The Just and the Unjust | Page 2

itinerant bill-poster and had his lodgings at Maxy Schaffer's Railroad Hotel hard by the B. & O. tracks.
Mr. Shrimplin was five feet three, and narrow chested. A drooping flaxen mustache shaded a sloping chin and a loose under lip, while a pair of pale eyes looked sadly out upon the world from the shadow of a hooked nose.
Mr. Joe Montgomery, Mrs. Shrimplin's brother-in-law, present on the occasion of her marriage to the little bill-poster, had critically surveyed the bridegroom and had been moved to say to a friend, "Shrimp certainly do favor a peanut!"
Mr. Montgomery's comparative criticism of her husband's appearance had in due season reached the ears of the bride, and had caused a rupture in the family that the years had not healed, but her resentment had been more a matter of justice to herself than that she felt the criticism to be wholly inapt.
Mr. Shrimplin had now become a public servant, for certain gasolene lamps in the town of Mount Hope were his proud and particular care. Any night he could be seen seated in his high two-wheeled cart drawn by a horse large in promise of speed but small in achievement, a hissing gasolene torch held between his knees, making his way through that part of the town where gas-lamps were as yet unknown. He still further added to his income by bill-posting and paper-hanging, for he belonged to the rank and file of life, with a place in the procession well toward the tail.
But Custer had no suspicion of this. He never saw his father as the world saw him. He would have described his eye as piercing; he would have said, in spite of the slouching uncertainty that characterized all his movements, that he was as quick as a cat; and it was only Custer who detected the note of authority in the meek tones of his father's voice.
And Custer was as like the senior Shrimplin as it was possible for fourteen to be like forty-eight. His mother said, "He certainly looks for all the world like his pa!" but her manner of saying it left doubt as to whether she rejoiced in the fact; for, while Mr. Shrimplin was undoubtedly a hero to Custer, he was not and never had been and never could be a hero to Mrs. Shrimplin. She saw in him only what the world saw--a stoop-shouldered little man who spent six days of the seven in overalls that were either greasy or pasty.
It was a vagary of Mr. Shrimplin's that ten reckless years of his life had been spent in the West, the far West, the West of cow-towns and bad men; that for this decade he had flourished on bucking broncos and in gilded bars, the admired hero of a variety of deft homicides. Out of his inner consciousness he had evolved a sprightly epic of which he was the central figure, a figure, according to Custer's firm belief, sinister, fateful with big jingling silver spurs at his heels and iron on his hips, whose specialty was manslaughter.
In the creation of his romance he might almost be said to have acquired a literary habit of mind, to which he was measurably helped by the fiction he read.
Custer devoured the same books; but he never suspected his father of the crime of plagiarism, nor guessed that his choicest morsels of adventure involved a felony. Mrs. Shrimplin felt it necessary to protest:
"No telling with what nonsense you are filling that boy's head!"
"I hope," said Mr. Shrimplin, narrowing his eyes to a slit, as if he expected to see pictured on the back of their lids the panorama of Custer's future, "I hope I am filling his head with just nonsense enough so he will never crawfish, no matter what kind of a proposition he goes up against!"
Custer colored almost guiltily. Could he ever hope to attain to the grim standard his father had set for him?
"I wasn't much older than him when I shot Murphy at Fort Worth," continued Mr. Shrimplin, "You've heard me tell about him, son--old one-eye Murphy of Texarcana?"
"He died, I suppose!" said. Mrs. Shrimplin, wringing out her dish-rag. "Dear knows! I wonder you ain't been hung long ago!"
"Did he die!" rejoined Mr. Shrimplin ironically. "Well, they usually die when I begin to throw lead!" He tugged fiercely at the ends of his drooping flaxen mustache and gazed into the wide and candid eyes of his son.
"Like I should give you the particulars, Custer?" he inquired.
Custer nodded eagerly, and Mr. Shrimplin cleared his throat.
"He was called one-eye Murphy because he had only one eye--he'd lost the other in a rough-and-tumble fight; it had been gouged out by a feller's thumb. Murphy got the feller's ear, chewed it off as they was rolling over and over on the