Bertram Mitford - Golden Face - A Tale of the Wild West

“I wish I hadn’t seen this just now, father,” she said, handing him back a sheaf of letters. It was a correspondence of a lively nature, and many years back, between himself and Mr Vallance. “You see, the Vallances are all coming up here this afternoon, and I don’t feel like being civil to them immediately upon it.”

“Pooh! civility means nothing, not in this location at least. Why, when we first came here we were overwhelmed with it. It didn’t last many months certainly, but it broke out afresh when rumour made me a millionaire. Why, what have you got there?”

For she was now scrutinising, somewhat intently, a photograph which had fallen out of a bundle of papers among the piles they had been sorting. It represented a youngish man, strikingly handsome, and with a strong, reckless stamp of countenance; and though the original must have been prematurely bald, the mouth was almost hidden by a long heavy moustache. A queer smile came into Mr Santorex’s face.

“Think that’s the type you could fall in love with, eh, Chickie? Well, I advise you not to, for I can’t bring you face to face with the original.”

“Why? Who is it?”

“Who is it? No less a personage than the disinherited heir, Ralph Vallance. The plot thickens, eh?”

“I didn’t know. I thought he was dead, if I ever knew there was such a person, that is. Why was he disinherited?”

“Ah, that’s something of a story. Poor Ralph! I think he was most unfairly treated, always did think so; especially when that hum – er, I mean, our spiritual guide, jumped into his shoes. No, I daresay you never heard much about it, but you are a woman now, my dear, and a deuced sensible one too, as women go, and I always hold that it is simply nonsensical and deleterious to their moral fibre to let women – sensible ones, that is – go about the world with their eyes shut. To come back to our romance. The old squire of Lant was a straight-laced, puritanical fossil, and Master Ralph was just the reverse, an extravagant, roystering young dog who chucked away ten pounds for every one that he was worth, in fact the ideal ‘Plunger’ as you girls estimate that article. Naturally, there were occasional breezes down at the Hall, nor were these effectually tempered by the crafty intervention of cousin Dudley, who ran the vicarage in those days. The old man used to get very mad, especially when Ralph began dabbling in post obits

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Part of the initiatory festival during which, by virtue of undergoing various forms of ghastly self-torture, the growing-up boys are admitted among the ranks of the warriors.

This chief, over and above his skill and intrepidity as a warrior, enjoyed a high reputation among the Indians of the Northern Plains as a magician and a seer – a reputation really due to his astuteness, keen foresight, and extraordinary luck.