Pete stood there grinning at me. Never in my life have I felt so hot with shame and humiliation. I wanted to escape. I came out from my corner to beg Pete to free me. My father, straight, kind, smiling, stood looking at me, his hand stretched through the bars of the calaboose, <...>
CHAPTER IV.
Release from jail; quiet years in Virginia; study of law; a new migration to the West; brawl in court; news of death in the night.
There was such a queer, gentle look in my father's face, as though he were the culprit and not I. It jabbed me to the quick. He never said a word of censure to me—not then nor in all the years that followed.
But he went quietly to work to win my release. Three days later I left Las Cruces with him. I was not even brought to trial. My father had taken a new start, studied law, won success, gathered the family about him and settled in Charleston, Virginia. The boys he sent to the Virginia Military academy. Frank and I finished the study of law four years later, when I was just past 18.
There must have been something unstable and reckless in our natures, for our lives never ran along the level. We seemed to court adversity. Our fortunes went like a wave through a continual succession of swells and hollows.
We struck the hollows when I finished college. The family packed its baggage and moved to Coldwater, Kansas.
The Middle West was wild, new country then. We moved from Kansas, took up land in Colorado, built the town of Boston, sold town lots, cleared $75,000 and lost every cent of it in the county-seat fight.
Crumb-clean we went into Oklahoma in 1889. The settlers were all bankrupt. The government even issued food to them. Frank and I were both athletes. We supported the family with the money we earned at foot racing.