"I know you did. Chuck told me. Look at the time, will you? Get your hat. We mustn't keep Jane waiting."
"No," he said, thoughtfully, his brows puckered, "we mustn't keep Jane waitin'. Lookit, Miss Dale, as I remember yore pa he had a moustache. Has he still got it?"
Miss Dale puzzled, paused in the doorway. "Why, no," she told him. "He wears a horrid chin whisker now."
"He does, huh? A chin whisker. Let's be movin' right along. I think
I've got something interesting to tell you and yore sister and Chuck."
But they did not move along. They halted in the doorway. Or, rather, the girl halted in the doorway, and Racey looked over her shoulder. What stopped them short in their tracks was a spectacle—the spectacle of an elderly chin-whiskered man, very drunk and disorderly, riding in on a paint pony.
"Father!" breathed Miss Dale in a horror-stricken whisper.
And as she spoke Father uttered a string of cheerful whoops and topped off with a long pull at a bottle he had been brandishing in his right hand.
"Please go," said Miss Dale to Racey Dawson.
He hesitated. He was in a quandary. He did not relish leaving her with—At that instant Mr. Dale decided Racey's course for him. Mr. Dale pulled a gun and, still whooping cheerily, shook five shots into the atmosphere. Then Mr. Dale fumblingly threw out his cylinder and began to reload.
"I'd better get his gun away from him," Racey said, apologetically, over his shoulder, as he ran forward.