“That should stop him,” he muttered.
But it didn't. With a guilty blush he went down upon his knees in a vain effort to seduce the twin in the belief that he was a horse. He was in this interesting position when Miss Caxton opened the door and entered, smiling and serene. The Fool was with her, but he was by no means so serene as he could have wished to be and his smile was not an easy one.
Miss Caxton mastered the situation at a glance. Without a word she possessed herself of the twin's small person.
“I am sorry, papa, that you missed your game of whist, but it won't occur again,” she said, as she walked from the room.
When she returned twenty minutes later, after having put Leander to bed, she found her father peacefully drinking cold tea—“to restore the tone to his nervous system,” as he explained—while he gave The Fool a detailed and truthful account of his adventure with the twin.
THE HALF-BREED
JOHN LE BO YEN was an Indian half-breed; the son of a whisky-drinking white man and a slovenly whisky-drinking squaw. Fate, which decreed he should have a copper skin, lifted him into temporary and unsavory prominence only as the perpetrator of certain vulgar atrocities, yet because there had been peace on sea and land for a decade, history once paused to give him a brief paragraph. Balancing the books, after another decade, she dropped him out of her record of events.
As a boy, Le Boyen had been taken in hand by the government and sent to school, where he mastered a little reading and less spelling with infinite difficulty. Later he was turned back on his reservation, given land, together with a yearly allowance in supplies, and told to shift for himself.