WHEN old Lucius Dowling lay dying he sent for his will and reread it. He lay in his wide walnut bed, which Henry's wife had vainly tried to exchange for a mahogany four-poster in the best period of early American, with his spectacles firmly fixed on his hawk-like nose, and studied it with a certain grimness.
"I give and devise to my son, Henry, and my daughter Elizabeth Osborne, the L. D. ranch property, in joint and equal ownership"
He read on through the paragraph, laid the typed sheets down on the counterpane and closed his eyes. Should he change that? Leave it in trust, insist that it be held together and carried on, as Henry and Bessie never would do? Leave it in trust to Henry's girl, and defy them to get rid of it? He smiled a little at that. They would probably try to break the will if he did so; still, there were ways.
He had lived past any illusions as regarded his children. Henry was phlegmatic, cautious; he had been a good son and a good husband. Almost too good: He had not had enough imagination to stray from the proper and correct path, nor old Lucius' own capacity for robust adventure and even occasional easy sinning. And Bessie, who had this last capacity of his in full, he disapproved of because she had it. He had a phrase for Bessie; he called her to himself a "retarded adolescent," and chuckled over it. He had invented it the day, at forty-one, when she had shingled her hair.
But in the end he let the will ride, as he put it, and in due time—not so repentant for his sins as he should have been,
