When a man's a man

by Harold Bell Wright

"The professor himself was not really so much to blame," said Patches. "It seems that he was born to an intellectual life. The poor fellow never had a chance. Even as a child he was exhibited as a prodigy—a shining example of the possibilities of the race, you know. His father, who was also a professor of some sort, died when he was a baby. His mother, unfortunately, possessed an income sufficient to make it unnecessary that Everard Charles should ever do a day's real work. At the age of twenty, he was graduated from college; at the age of twenty-one he was married to—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say—he was married by—his landlady's daughter. Quite likely the woman was ambitious to break into that higher life to which the professor aspired, and caught her cultured opportunity in an unguarded moment. The details are not clear. But when their only child, Joe, was six years old, the mother ran away with a carpenter who had been at work on the house for some six weeks. A maiden aunt of some fifty years, who was a worshiper of the professor's cult, came to keep his house and to train Joe in the way that good boys should go.

"But the lad proved rather too great a burden, and when he was thirteen they sent him to a school out here in the West, ostensibly for the benefit of the climate. The boy, it was said, being of abnormal mentality, needed to pursue his studies under the most favorable physical conditions. The professor, unhampered by his offspring, continued to climb his aesthetic ladder to intellectual and cultured glory. The boy in due time escaped from the school, and was educated by the man Dryden and Nick Cambert."

"And what will become of him now?" asked the Dean.

Patches smiled. "Why, the lad is twenty-one now, and we have agreed that it is about time that he began to make a man of himself—I can help him a little, perhaps—I have been trying occasionally the past year. But you see the conditions have not been altogether favorable to the experiment. It should be easy from now on."

During the time that intervened before the trial of the Tailholt Mountain man, Phil and Patches re-established that intimate friendship of those first months of their work together. Then came the evening when Phil went across the meadow to ask Jim Reid for his daughter.

The big cattleman looked at his young neighbor with frowning disapproval.

"It won't do, Phil," he said at last. "I'm Kitty's father, and it's up to me to look out for her interests. You know how I've educated her for something better than this life. She may think now that she is willin' to throw it all away, but I know better. The time would come when she would be miserable. It's got to be somethin' more than a common cow-puncher for Kitty, Phil, and that's the truth."

The cowboy did not argue. "Do I understand that your only objection is based upon the business in which I am engaged?" he asked coolly.

Jim laughed. "The business in which you are engaged? Why, boy, you sound like a first national bank. If you had any business of your own—if you was the owner of an outfit, an' could give Kitty the—well—the things her education has taught her to need, it would be different. I know you're a fine man, all right, but you're only a poor cow-puncher just the same. I'm speakin' for your own good, Phil, as well as for Kitty's," he added, with an effort at kindliness.