Clif, who didn’t care much for billiards, consented to humor the other, but he had no idea of spending the evening in such unexciting fashion, and when eight o’clock arrived he hauled an unenthusiastic parent across the street to Freeburg’s one palace of amusement, the Coliseum. The Coliseum was about the size of the library back home in Providence, but it was clean and it offered good, if not recent, pictures. Mr. Bingham professed to be greatly awed by the red, white and blue splendor of the exterior and embarrassed Clif somewhat by insisting on viewing the gaudy and startling pictures in the small lobby painstakingly before purchasing tickets from the interested young lady who chewed her gum so rhythmically inside the glass cage. Aware of the curious stares of theater-going Freeburg, Clif tugged at his father’s arm. “Oh, come on, dad!” he begged. But Mr. Bingham was not to be hurried. “I want to be sure,” he declared sedately, “that everything is quite proper, Clif. You know there’s a good deal being said these days about the influence of moving pictures on the young, and I’d very much dislike to have you tell me in later years that you traced your downfall to the night I took you to see――now what the dickens――ah, here it is――to see ‘Outlawed by Honor’! To me, Clif, this man, Johnny Rick, looks rather a desperate character. Isn’t he killing the gentleman with the drooping, black mustache in that picture?” “Aw, dad!” whispered Clif. “All right, but I’ll ask for seats well away from the stage, son. Pistol shooting always makes me jump.” In spite of the fun Mr. Bingham poked at the entertainment provided by the Coliseum that evening, it would have been apparent to any one that he got more pleasure from it than the more blasé Clif. He became visibly excited when, in the fourth reel, the redoubtable hero, the aforementioned Mr. Rick, dashed into the deserted cabin, seized the heroine in his elastic-banded arms, with not even a glance at the sizzling fuse that led to the enormous can of dynamite, dashed out again and spurred his faithful horse to safety. Of course Clif knew perfectly well that the cabin wouldn’t blow up until the hero was well out of the way, but apparently the idea hadn’t occurred to his father, for the latter relapsed, exhausted by emotion, against Clif’s shoulder. Fathers are sometimes very trying.