But,
so far as we knew, Pap had no children; accordingly we jumped to the
conclusion that Andrew Spooner got his nickname from a community who
had rechristened the tallest man in our village "Shorty" and the
ugliest "Beaut." The humorists knew that Pap might have been the
father of the foothills, the George Washington of Paradise, but he
wasn't.
Later we learned that Pap had buried a wife and child. And the child,
it seems, had called him "Pap." We made the inevitable deduction that
such paternal instincts as may have bloomed long ago in the miser's
heart were laid in a small grave in the San Lorenzo Cemetery. Our
little school-marm, Alethea-Belle Buchanan, said (without any reason):
"I reckon Mr. Spooner must have thought the world of his little one."
Whereupon Ajax replied gruffly that as much could be said, doubtless,
of a--vulture.
The word "vulture" happened to be pat, apart from the shape of Andrew
Spooner's nose, because we were in the middle of the terrible spring
which succeeded the dry year. Even now one does not care to talk about
that time of drought. During the previous twelve months the relentless
sun had destroyed nearly every living thing, vegetable and animal, in
our county.
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