The Lady [antikvár]

I would never believe that my father had run away with the money. Oh, I knew well enough what the people of Moro were saying: that no one really knew anything about us but Judge Sessions and he had known only my mother; that my father was too fancy a dresser to be an honest "commission boy"; that he used to pay attention to a questionable woman, Mrs. Consuelo Blount, who less than a month before had left the country, and that they were probably together somewhere in Colorado right now. It was a barefaced lie, I told anyone who spoke it in my hearing. I said he had gone to Mrs. Blount only to learn Spanish, which he needed at the commission house. I said many other things to his credit, and not a word of the two bad things I knew he had really done, one of them being with another woman while my mother lay in her last illness back in Missouri, and the other, his unwillingness to bring her West when they found she had lung fever. She had wanted to come. The malady ran in the family. Her cousin Albert had been expected to die with it, but he had gone to New Mexico territory, where he studied law, had married into a wealthy Spanish family, and was now a judge for three or