When they learned what I was doing, I'm hanged if my stepmother and uncle Bumpkin didn't stop my allowance." He laughed ruefully.

"However, I kept the inquiries going by selling my two horses, my jewellery, my guns, and my clothes.

That's why I'm in these rags.

But no good came of it; the private detective discovered nothing, and charged me nearly three hundred for discovering it.

But the crowning point of my stepmother's madness came yesterday.