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Text Analytics
 Text Analytics
An Introduction to the Science
and ­Applications of Unstructured
­Information Analysis

John A
­ tkinson-Abutridy
First edition published 2022
by CRC Press
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300, Boca Raton, FL ­33487-2742

and by CRC Press

4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

© 2022 John ­Atkinson-Abutridy

Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and
publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of
their use. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all m
­ aterial
reproduced in this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission to publish in this
form has not been obtained. If any copyright material has not been acknowledged please write
and let us know so we may rectify in any future reprint.

Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, ­reproduced,
transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any i­ nformation
storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, access www.­
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data

Names: Atkinson-Abutridy, John, author.
Title: Text analytics : an introduction to the science and applications of unstructured information
analysis / John Atkinson-Abutridy.
Description: First edition. | Boca Raton : CRC Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021056159 | ISBN 9781032249797 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781032245263 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003280996 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Text data mining. | Natural language processing (Computer science) |
Semantics—Data processing. | Document clustering.
Classification: LCC QA76.9.D343 A85 2022 | DDC 006.3/12—dc23/eng/20220105
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056159

ISBN: ­978-­1- ­032-­24979-7 (­hbk)

ISBN: ­978-­1-­032-­24526-3 (­pbk)
ISBN: ­978-­1-­0 03-­28099-6 (­ebk)

DOI: 10.1201/­9781003280996

Typeset in Minion
by codeMantra

eResources are available for download at https://www.routledge.com/Atkinson-Abutridy/p/

book/9781032249797
To Ivana, my wife and my light
Contents

List of Figures, xi
List of Tables, xv
Preface, xvii
Acknowledgments, xxv
Author, xxvii

Chapter ­1   ◾   Text Analytics 1

1.1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.2 TEXT MINING AND TEXT ANALYTICS 4
1.3 TASKS AND APPLICATIONS 7
1.4 THE TEXT ANALYTICS PROCESS 10
1.5 SUMMARY 12
1.6 QUESTIONS 13

Chapter 2   ◾   ­Natural-Language Processing 15

2.1 INTRODUCTION 15
2.2 THE SCOPE OF ­NATURAL-LANGUAGE
PROCESSING 16
2.3 NLP LEVELS AND TASKS 18
2.3.1 Phonology 20
2.3.2 Morphology 20
2.3.3 Lexicon 22
2.3.4 Syntax 29

vii
viii   ◾    Contents

2.3.5 Semantics 33
2.3.6 Reasoning and Pragmatics 38
2.4 SUMMARY 39
2.5 EXERCISES 39
2.5.1 Morphological Analysis 39
2.5.2 Lexical Analysis 44
2.5.3 Syntactic Analysis 45

Chapter 3   ◾   Information Extraction 49

3.1 INTRODUCTION 49
3.2 ­RULE-BASED INFORMATION EXTRACTION 53
3.3 ­NAMED-ENTITY RECOGNITION 54
3.3.1 ­N-Gram Models 57
3.4 RELATION EXTRACTION 60
3.5 EVALUATION 64
3.6 SUMMARY 67
3.7 EXERCISES 67
3.7.1 Regular Expressions 68
3.7.2 ­Named-Entity Recognition 72

Chapter 4   ◾   Document Representation 75

4.1 INTRODUCTION 75
4.2 DOCUMENT INDEXING 77
4.3 VECTOR SPACE MODELS 79
4.3.1 Boolean Representation Model 79
4.3.2 Term Frequency Model 80
4.3.3 Inverse Document Frequency Model 82
4.4 SUMMARY 84
4.5 EXERCISES 84
4.5.1 TFxIDF Representation Model 84
 Contents   ◾    ix

Chapter 5   ◾   Association Rules Mining 91

5.1 INTRODUCTION 91
5.2 ASSOCIATION PATTERNS 92
5.3 EVALUATION 94
5.3.1 Support 94
5.3.2 Confidence 95
5.3.3 Lift 95
5.4 ASSOCIATION RULES GENERATION 96
5.5 SUMMARY 101
5.6 EXERCISES 101
5.6.1 Extraction of Association Rules 101

Chapter 6   ◾   ­Corpus-Based Semantic Analysis 105

6.1 INTRODUCTION 105
6.2 ­CORPUS-BASED SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 107
6.3 LATENT SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 109
6.3.1 Creating Vectors with LSA 110
6.4 WORD2VEC 115
6.4.1 Embedding Learning 118
6.4.2 Prediction and Embeddings Interpretation 121
6.5 SUMMARY 123
6.6 EXERCISES 123
6.6.1 Latent Semantic Analysis 124
6.6.2 Word Embedding with Word2Vec 130

Chapter 7   ◾   Document Clustering 137

7.1 INTRODUCTION 137
7.2 DOCUMENT CLUSTERING 139
7.3 ­K-MEANS CLUSTERING 145
7.4 ­SELF-ORGANIZING MAPS 149
7.4.1 Topological Maps Learning 150
7.5 SUMMARY 155
7.6 EXERCISES 155
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x   ◾    Contents

7.6.1 ­K-means Clustering 155

7.6.2 ­Self-organizing Maps 162

Chapter 8   ◾   Topic Modeling 165

8.1 INTRODUCTION 165
8.2 TOPIC MODELING 166
8.3 LATENT DIRICHLET ALLOCATION 169
8.4 EVALUATION 176
8.5 SUMMARY 179
8.6 EXERCISES 179
8.6.1 Modeling Topics with LDA 179

Chapter 9   ◾   Document Categorization 185

9.1 INTRODUCTION 185
9.2 CATEGORIZATION MODELS 187
9.3 BAYESIAN TEXT CATEGORIZATION 191
9.3.1 Conditional Class Probability 192
9.3.2 A Priori Probability 193
9.3.3 Evidence 194
9.3.4 Classification 194
9.4 MAXIMUM ENTROPY CATEGORIZATION 195
9.5 EVALUATION 200
9.6 SUMMARY 203
9.7 EXERCISES 203
9.7.1 Naïve Bayes Categorization 203
9.7.2 MaxEnt Categorization 208

CONCLUDING REMARKS, 215

BIBLIOGRAPHY, 221

GLOSSARY, 225

INDEX, 229
List of Figures

­Figure 1.1 Search versus data discovery 2

­Figure 1.2 The scope of text mining 6
­Figure 1.3 Document clustering 8
­Figure 1.4 Information extraction 8
­Figure 1.5 Text categorization 9
­Figure 1.6 Relationship inference 9
­Figure 1.7 The text mining process 10
­Figure 2.1 Levels, tasks, and linguistic resources in NLP 19
­Figure 2.2 A simple Markov model 25
­Figure 2.3 Hidden Markov Models (­HMM) with transition
and emission probabilities 27
­Figure 2.4 Syntactic analysis task 29
­Figure 2.5 ­Context-Independent Grammar (­CFG) rules 30
­Figure 2.6 Parse tree for the sentence “­The flight arrived” 31
­Figure 2.7 Dependency grammar for “­The flight arrived
without problems” 32
­Figure 2.8 S emantic graph for the sentence “­The flight arrived
without problems” 34
­Figure 2.9 The task of Word Sense Disambiguation (­WSD) 34

xi
xii   ◾    List of Figures

­Figure 2.10 Structure of rhetorical relationships for an

example text 38
­Figure 3.1   A complaint text 50
­Figure 3.2   Relation extraction to feed a template 50
­Figure 3.3   Steps in information extraction 51
­Figure 3.4   Simple and relational information extraction 52
­Figure 3.5   Example of extraction based on cascading rules 53
­Figure 3.6   Association and search for specific relationships 60
­Figure 3.7   Extracting ­protein-protein interaction relationships 61
­Figure 4.1   The indexing or characteristics generation task 78
­Figure 4.2   Vector representation of sample texts 80
­Figure 5.1   Documents transactions as shopping baskets 93
­Figure 5.2   Generating frequent itemsets using the
APRIORI method 98
­Figure 5.3   Association rules search space 100
­Figure 6.1   Word embeddings representation 108
­Figure 6.2   Matrix decomposition using Singular Value
Decomposition (­SVD) 112
­Figure 6.3   Selecting the best number of dimensions 113
­Figure 6.4   Types of Word2Vec models 116
­Figure 6.5   Examples of context windows for training 117
­Figure 6.6   A
 rchitecture of a Continuous Bag of Words
(­CBOW) model 118
­Figure 6.7   Updating hidden layer values 119
­Figure 6.8   Computing values for output neurons 119
­Figure 6.9   Output words prediction using the SoftMax classifier 120
­Figure 6.10 Continuous Bag of Words (­CBOW) training
process to generate predictions 121
 List of Figures   ◾    xiii

­Figure 6.11 General network structure for context prediction 121

­Figure 7.1   Simple news grouping 138
­Figure 7.2   Generating document groups 139
­Figure 7.3    xample of three clusters represented by
E
­2-dimensional vectors 140
­ igure 7.4  
F A document clustering system 141
­ igure 7.5  
F Clusters distribution based on their centroids 142
­ igure 7.6  
F Spatial distribution of document vectors 144
­ igure 7.7  
F Generating three clusters from a corpus of documents 146
­ igure 7.8   Different clusters based on their initial centroids
F 147
­Figure 7.9   Selecting the best number of clusters 148
­Figure 7.10 SOM general architecture 150
­ igure 7.11
F Some shapes of SOM topologies: (­a) rectangle (­2D),
(­b) octahedron (­2D), and (­c) linear (­1D) 151
­ igure 7.12
F Geometric representation of clusters in ­Self-
Organizational Map (­SOM) 154
­Figure 8.1   Topic distribution, words and documents 167
­Figure 8.2   A mixture of three distributions 168
F
­ igure 8.3   Geometric interpretation of topics 171
­ igure 8.4  
F Dependency modeling between documents,
topics and words 172
­ igure 8.5  
F Modeling topics with Dirichlet distribution 173
F
­ igure 8.6    irichlet distribution on a 2­ -simplex for different
D
values of α 175
­Figure 8.7   Topic visualization for a sample corpus 176
­Figure 8.8   Evaluating a topic model according to perplexity 177
­Figure 8.9   Evaluating a topic model according to coherence 178
F
­ igure 9.1   Testing a text classification model 188
xiv   ◾    List of Figures

­Figure 9.2 Training a text classification model 189

­Figure 9.3 Entropy for probability distribution of X 196
­Figure 9.4 Computing indicator functions and probability
of classes 200
­Figure 9.5 A
 n example of a Receiver Operating Characteristic
(­ROC) curve 202
List of Tables

­Table 3.1 Confusion Matrix 65

­Table 3.2 Example of a Confusion Matrix 67
­Table 4.1 Sample Documents and Terms 79
­Table 4.2 Normalized TF Vector Representation 81
­Table 4.3 Correlation between Document Vectors: (­a) TF Model
(­b) TFxIDF Model 83
­Table 6.1 Initial Matrix of Terms by Documents 111

xv
Preface

W hen I thought about writing this book, I wasn’t clear enough

where to start, as there are many related topics that could be
addressed. However, it was clear to me that I wanted to share knowledge in
the simplest possible way, so that professionals with basic knowledge could
not only understand the theoretical and practical topics related to text ana-
lytics but also perceive their applications and impact in a c­ ross-sectional
way in many areas.
The challenge wasn’t simple, because despite my experience as an aca-
demic, I’m used to writing specialized scientific articles (­papers) and
technical books, giving technical conferences to scientific audiences and
directing ­scientific-technological projects evaluated by experts, etc. that
is, activities aimed at professionals/­scientists who are able to understand
complex issues. But this isn’t the case for common professionals and spe-
cialists in general; in other words, accessible and understandable formal
literature was required for them to understand the fundamentals in a sim-
ple way as well as the applications.
There were several alternatives to address the above, such as theoreti-
cal books, which are already available. However, these are usually focused
toward more advanced professionals and/­or postgraduate students leaving
aside practical and applied aspects. On the other hand, there are several
practical books focused on programming aspects; however, they’re usually
highly biased to the author’s own conception of the subject. Furthermore,
in my experience as an academic teaching text analytics and text mining
courses for many years, both within and outside Chile, I’ve been able to
verify how the students, professionals, or technicians who rely on such
books simply don’t understand what they’re doing, not being able to
compare/­analyze methods or models, being unable to go beyond what’s
written. This is mainly because they’re o ­ ver-focused on coding in specific
languages, where, unfortunately, many functionalities are arranged as

xvii
xviii   ◾    Preface

“­black boxes”, that is, hiding all the technical details, making it hard to
replicate their experiences using other computational methods or tools.
The book’s nature was clear then. This should be an introductory book
combining the basic theoretical foundations of the different paradigms
and methods of textual analytics, with practical aspects, accompanied by
examples in some programming language, which would allow us to fully
understand the background and logic of computational methods, but at
the same time, being flexible enough to use and implement them in other
languages or computational tools.
I should take advantage of my academic experience to help profession-
als better understand computational concepts and methods. For more
than 25 years, I’ve taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses related
to text analytics, text mining, ­natural-language processing, and artificial
intelligence at several national and foreign universities. While doing this,
I learned a lot from students and professionals alike, understanding what
was easier or difficult for them to understand, their questioning of what
was established, their ways of taking something complex and simplifying
it, etc.
On the other hand, my extensive experience as a scientific researcher
and consultant, developing and leading scientific projects, and transferring
technologies to the public and private sectors, should also have something
to say in the way I’m focusing this book. Indeed, much of what the book
conveys had to do not only with the basis behind computational methods
but also with the challenges and considerations involved in the study, use
and design of computational methods in real practical problems. Thus, the
book is the result of both types of experiences, which allows us to under-
stand not only the how but also the why.
After all these years doing this, why am I creating this text analytics
book now? Globally, this is a l­ong-standing topic, and we started seeing
this in the ­mid-1990s in Chile, at the academy. However, in many ways,
society and industry weren’t prepared, and, up to a certain extent, many
didn’t see the need to be prepared, considering it to be something abstract
and, therefore, impractical, taking into account not only the small amount
of data available for them in that period but also performing several ana-
lytical tasks manually, like the old days.
However, the access and size of data sources, and in particular unstruc-
tured ones such as texts and documents, have experienced exponential
growth in the last 10 years. This led to important scientific advances in
both new and improved methods of text analytics as well as a greater need
 Preface   ◾    xix

for companies, not only to analyze structured information automatically

per se but to generate insights from it, improving their ­decision-making
and business productivity.
Nor is it fortuitous that the writing of this book went through two major
local and international crises. First, there was the unprecedented social
crisis that affected Chile in October 2019. Then, since the end of 2019, the
world has been affected by a gigantic global pandemic of the C ­ OVID-19
disease, and, even now, when finishing this book, when it will come to an
end is still uncertain. But what do these two recent events have in common?
In addition to the already increasing information overload, in the case of
Chile, the social crisis generated an enormous flow of information, especially
related to social media information, whose analysis was key to making stra-
tegic decisions in terms of discovering links in informal textual information.
On the other hand, in the case of the pandemic, there has been a large accu-
mulation of scientific literature (­i.e., formal textual information), around the
investigations that shed light on various factors related to C ­ OVID-19, and
that, due to its dimension (­more than 45,000 articles) and complexity, it’s
necessary to have advanced textual analytics methods that can automatically
extract and discover relevant knowledge that allows research to progress, a
task that clearly cannot be performed manually by human experts.
The above shows once again not only the technological, critical, and
strategic relevance of text analytics but also the need of a book capable of
introducing this technology as a powerful ­decision-making tool.
Crises bring opportunities, and this book was written in the midst of a
crisis.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is an introductory book to the science and applications of text ana-
lytics or text mining, which enables automatic knowledge discovery from
unstructured information sources. With this purpose, the book introduces
the main concepts, models, and computational techniques that allow solv-
ing several real ­decision-making problems coming from textual and/­or
documentary sources.

Audience
If you have textual data sources that you need to understand, this is the
right book for you. If you want to obtain textual data and want to take
advantage of it to discover and/­or detect important knowledge, this is also
Visit https://ebookmass.com today to explore
a vast collection of ebooks across various
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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 “I’ve either got to go with them fellows to the Bad Lands, and get
whipped when they do, or I must go and surrender myself,” he said to
himself. “I know that little snipe could have said something for me if
he had chosen to do it; but here I am, with everybody down on me.
Blessed if I know what to do.”

“I think he has more cheek than any man I ever saw,” muttered
Carl, as he moved cautiously away from his place of concealment. “He
makes an attempt to rob father and gets a bullet in him for his pains,
and then comes to me with the request that I will say something for
him! Mighty clear of it. I would say something that would get him
stretched up by the neck, if I could.”
 CHAPTER XV.
Five Years Before.

A bout forty miles distant from Fort Scott, in a quiet valley

surrounded on all sides by stately hills, the ranch of Mr. Preston
was located. The valley was fifty miles long and half as wide, and the
owner had no difficulty in protecting his stock during the winter
storms which now and then spread over the valley, accompanied by a
driving snow that effectually shut the cowboys off from all contact
with the outside world. A river flowed through within a hundred
yards or so of the house, and on the wild fowl that frequented its
banks during the fall and winter Carl Preston had received his first
instruction in wing-shooting. Game of nearly all kinds was abundant,
and it was no trouble at all for the ranchmen who wanted a haunch of
venison to shoot a deer when they came to the river for water. It was a
quiet, happy home, and Carl never would have thought of leaving it
had his father been spared to him.

The house was a rambling structure, built of rough boards, dismal-

looking enough on the outside, but in the interior it was fitted up as
any boy would care to have it. A porch ran the full length of the front
of the house, and one day in the month of June Carl Preston sat on it,
deeply interested in some work the foreman was doing upon his
saddle. Carl was at that time seventeen years of age, and, to quote
from the herdsmen, with whom he was an especial favorite, he was
“as likely a boy as ever stood up.” But there was one objection to Carl,
and that was, he never would study his books. According to Colonel
Dodge, he found more excitement in horses and guns than he did in
anything else. He tried hard to master a lesson that his father gave
him, but just as surely as anything happened outside, he would go out
to see what the matter was. Did any of the cattle become alarmed and
threaten a stampede, Carl wanted to be sure that the cowboy got
ahead of them and kept them from going out at the entrance of the
valley onto the prairie; or, if a horseman was selected that morning at
breakfast to break in a bronco, Carl would happen on the porch about
the time he got ready to begin, and see that the horse did not do the
cowboy any damage. At last his father became disheartened, put away
the books, and began work on Carl’s education himself. He took him
into the field with him every time he went, all the while discoursing
upon some subject in which he hoped Carl would be interested, and
in this way the boy learned much that he could not have got out of
books.

“So you think you won’t be lonely any more after your cousin
comes?” said the foreman, stopping to pound down a waxed end with
his hammer. “Well, I hope you will like him, but I am afraid you
won’t.”

Mr. Preston had left home three days before to go to Standing Rock
Agency for the purpose of meeting this cousin, and he had purposely
left Carl at home till he could see what manner of boy it was that he
was going to meet.
 This boy Claude was the only son of Mr. Preston’s brother, who
lived in St. Louis. During his father’s lifetime, for Claude was now an
orphan, Mr. Preston often had calls for money and assistance, until
he began to believe that really his brother did not amount to much.
He got him situations, only to have the man throw them up at last. To
his brother’s inquiry as to why he had done so he always replied that
it was something to which he was not adapted, and begged for
something easier. Now the man was dead and Claude was left alone.
He wrote to Mr. Preston, and, telling of the death of his father, asked
him what he should do.

“Now is the time for him to make good his boasts that he is going to
set me up in business,” said Claude to himself. “Ten to one he will
write me to go out there, and that is one thing that I don’t want to do.
But then he has money, and I will see what I can do with him after I
get out there. I will promise him that if he will give me five thousand
dollars I will never bother him again.”

One thing that made Claude so free with his uncle’s money was the
conversations he had often had with his father. He had heard that all
Western men were reckless with their gains, and he thought perhaps
Mr. Preston would be equally so. What were five thousand dollars to
him? He could easily get it out of the first cattle he sold. But now his
worst fears came to him. Mr. Preston, after holding a consultation
with his foreman—educated man as he was, he needed somebody to
go to—wrote to Claude, and sent him money to come to Standing
Rock Agency. After he got there he would still have a hundred and
sixty miles to ride, and, for fear that he might not be able to stand the
journey on horseback, Mr. Preston would meet him there with a
wagon. Claude did not like the prospect of going out there so far from
everybody, but still he packed up his trunk and went, and he found
his uncle ready to receive him. Carl, as we said, had been left at home,
because his father was anxious to see what sort of a boy—or man,
rather, for Claude was nearly seven years older than Carl—he had
been so willing to receive into his house.

“I hope you will like him, but I am afraid you won’t,” repeated the
foreman. “A man who has lived all his life in a big city ain’t agoing to
be contented out here.”

“Oh, I hope he will,” said Carl, somewhat disappointed at the

foreman’s view of the matter. “I will give him up everything I’ve got if
he will only stay here with me. There are plenty of horses for him to
ride, there is a boat on the river, and——”

“That may all be,” said the cowboy, “but when he is in the city he
has more than that. Where are the theatres for him to go to, and the
balls and sleigh-rides?”

“Why, Claude has not been to any of those things,” said Carl in
surprise. “You must remember that his father was poor.”

“Supposing he was. What has this man been doing during all these
years? If he had a position when his father died, what was the reason
he did not keep it?”

“Blessed if I know,” said Carl, who began to have a faint idea of the
way the matter stood.
 “I’ll tell you just what’s the matter with Claude,” said the cowboy,
getting upon his feet. “He did not have a thing to do when his father
was alive; he stayed at home or bummed around some place waiting
for his father to give him money; and now, when his father’s left him,
he’s afloat and does not know what to do. I tell you, he has come to a
bad place. If he waits for your father to give him money he will wait
for a long while.”

“You are prejudiced, and I hope that you are mistaken. However, he
will soon be here, and I want you to meet him as civilly as you can.”

“Oh, I will do that,” said the cowboy. “He is coming here as your
guest, and of course I will take off my hat to him. But I will tell you
one thing, and that ain’t two,” he added mentally, as he shouldered
his saddle and walked toward the corral with it: “I believe that a
fellow who will stand around with his hands in his pockets, while his
father is so poor that he doesn’t know where his next meal is coming
from, is not a man who will do to run with you. I shall keep an eye on
him.”

This made it plain that Mr. Preston had talked rather freely with his
foreman before he started for Standing Rock Agency, and that the
latter’s suspicions had been aroused. The cowboy was loyal to the
family, and anything that interfered with them was sure to raise his
ire. Carl did not know what to think when he went away and left him
sitting there on the porch. Ever since his father went away he had
been impatient for his return, for he wanted to see his cousin, and
had promised himself that he would try by every means in his power
to make his stay under their roof agreeable.
 “Thompson is mistaken—I know he is, or father would not have
received him under our roof,” muttered Carl, as he turned himself
around on the porch and gazed toward the entrance of the valley. “At
any rate, I shall not fall in with him until I see Claude and judge him
for myself.”

This much was settled, and Carl forthwith dismissed all thoughts of
his cousin from his mind. His father had promised to be at home on
the afternoon of that day, and then the matter could be determined to
his satisfaction. His pony came up and thrust his nose into his hand,
and Carl suddenly thought of something.

“I believe I will not wait for them to get home,” said he, going to the
end of the porch where were hung the saddle and bridle which he
used in riding. “I will go down to the gap and meet them.”

The pony—he was always called the pony, and nothing else—did
not raise any objection to being saddled and bridled. He was as gentle
with Carl as a dog, although if anybody else came near him he was apt
to be dangerous. This was the pony that Carl rode when he got his
name. He came home on a leave of absence and told his father of it,
and the consequence was Carl was not allowed to go back.

“I tell you those fellows have gone too far in naming my boy,” said
Mr. Preston in astonishment. “Have you ever been in that country
before?”

“Not quite so far down,” answered Carl, who almost wished that he
had said nothing about it. “I have been down pretty near to Fort
Belknap with Mason, carrying dispatches, and that is as far as I have
been.”

“Do you know what those Indians would have done to you if they
had captured you?”

“Yes, sir; but I didn’t intend to be captured.”

“Yes? Well, you don’t go back to the fort any more; and if Mason
comes up here I will tell him what I think of him.”

Carl smiled as he put the saddle on his pony and the conversation
he had had with his father came vividly to his mind; but, being an
obedient boy, he had stayed at home after that, and listened to the
stories the scouts told, although he had no hand in them himself.
Some day he hoped to gain his father’s consent to take part in them;
but until that consent was gained he would remain there on the
ranch, acting as cowboy.

Without taking any weapons with him Carl mounted his pony and
set off at a gallop, followed by his pointers, which went with him
everywhere. It was three miles to “the gap,” as he called it, which gave
access to the valley from the prairie, and he rode the entire distance
without seeing anybody. The cattle were all up at the farthest end of
the range, and had no business on that side of the house unless they
were stampeded. As he drew rein, however, and cast his eyes down
the road, he saw a dim object at the farther end which appeared to be
coming toward him. A second look started him down the road again,
and a brisk gallop of a mile or more showed him that it was his
father’s team.
 “Now I will soon find out whether or not Thompson is mistaken,”
said Carl to himself. “There are two of them on the front seat, and one
of them is a stranger. It must be Claude.”

Filled with curiosity, Carl kept his pony on a lope until he obtained
a nearer view of the man who was a stranger to him. The result
satisfied him and his countenance fell. Claude was neatly dressed as
far as his outward appearance went, and his gloved hands, which lay
before him, were as dainty as a woman’s; but there was something in
his face that was not attractive. It had a hard look, a dissipated look
such as Carl had never seen before, although he well knew what it
meant.

“Halloo! Carl,” said his father, who was somewhat surprised at the
boy’s silence. “How is everything?”

“Father,” exclaimed Carl, extending his hand to his sire, “I am glad

to see you back again safe and sound. And this is my cousin,” he
added, riding around the wagon so that he could shake hands with
Claude. “How do you do, sir? I suppose you thought you were never
going to get here, didn’t you?”

“Oh, no,” said Claude with a smile. “I knew uncle would not run me
off into the mountains and lose me.”

While he spoke the young men had been making a mental estimate
of each other. Carl judged something of his cousin by the grasp of his
hand. He did not put any life into it; it was as limp as a piece of wet
rope. Claude judged of Carl the same way, and both of them came
pretty near the mark.
 “Drat the boy, he has the grasp of a young blacksmith,” said Claude,
noticing the glove on his hand, which Carl had considerably mussed
during his greeting. “And this is the kind of fellow I am to be
associated with all my life! I’ll bet the boy doesn’t know putty. I have
seen enough of uncle’s life. I am going to get away from here as soon
as I can.”
 CHAPTER XVI.
What Claude Knew.

“Y es, sir, I am going to get away from here as soon as I can,”

repeated Claude, giving his cousin a good looking over as he
rode a little in advance of him. “I know just what I will have to do
when I arrive at the shanty they call home. Uncle has not said so, but
I infer he is going to make a cowboy out of me. If there is anything I
do despise it is a horse; and I know this wild Indian will take great
delight in giving me the wildest one there is on the range to ride. Then
what will I do during my off times? Not a billiard-table nor a bowling-
alley here! I wish I could think up some way to get around the old
man.”

Claude was filled with such thoughts as these during his ride to the
ranch, although he tried his level best to keep up his end of the
conversation. He laughed when the others did, when Carl told his
father of the time that Thompson had had breaking in the sorrel mare
—not because he could see any fun in it, but for the reason that he did
not want to let his uncle and cousin see how completely his mind was
taken up with other matters. Finally he aroused himself and began to
take more interest in what they were saying. It would be well enough,
he thought, to wait awhile before getting away from there.
 “Carl, do you see anything of the Indians out here?” was his first
question.

“Oh, yes; we see them every day,” replied Carl.

“But do you have any trouble with them? I have heard that Indians
are always on the warpath, and that they shoot and scalp every white
man they see.”

“Well, it is not so. We are on the Sioux reservation, and we know

that they have been peaceable ever since their surrender.”

“What did they surrender for?”

“To pay for killing Custer and his band,” replied Carl, looking at his
cousin with some surprise.

“I believe I heard something about that. Custer lost several of his

own men, didn’t he?”

“Well, I should say so. It was the greatest massacre that ever was
known. Custer gave up his own life; and, besides, he lost two hundred
and forty-six of his men.”

“Do you find any game about here?” asked Claude, who plainly saw
that it would not do to talk to Carl about the Indians.

“More than we want. If you are fond of shooting, I can take you
where you can shoot a grizzly bear inside of three hours after you
leave our house.”

“They are dangerous, are they not?”

 “Well, I guess you would think so after you have been in a battle
with one. Last week we took a man down to the fort, to the hospital,
who had his left shoulder all torn out.”

“Have you got any books that are worth the reading?” said Claude,
who very soon made up his mind that he didn’t want anything to do
with grizzly bears. “You must have lots of time at your disposal——”

“Well, no. We have our evenings if we are not on the watch, but
then we are too tired to do anything but sit around and talk. We have
plenty of books, however, and among them there is one that I always
admired—Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake.’”

“Yes, I believe I have heard of that book. Scott was a robber, was he
not?”

“No,” answered Carl indignantly. “He was a Scottish nobleman. But

he made one of his heroes an outlaw, and he ran on until he met his
lawful monarch and killed him.”

Both the young men remained silent after that. Carl was astonished
that his cousin, who was fresh from the city, where everybody is
supposed to know everything, should be ignorant of little matters
which he had at his tongue’s end, and Claude saw that he must be
careful what subjects he touched upon to avoid showing how little he
knew. By this time they were in sight of the ranch. It is hard to tell
just what kind of a looking building Claude had picked out in his
imagination for his uncle to live in, but it was plain that his
amazement increased when he looked at it. He got down out of the
wagon and was immediately introduced to Thompson, who gave him
a hearty shake, and at the same time he bent his eyes upon him as if
he meant to look him through.

“Everything is all right, sir,” said he in response to an inquiry from

his employer, “and Carl has had one good, hearty laugh since you
went away. The old sorrel threw me three times in succession, and I
thought Carl would never get over it. I think you will find everything
just as it was.”

Claude was shown into his room, which he had to himself; and
Carl, after turning his pony loose, sat down upon the porch to think.
To say that he was sadly disappointed in his cousin would not begin
to express it. He knew that the man was older than himself, and that
he would find it hard work to amuse him; but he did not suppose that
there was going to be such a gulf between them.

Claude knew literally nothing outside of billiards and bowling-

alleys, and he would have to go a long way from that valley to find
them. His thoughts, as he sat on his bed gazing idly at the rag carpet
on the floor, were very much out of place for one who had just come
among relatives he had not seen for a long time, and whom he had
tired of already.

“I was a fool for ever coming out here, but then I did not know that
they lived so far from everybody,” said Claude, running his fingers
through his hair and acting altogether as if he were very much
displeased with himself. “I wish I were back in the Planters’ House,
playing a game of billiards with somebody; but now that I am here, I
am going to make the most of it. I don’t like my uncle’s looks. He is a
pretty hard man to deal with.”
 And we may add that these were his reflections during the two
years that he remained an unwilling visitor at the ranch. He
conquered himself as well as he could, and stayed there because he
had nowhere else to go. If he went to the city he would have to go to
work at something, and he thought that living on the ranch was better
than going among entire strangers. He tried hard to learn his duties;
and being given a sober old horse that it was no trouble to ride, and
keeping always in company with Carl, he found that he got along
better than he otherwise thought he would. But there was one thing
that came into Claude’s mind that he would not have his relatives
know for anything. Mr. Preston had an office which opened off the
dining-room, and every pay-day, and that came once a month, he
opened a safe in which Claude had often seen huge piles of
greenbacks stowed away. He had not thought about this for some
time after he gained an insight into the safe, but of late it had
gradually come upon him that if he could get into that safe
unbeknown to anybody, he would have enough to keep him in
idleness as long as he lived. It scared him at first, but the longer he
pondered upon it the more he thought it could be done. Besides, his
uncle was gradually wasting away from some form of incurable
disease, and Claude had schooled himself to look upon his death with
the greatest composure. Of course Mr. Preston would not want the
money after he was gone; and as to Carl, he would have the stock and
ranch left, and that was all he needed. If he could not make a living
out of that, he deserved to starve.

“I think that is the only way to make money,” said Claude to

himself. “It is true I might try Carl after his father is gone, but I don’t
have any hopes of making him divide the property with me. He will
want it all himself, for he is awful stingy. I’ll keep an eye on that safe,
and if he leaves the key in the door, as I have known him to do a
hundred times, I’ll just open it and take what I want. But where will I
go after I have performed the deed? Well, that will require some
study.”

Every time Claude talked to himself in this way he grew more and
more impatient for something to happen. One morning as he was
about to mount his horse to go out and attend to the cattle he was
approached by a couple of rather seedy-looking men, who inquired
for Mr. Preston.

“He is out on the ranch now, but he will be in before long,” said
Claude. “Do you want to see him for anything particular?”

“Yes—we want a job at herding stock,” said one of the men, who
answered to the name of Harding. “We understood that some of his
stockmen had left him.”

“They were three men who have got all the stock they want and
have gone off somewhere to begin business for themselves. I don’t
know whether you could fill their places or not. You don’t look like
men who had been in the habit of herding stock.”

And they didn’t, either. One of them, as we have said, was Harding,
and the other was Ainsworth, and they looked just what they were—
regular squawmen. Claude had been long enough on the plains to tell
a stockman when he saw him.

“Perhaps we don’t,” said Harding, “but we have been used to the

business all our lives. Is old man Preston out this way? Then we will
ride with you until we find him.”

Claude rode on ahead, followed by the squawmen, and somehow he

did not feel safe in their presence; but before long something that one
of the men said opened his eyes and made him feel that his uncle, by
hiring the two men in question, would make easy of accomplishment
certain plans he had formed.

“You’re getting rich herding cattle, ain’t you?” said Harding. “Well,
it beats the world how some men can get rich and do nothing. If I had
what old man Preston is worth I wouldn’t never do nothing no more.”

“Neither would I,” said Claude. “But it takes money to make

money; haven’t you lived long enough to prove that? A man who hires
out to be abroad in all sorts of weather, and who loses his sleep of
nights for the paltry sum of forty-five dollars a month, don’t see much
money by the time the year is up.”

Here the subject was dropped, but enough had been said to set each
one to thinking. Harding and his partner were hard up, to use the
language of the country. The provisions their wives drew every week
did not furnish them with money, and how in the world they were
going to get funds was what troubled them. If the truth must be
known, they came there to Mr. Preston’s house not for the purpose of
herding cattle, but with an eye on the safe in the office. Claude, dull as
he was about some things, saw that, and instantly two courses of
action suggested themselves to him: should he scrape acquaintance
with the men, in case his uncle hired them, and share the proceeds
with them, or should he pretend to be on their side, find out what
arrangements they made in regard to robbing the safe, and then go to
his uncle and expose them?

“By gracious! here is another chance to make money,” said Claude,

so overcome with his grand idea that it was all he could do to keep
from laughing outright. “If I go in with them they will take the money
and leave me to whistle for my share; but if I go to my uncle and post
him, he will certainly reward me for my efforts, and that will be better
than stealing. I tell you I will get the start of that man yet.”

Claude was so impatient to reach his uncle and turn the men over
to him that he put his horse into a lope, and in the space of half an
hour discovered his relative riding slowly toward him. He simply said,
“Here are two men who want a chance to herd cattle,” and then
passed on, so that he could have an opportunity to think over his new
scheme without being bothered by anybody. It was in his mind all
that day, and when he went home to supper that night he found the
men, with their hats off and their sleeves rolled up, in the act of
taking a wash.

“I guess uncle has hired you,” said he.

“Is old man—I mean is Mr. Preston your uncle?” asked one of the
men in surprise.

“Oh, yes, he is my uncle easy enough, but he treats me mighty

mean. In fact he uses all his hands mean.”

Claude looked all around before he gave utterance to this falsehood,

for if Thompson or some of the older hands on the ranch had heard
him, it is possible that he would have listened to the truth, plainly
told. A kinder owner to work for than Mr. Preston did not exist, and
every one who had earned his daily bread on that ranch knew it. If the
three men who had left the ranch to begin business for themselves
could have heard it, they would have told a different story. These men
had been at work for Mr. Preston a long time, and each one carried,
besides his stock, one thousand dollars, with which to start him on
the road to prosperity.
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