Of course, we expressed our thanks and joy; but we would have been better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face to face with us and let us gaze upon her.  For she was no Adelina Patti—­ not even on the farewellest of the diva’s farewell tours.  She had a cooing little voice like that of a turtle-dove that could almost fill the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen.  She had a gamut that I estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her runs and trills sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother’s iron wash-pot.  Believe that she must have been beautiful when I tell you that it sounded like music to us.

Ileen’s musical taste was catholic.  She would sing through a pile of sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each slaughtered composition on the right-hand top.  The next evening she would sing from right to left.  Her favorites were Mendelssohn, and Moody and Sankey.  By request she always wound up with “Sweet Violets” and “When the Leaves Begin to Turn.”

When we left at ten o’clock the three of us would go down to Jacks’ little wooden station and sit on the platform, swinging our feet and trying to pump one another for clews as to which way Miss Ileen’s inclinations seemed to lean.  That is the way of rivals—­they do not avoid and glower at one another; they convene and converse and construe—­striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of the enemy.

One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at once flaunted his shingle and himself spectacularly upon the town.  His name was C. Vincent Vesey.  You could see at a glance that he was a recent graduate of a southwestern law school.  His Prince Albert coat, light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and narrow white muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any diploma could.  Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord Chesterfield, Beau Brummell, and Little Jack Horner.  His coming boomed Paloma.  The next day after he arrived an addition to the town was surveyed and laid off in lots.

Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma.  And, as well as with the soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of the place.  So Jacks and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by his acquaintance.

The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had not Vesey seen Ileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney.  Magnificently, he boarded at the yellow pine hotel instead of at the Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the Hinkle parlor.  His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud’s imprecations, and made me dumb with gloom.

For Vesey had the rhetoric.  Words flowed from him like oil from a gusher.  Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with one another for pre-eminence in his speech.  We had small hopes that Ileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert.