CHAPTER ONE.
FIGHTING SHRIMPLIN Custer felt it his greatest privilege to sit of a Sunday morning in his mother's clean and burnished kitchen and, while she washed the breakfast dishes, listen to such reflections as his father might care to indulge in.
On these occasions the senior Shrimplin, commonly called Shrimp by his intimates, was the very picture of unconventional ease-taking as he lolled in his chair before the kitchen stove, a cracker box half filled with sawdust conveniently at hand.
As far back as his memory went Custer could recall vividly these Sunday mornings, with the church bells ringing peacefully beyond the windows of his modest home, and his father in easy undress, just emerged from his weekly bath and pleasantly redolent of strong yellow soap, his feet incased in blue yarn socks--white at toe and heel--and the neckband of his fresh-starched shirt sawing away at the lobes of his freckled ears.
On these occasions Mr.Shrimplin inclined to a certain sad conservatism as he discussed with his son those events of the week last passed which had left their impress on his mind.

But what pleased Custer best was when his father, ceasing to be gently discursive and becoming vigorously personal, added yet another canto to the stirring epic of William Shrimplin.
Custer was wholly and delightfully sympathetic.

There was, he felt, the very choicest inspiration in the narrative, always growing and expanding, of his father's earlier career, before Mrs.Shrimplin came into his life, and as Mr.Shrimplin delicately intimated, tied him hand and foot.

The same grounds of mutual understanding and intellectual dependence which existed between Custer and his father were lacking where Mrs.Shrimplin was concerned.

She was unromantic, with a painfully literal cast of mind, though Custer--without knowing what is meant by a sense of humor, suspected her of this rare gift, a dangerous and destructive thing in woman.