"But you was mournin' about a she!" Parker insisted.
"Well, I reckon it ain't a wife--at least not the one I was thinking about," Chuck murmured disappointedly, "but I bet he's had one somewhere in his vari'gated career and is hiding out from her in fear an' tremblin'--"
"And there will not be the grand, the beautiful murder?" Pedro sighed, questioningly.
"Wait a minute," Skinny pleaded, "--give him air!"
"--and he's got a female daughter--and I didn't know that--and he's--oh, Gawd!--he's sending her out to the Quarter Circle KT!"
"--and Ophelia is coming with her--Ophelia Cobb--C-o-double-b it is--is coming with her for a chaperon--"
"Great guns!" Skinny breathed,"--two females!"
"Hold still and I'll read it--no, you do it, Parker--I'm too full of emotion--my voice'd quiver--"
"Am sending my daughter, Carolyn June, out to your ranch for a while. She needs a change. She has broke all the he-human hearts in Hartville--that is all of them old enough or young enough to be broke--and is what's called a love-stimulator and won't settle. She is twenty-two and it's time she was calmed. Hoping six months on the Kiowa range will gentle her quite a lot, I am sympathetically your 1/2 brother, Simeon.
"P.S.--Mrs. Ophelia Cobb, a lady widow, is coming with her for a chaperon. Beware of both of them. They will arrive at Eagle Butte the 21st.--S."
"Gee, it's a long one!" Chuck said admiringly.
"It's one of these 'Night Letters,'" Parker explained.
"I knowed it was bad news," Skinny exclaimed, "--poor old Heck!"
"Better say, 'Poor we all!'" Bert declared. "Farewell peace and joy on the Quarter Circle KT!"
"The Lord have mercy on Old Heck!" Charley cried with dramatic fervor.
"Holy smoke," Parker murmured desperately, "_two of them on the twenty-first--and that's to-morrow!_"
The Quarter Circle KT was a womanless ranch. Came now, like a bolt from the clear sky or the sudden clang of a fire-alarm bell, the threat of violation of this Eveless Eden by the intrusion of a pair of strange and unknown females. The arrival of the telegram telling of the coming of Carolyn June Dixon, Old Heck's niece, and Ophelia Cobb, her chaperon, filled with varying emotions the hearts of Old Heck, Parker and the cowboys.