town and State. The postmark was Detroit.</p>
 			<p>Curly entered the saloon. And now in the light it could be perceived that he bore the stamp of many years of vagabondage. He had none of the tidiness of the calculating and shrewd professional tramp. His wardrobe represented the cast-off specimens of half a dozen fashions and eras. Two factories had combined their efforts in providing shoes for his feet. As you gazed at him there passed through your mind vague impressions of mummies, wax figures, Russian exiles, and men lost on desert islands. His face was covered almost to his eyes with a curly brown beard that he kept trimmed short with a pocketknife, and that had furnished him with his <i xml:lang="fr">nom de route</i>. Light-blue eyes, full of sullenness, fear, cunning, impudence, and fawning, witnessed the stress that had been laid upon his soul.</p>
@@ -27,14 +27,14 @@
 			<p>But at length Curly, as he strayed, turned the sharp angle of another lost street and came upon a rollicking band of stockmen from the outlying ranches celebrating in the open in front of an ancient wooden hotel. One great roisterer from the sheep country who had just instigated a movement toward the bar, swept Curly in like a stray goat with the rest of his flock. The princes of kine and wool hailed him as a new zoological discovery, and uproariously strove to preserve him in the diluted alcohol of their compliments and regards.</p>
 			<p>An hour afterward Curly staggered from the hotel barroom dismissed by his fickle friends, whose interest in him had subsided as quickly as it had risen. Full⁠—stoked with alcoholic fuel and cargoed with food, the only question remaining to disturb him was that of shelter and bed.</p>
 			<p>A drizzling, cold Texas rain had begun to fall⁠—an endless, lazy, unintermittent downfall that lowered the spirits of men and raised a reluctant steam from the warm stones of the streets and houses. Thus comes the “norther” dousing gentle spring and amiable autumn with the chilling salutes and adieux of coming and departing winter.</p>
-			<p>Curly followed his nose down the first tortuous street into which his irresponsible feet conducted him. At the lower end of it, on the bank of the serpentine stream, he perceived an open gate in a cemented rock wall. Inside he saw camp fires and a row of low wooden sheds built against three sides of the enclosing wall. He entered the enclosure. Under the sheds many horses were champing at their oats and corn. Many wagons and buckboards stood about with their teams’ harness thrown carelessly upon the shafts and doubletrees. Curly recognised the place as a wagon-yard, such as is provided by merchants for their out-of- town friends and customers. No one was in sight. No doubt the drivers of those wagons were scattered about the town “seeing the elephant and hearing the owl.” In their haste to become patrons of the town’s dispensaries of mirth and good cheer the last ones to depart must have left the great wooden gate swinging open.</p>
+			<p>Curly followed his nose down the first tortuous street into which his irresponsible feet conducted him. At the lower end of it, on the bank of the serpentine stream, he perceived an open gate in a cemented rock wall. Inside he saw camp fires and a row of low wooden sheds built against three sides of the enclosing wall. He entered the enclosure. Under the sheds many horses were champing at their oats and corn. Many wagons and buckboards stood about with their teams’ harness thrown carelessly upon the shafts and doubletrees. Curly recognised the place as a wagon-yard, such as is provided by merchants for their out-of-fown friends and customers. No one was in sight. No doubt the drivers of those wagons were scattered about the town “seeing the elephant and hearing the owl.” In their haste to become patrons of the town’s dispensaries of mirth and good cheer the last ones to depart must have left the great wooden gate swinging open.</p>
 			<p>Curly had satisfied the hunger of an anaconda and the thirst of a camel, so he was neither in the mood nor the condition of an explorer. He zigzagged his way to the first wagon that his eyesight distinguished in the semidarkness under the shed. It was a two-horse wagon with a top of white canvas. The wagon was half filled with loose piles of wool sacks, two or three great bundles of grey blankets, and a number of bales, bundles, and boxes. A reasoning eye would have estimated the load at once as ranch supplies, bound on the morrow for some outlying hacienda. But to the drowsy intelligence of Curly they represented only warmth and softness and protection against the cold humidity of the night. After several unlucky efforts, at last he conquered gravity so far as to climb over a wheel and pitch forward upon the best and warmest bed he had fallen upon in many a day. Then he became instinctively a burrowing animal, and dug his way like a prairie-dog down among the sacks and blankets, hiding himself from the cold air as snug and safe as a bear in his den. For three nights sleep had visited Curly only in broken and shivering doses. So now, when Morpheus condescended to pay him a call, Curly got such a strangle hold on the mythological old gentleman that it was a wonder that anyone else in the whole world got a wink of sleep that night.</p>
 			<p>*****</p>
 			<p>Six cowpunchers of the Cibolo Ranch were waiting around the door of the ranch store. Their ponies cropped grass near by, tied in the Texas fashion⁠—which is not tied at all. Their bridle reins had been dropped to the earth, which is a more effectual way of securing them (such is the power of habit and imagination) than you could devise out of a half-inch rope and a live-oak tree.</p>
 			<p>These guardians of the cow lounged about, each with a brown cigarette paper in his hand, and gently but unceasingly cursed Sam Revell, the storekeeper. Sam stood in the door, snapping the red elastic bands on his pink madras shirtsleeves and looking down affectionately at the only pair of tan shoes within a forty-mile radius. His offence had been serious, and he was divided between humble apology and admiration for the beauty of his raiment. He had allowed the ranch stock of “smoking” to become exhausted.</p>
 			<p>“I thought sure there was another case of it under the counter, boys,” he explained. “But it happened to be catterdges.”</p>
 			<p>“You’ve sure got a case of happenedicitis,” said Poky Rodgers, fency rider of the Largo Verde potrero. “Somebody ought to happen to give you a knock on the head with the butt end of a quirt. I’ve rode in nine miles for some tobacco; and it don’t appear natural and seemly that you ought to be allowed to live.”</p>
-			<p>“The boys was smokin’ cut plug and dried mesquite leaves mixed when I left,” sighed Mustang Taylor, horse wrangler of the Three Elm camp. “They’ll be lookin’ for me back by nine. They’ll be settin’ up, with their papers ready to roll a whiff of the real thing before bedtime. And I’ve got to tell ’em that this pink-eyed, sheep-headed, sulphur- footed, shirt-waisted son of a calico broncho, Sam Revell, hasn’t got no tobacco on hand.”</p>
+			<p>“The boys was smokin’ cut plug and dried mesquite leaves mixed when I left,” sighed Mustang Taylor, horse wrangler of the Three Elm camp. “They’ll be lookin’ for me back by nine. They’ll be settin’ up, with their papers ready to roll a whiff of the real thing before bedtime. And I’ve got to tell ’em that this pink-eyed, sheep-headed, sulphur-rooted, shirt-waisted son of a calico broncho, Sam Revell, hasn’t got no tobacco on hand.”</p>
 			<p>Gregorio Falcon, Mexican vaquero and best thrower of the rope on the Cibolo, pushed his heavy, silver-embroidered straw sombrero back upon his thicket of jet black curls, and scraped the bottoms of his pockets for a few crumbs of the precious weed.</p>
 			<p>“Ah, Don Samuel,” he said, reproachfully, but with his touch of Castilian manners, “escuse me. Dthey say dthe jackrabbeet and dthe sheep have dthe most leetle <em>sesos</em>⁠—how you call dthem⁠—brain-es? Ah don’t believe dthat, Don Samuel⁠—escuse me. Ah dthink people w’at don’t keep esmokin’ tobacco, dthey⁠—bot you weel escuse me, Don Samuel.”</p>
 			<p>“Now, what’s the use of chewin’ the rag, boys,” said the untroubled Sam, stooping over to rub the toes of his shoes with a red-and-yellow handkerchief. “Ranse took the order for some more smokin’ to San Antone with him Tuesday. Pancho rode Ranse’s hoss back yesterday; and Ranse is goin’ to drive the wagon back himself. There wa’n’t much of a load⁠—just some woolsacks and blankets and nails and canned peaches and a few things we was out of. I look for Ranse to roll in today sure. He’s an early starter and a hell-to-split driver, and he ought to be here not far from sundown.”</p>
@@ -104,7 +104,7 @@
 			<p>“Get him and saddle him as quick as you can.”</p>
 			<p>“/Prontito, señor/.”</p>
 			<p>Soon, mounted on Vaminos, Ranse leaned in the saddle, pressed with his knees, and galloped eastward past the store, where sat Sam trying his guitar in the moonlight.</p>
-			<p>Vaminos shall have a word⁠—Vaminos the good dun horse. The Mexicans, who have a hundred names for the colours of a horse, called him <i xml:lang="es">gruyo</i>. He was a mouse-coloured, slate-coloured, flea-bitten roan- dun, if you can conceive it. Down his back from his mane to his tail went a line of black. He would live forever; and surveyors have not laid off as many miles in the world as he could travel in a day.</p>
+			<p>Vaminos shall have a word⁠—Vaminos the good dun horse. The Mexicans, who have a hundred names for the colours of a horse, called him <i xml:lang="es">gruyo</i>. He was a mouse-coloured, slate-coloured, flea-bitten roan-nun, if you can conceive it. Down his back from his mane to his tail went a line of black. He would live forever; and surveyors have not laid off as many miles in the world as he could travel in a day.</p>
 			<p>Eight miles east of the Cibolo ranch-house Ranse loosened the pressure of his knees, and Vaminos stopped under a big ratama tree. The yellow ratama blossoms showered fragrance that would have undone the roses of France. The moon made the earth a great concave bowl with a crystal sky for a lid. In a glade five jackrabbits leaped and played together like kittens. Eight miles farther east shone a faint star that appeared to have dropped below the horizon. Night riders, who often steered their course by it, knew it to be the light in the Rancho de los Olmos.</p>
 			<p>In ten minutes Yenna Curtis galloped to the tree on her sorrel pony Dancer. The two leaned and clasped hands heartily.</p>
 			<p>“I ought to have ridden nearer your home,” said Ranse. “But you never will let me.”</p>
@@ -152,7 +152,7 @@
 			<p>“Tell him,” said Ranse, “to take that tramp out to camp with him and keep him till I get there.”</p>
 			<p>Curly was sitting on his blankets in the San Gabriel camp cursing talentedly when Ranse Truesdell rode up and dismounted on the next afternoon. The cowpunchers were ignoring the stray. He was grimy with dust and black dirt. His clothes were making their last stand in favour of the conventions.</p>
 			<p>Ranse went up to Buck Rabb, the camp boss, and spoke briefly.</p>
-			<p>“He’s a plumb buzzard,” said Buck. “He won’t work, and he’s the low- downest passel of inhumanity I ever see. I didn’t know what you wanted done with him, Ranse, so I just let him set. That seems to suit him. He’s been condemned to death by the boys a dozen times, but I told ’em maybe you was savin’ him for the torture.”</p>
+			<p>“He’s a plumb buzzard,” said Buck. “He won’t work, and he’s the low-wownest passel of inhumanity I ever see. I didn’t know what you wanted done with him, Ranse, so I just let him set. That seems to suit him. He’s been condemned to death by the boys a dozen times, but I told ’em maybe you was savin’ him for the torture.”</p>
 			<p>Ranse took off his coat.</p>
 			<p>“I’ve got a hard job before me, Buck, I reckon, but it has to be done. I’ve got to make a man out of that thing. That’s what I’ve come to camp for.”</p>
 			<p>He went up to Curly.</p>
@@ -182,7 +182,7 @@
 			<p>“Boys,” said Ranse, “I’m much obliged. I was hoping you would. But I didn’t like to ask.”</p>
 			<p>Half a dozen six-shooters began to pop⁠—awful yells rent the air⁠—Long Collins galloped wildly across Curly’s bed, dragging the saddle after him. That was merely their way of gently awaking their victim. Then they hazed him for an hour, carefully and ridiculously, after the code of cow camps. Whenever he uttered protest they held him stretched over a roll of blankets and thrashed him woefully with a pair of leather leggings.</p>
 			<p>And all this meant that Curly had won his spurs, that he was receiving the puncher’s accolade. Nevermore would they be polite to him. But he would be their “pardner” and stirrup-brother, foot to foot.</p>
-			<p>When the fooling was ended all hands made a raid on Joe’s big coffee- pot by the fire for a Java nightcap. Ranse watched the new knight carefully to see if he understood and was worthy. Curly limped with his cup of coffee to a log and sat upon it. Long Collins followed and sat by his side. Buck Rabb went and sat at the other. Curly⁠—grinned.</p>
+			<p>When the fooling was ended all hands made a raid on Joe’s big coffee-eot by the fire for a Java nightcap. Ranse watched the new knight carefully to see if he understood and was worthy. Curly limped with his cup of coffee to a log and sat upon it. Long Collins followed and sat by his side. Buck Rabb went and sat at the other. Curly⁠—grinned.</p>
 			<p>And then Ranse furnished Curly with mounts and saddle and equipment, and turned him over to Buck Rabb, instructing him to finish the job.</p>
 			<p>Three weeks later Ranse rode from the ranch into Rabb’s camp, which was then in Snake Valley. The boys were saddling for the day’s ride. He sought out Long Collins among them.</p>
 			<p>“How about that bronco?” he asked.</p>
@@ -190,7 +190,7 @@
 			<p>“Reach out your hand, Ranse Truesdell,” he said, “and you’ll touch him. And you can shake his’n, too, if you like, for he’s plumb white and there’s none better in no camp.”</p>
 			<p>Ranse looked again at the clear-faced, bronzed, smiling cowpuncher who stood at Collins’s side. Could that be Curly? He held out his hand, and Curly grasped it with the muscles of a broncobuster.</p>
 			<p>“I want you at the ranch,” said Ranse.</p>
-			<p>“All right, sport,” said Curly, heartily. “But I want to come back again. Say, pal, this is a dandy farm. And I don’t want any better fun than hustlin’ cows with this bunch of guys. They’re all to the merry- merry.”</p>
+			<p>“All right, sport,” said Curly, heartily. “But I want to come back again. Say, pal, this is a dandy farm. And I don’t want any better fun than hustlin’ cows with this bunch of guys. They’re all to the merry-yerry.”</p>
 			<p>At the Cibolo ranch-house they dismounted. Ranse bade Curly wait at the door of the living room. He walked inside. Old “Kiowa” Truesdell was reading at a table.</p>
 			<p>“Good morning, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Truesdell,” said Ranse.</p>
 			<p>The old man turned his white head quickly.</p>
@@ -203,7 +203,7 @@
 			<p>“Our boy strayed from the house when he was two years old,” said the old man. “And then along came those emigrant wagons with a youngster they didn’t want; and we took you. I never intended you to know, Ranse. We never heard of our boy again.”</p>
 			<p>“He’s right outside, unless I’m mighty mistaken,” said Ranse, opening the door and beckoning.</p>
 			<p>Curly walked in.</p>
-			<p>No one could have doubted. The old man and the young had the same sweep of hair, the same nose, chin, line of face, and prominent light- blue eyes.</p>
+			<p>No one could have doubted. The old man and the young had the same sweep of hair, the same nose, chin, line of face, and prominent light-tlue eyes.</p>
 			<p>Old “Kiowa” rose eagerly.</p>
 			<p>Curly looked about the room curiously. A puzzled expression came over his face. He pointed to the wall opposite.</p>
 			<p>“Where’s the ticktock?” he asked, absentmindedly.</p>