Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/76

64 "I think it's lucky when it happens young. I've seen it go on until a boy is in his twenties before the thing happened—before they got into the new relations. That's a pity. It's more difficult. I wish Dora would throw her slipper over the moon. I really do. Unpleasant! Good Lord! But it's got to come, and it makes me nervous waiting for it."

"You are quite a philosopher, Colonel," said Boyd. He thought of Kenneth, and realized with a pang that he had really never considered the matter of their relations at all. Did he hold Ken as boy or man? It was something to think about. "How many children have you, Colonel?" he asked.

The Colonel considered a moment.

"Twenty-nine," he replied.

Boyd started. "I should not have thought it," he recovered himself. "Are they—that is—is the present Mrs. Peyton your first wife?"

The Colonel chuckled delightedly.

"Mrs. Peyton is my first and only wife, and we have neither chick nor child of our own," he explained, "but I have twenty-nine children around this place just the same. I'm not sure but it is thirty—I like the looks of that lad of yours, Boyd."

They were driving down the long length of Main Street now. The Colonel was busy responding to salutations. It was the shopping hour; and this was the era of personal shopping. Buggies, surries, phaetons with fringed canopy tops, saddle horses stood hitched to rails and posts the full length of the street. Ladies under gay parasols were conversing in the middle of the sidewalk, or selected vegetables or fruits from the displays in the open windows. Mexicans lounged in front of the saloons. Shopkeepers who for the moment did no business stood in their doorways. Down a side street Boyd looked into Chinatown—a collection of battered old frame and adobe buildings that mysteriously had been lifted sheer from squalor to splendid romance by no other means than red paper, varnished ducks, rattan baskets, calico partitions, exotic smells and a brooding, spiritual atmosphere of the orient. They passed the San Antonio hotel which the Colonel casually mentioned as his own. "There are always a number of people no gentleman would