Chapter VI: Part 6

And, sure enough, Ed came promptly to the front. It seems he waited only long enough to get a new suit and an assorted lot of the snappiest diamond jewellery he could find. Then he wired me he was coming to right the wrongs of a lifetime. Reaching San Francisco, it occurred to him that he could put it all over Ben in another way that would cut him to the heart; so he there chartered the largest, goldest, and most expensive private car on the market, having boudoirs and shower baths and conservatories and ballrooms, and so on; something that would make Ben's dinky little private car look like a nester's shack or a place for a construction gang to bunk in. And in this rolling palace Ed invaded our peaceful country, getting lots of notice. The papers said this new mining millionaire was looking us over with an eye to investment in our rich lands. Little they knew he merely meant to pull off a brutal fist altercation with a prominent railroad official that was somewhat out of condition.

Ben was one worried man, especially after he heard of Ed's private car. It was one thing to lick an exbrakeman, but entirely different to have an affray with a prominent capitalist that come after you regardless of expense. Furthermore, this was the time for the annual tour of inspection by the officers of the road, and they was now on the way to Ben's division, with him hoping to create a fine impression by showing his miracles of management. And here was Ed, meaning to start something scandalous at sight! No wonder Ben lost his nerve and tried to run out on his antagonist. He was trying to put it off at least till after his officials had come and gone.

So for six days he kept about thirty miles of standard-gauge track between his car and Ed's. Ed would get word that he was at such a station and have his car dropped there, only to find that Ben had gone on. Ed would follow on the next train, or mebbe hire a special engine; and Ben would hide off on some blind spur track. They covered the whole division about three times without clashing, thanks to Ben's superior information bureau; it being no trick at all to keep track of this wheeled apartment house of Ed's.

Ed couldn't understand it at first. Here he'd come up to lick Ben, and Ben was acting queer about it. Ed would send messages every day wanting to know when and where he could have a nice quiet chat with Ben that would not be interfered with by bystanders; and Ben would wire back that his time wasn't his own and company business was keeping him on the jump, but as soon as this rush was over he would arrange an interview; and kind regards, and so on. Or he might say he would be at some station all the following day; which would be a clumsy falsehood, because he was at that moment pulling out, as Ed would find when he got there. The operating department must of thought them a couple of very busy men, wanting so much to meet, yet never seeming able to get together.

Ed got peeved at last by the way Ben was putting him off. It wasn't square and it wasn't businesslike. He had large mining interests in charge and here was Ben acting like he had all summer to devote just to this one little matter. He called Ben's attention to this by telegraph, but Ben continued to be somewhere else from where he said he was going to be.

After a week of this pussy-wants-a-corner stuff Ed got wise that the thing had come to be a mere vulgar chase, and that his private car was hampering him by being so easy to keep track of. So he disguised himself by taking off his diamond ornaments and leaving his private car at Colfax, and started out to stalk Ben as a common private citizen in a day coach. He got results that way, Ben supposing he was still with his car. After a couple of scouting trips up and down the line he gets reliable word that Ben, with his bunch of high officials, is over at Wallace.

So much the better, thinks Ed. It will be fine to have this next disturbance right on the spot where a great wrong was done him fifteen years before. So he starts for Wallace, wiring for his car to follow him there. He'd found this car poor for the bloodhound stuff, but he wanted Ben to have a good look at it and eat his heart out with envy, either before or after what was going to happen to him.

He gets to Wallace on the noon train and finds that Ben with his officials has gone up the canon, past Burke, on the president's private car, to return in about an hour. After Ed's inquiries the agent kindly wires up to Ben that his cousin from Arizona is waiting for him. Ed spends the time walking round Ben's shabby little private car and sneering at it. He has his plans all made, now that he has run his man to earth. He won't pull anything rough before the officials, but about twenty miles out on the line is a siding with a shipping corral beside it and nothing else in sight but vistas. They'll get an engine to run the two cars out there that night and leave 'em, and everything can be done decently and in order. No hurry and no worry and no scandal.

Ed is just playing the coming fight over in his mind for the fifth time, correcting some of his blows here and there, when he hears a whistle up the canon and in comes the special. The officials pile off and Ben comes rushing up to Ed with a glad smile and effusive greetings and hearty slaps on the back; and how is everything, old man?--and so on--with a highly worried look lurking just back of it all; and says what rare good luck to find Ed here, because he's the very man they been talking about all the way down from Burke.

Ed says if they come down as fast as he did one time they didn't get a chance to say much about him; but Ben is introducing him to the president of the road and the general manager and the chief engineer and three or four directors, and they all shake hands with him till it seems like quite a reception. The president says is this really the gentleman who has made that last big strike in Arizona! And if it is he knows something still more interesting about him, because he has just listened to a most remarkable tale of his early days as a brakeman on this very line. Their division superintendent has been telling of his terrific drop down the canon and his incredible flight through the air of three hundred and thirty-five feet.

"How far did he say I was hurled?" says Ed, and the president again says three hundred and thirty-five feet, which was a hundred more than Ed had ever claimed; so he looks over at Ben pretty sharp.

Ben is still talking hurriedly about the historic accident, saying that in all his years of railroad experience he never heard of anything approaching it, and if they will step up the track a piece he will show them just where the cars left the rails. Ben must of done a lot of quick thinking that day. He had the bunch over to see the exact spot, and they all stood and looked over to the ice house and said it was incredible; and a director from Boston said it was perfectly preposterous; really now! And Ben kept on reciting rapidly about the details. He said Ed had come down the seven miles in less than three minutes, which was lopping a minute and a half off the official time; and that when picked up he hadn't a whole bone left in his body, which was also a lie; and that his cousin never could of survived if he hadn't probably had the most marvellous constitution a man was ever endowed with. He then made the bunch go over to the ice house to see the other exact spot, and they looked back to where he started from, and again said it was incredible and preposterous.

I don't know. Mebbe they wouldn't of thought it preposterous that a mere brakeman was hurled that far, but Ed was a capitalist now. Anyway, the president had him into his car for lunch with the party, and they might possibly of got to talking about other things of less importance, but Ben wouldn't have any thing else. He made 'em insist that Ed should tell his version of the whole thing; how he felt when the cars started, and how the scenery was blurred, and how his whole past life flashed before him, and the last thing he remembered before he hit the sawdust. And Ben set there looking so proud of Ed, like a mother having her little tot recite something. And when Ed had finally lit, Ben made him tell about his slow recovery. And after Ed got himself well again Ben would go back to the start and ask for more details, such as whether he hadn't wanted to jump off on the way down, or whether he had been conscious while going through the air for nearly four hundred feet.

Ed got little food; but much he cared! He'd come into his own at last. And suddenly he was surprised by finding a warm glow in his heart for Ben, especially after Ben had said for about the third time: "I was certainly a green hand in those days; so green that I didn't begin to realize what a whale of an occurrence this was." Ed was getting a new light on Ben.

After lunch Ed's own car got in from Colfax and he had the party over there for cigars and more talk about himself, which was skillfully led by Ben. Then the president invited Ed to hitch his car on and come along with them for a little trip, and talk over mining and investments, and so on, and what the outlook was in the Southwest. So Ed went with 'em and continued to hear talk of his accident. Ben would bring it up and harp back to it, and bring it forward and sandwich it in whenever the conversation had an open moment. It was either the wild thoughts Ed must of had sliding down the canon, or the preposterous constitution he had been endowed with, or the greenness of himself for not recognizing it as the prize accident of the ages. And I don't wonder Ben went on that way for the next two days. He knew what a tenacious idiot Ed was, and that he had come miles out of his way to try something he had often tried before. The most he could hope for was to stave off the collision till his officials got away.

And it looked, the second night, like he wasn't going to be able to do even this much. He'd been detecting cold looks from Ed all day, in spite of his putting on another record about the accident every ten minutes or so. They was laid out at some little station, and just before dinner Ed give Ben the office that he wanted a word private with him. Ben thinks to himself it's coming now in spite of all his efforts to smooth it over. But he leaves the car with Ed and they walk a piece up the track, Ben hoping they can make the lee of a freight car before Ed starts his crime of violence. He makes up his mind quick. If Ed jumps him there in the open he will certainly do his best to win the contest. But if he waits till they get this freight car between them and the public, then he will let Ed win the fight and get the scandal out of his life forever.

Ben walks quite briskly, but Ed begins to slow up when they ain't more than a hundred yards from the president's car. Finally Ed stops short.

"The little foci is going to pull the fight here in the open!" thinks Ben; so he gets ready to do his best.

Then Ed says:

"Say, Ben, what's the matter with you, anyway? Are you losing your mind? It ain't so much on my account; I could make allowance for you. But here's these officials of yours, and you want to make a good impression on 'em; instead of which you are making yourself the grandest bore that ever needed strangling for continuous talk on one subject."

Ben didn't get him yet. He says come on up the other side of them freight cars, where they can be more private for their consultation.

Ed says no; this is far enough to tell him for his own good not to be such a bore; an' Ben says how is he a bore?

"A bore?" says Ed. "Why, for forty-eight hours you ain't been able to talk about anything but that stale old accident of mine, and you got me so sick of it I could jump on you every time you begin. You got everybody in the party sick of it. Don't you see how they all try to get away from you? For the Lord's sake, can't you think up something else to talk about now and then--at least for five minutes, just to give your silly chatter a little different flavour? I never been so sick of anything in my life as I am of this everlasting prattle of yours about something that was over and forgotten fifteen long years ago! What's got into you to keep dragging that accident up out of the dead past that way? Anyway, you better cut it out. I have to listen because you're my cousin; but these officials don't. Your next pay check is liable to be your last on this road if you don't think up some other kind of gossip. Darned if it don't seem like you had been getting weak-minded in your old age!"

Ben had got his bearings by this time. He apologized warmly to Ed; he said it was true this magnificent catastrophe had lately taken possession of his mind, but now that he finds Ed is so sensitive about it he'll try to keep it out of his talk, and he hopes Ed won't cherish hard feelings against him.

Ed says no, he won't cherish anything if Ben will only quit his loathsome gushing about the accident; and Ben says he will quit. And so they shook hands on it.

That's the way the feud ended. The champion grudge hoarder of the universe had been dosed to a finish with his own medicine. It showed Ben has a weakness for diplomacy; kind of an iron hand in a velvet glove, or something.

Ed is still a nut, though. There was a piece in a Sunday paper not long ago about this new mining millionaire. He spoke some noble words to the youth of our land. He said young American manhood could still make its fortune in this glorious country of opportunity by strict attention to industry and good habits and honest dealing and native pluck--him that had had these mules forced on him in the first place, and then his interest in this claim forced on him for the mules, and then hadn't been able to get shut of the claim. Ain't it lovely how men will dig up a license to give themselves all credit for hog luck they couldn't help!

Ma Pettengill busied herself with a final cigarette and remarked that she never knew when to stop talking. Some parties did, but not her; and she having to be up and on the way to Horsefly Mountain by six-thirty in the A.M.! Her last apology was for a longing she had not been able to conquer: She couldn't help a debased wish to know how that last fight would of come out.

"Of course it ain't nice to want men to act like the brutes," said the lady. "Still, I can't help wondering; not that I'm inquisitive, but just out of curiosity."

V

ONE ARROWHEAD DAY

It began with the wonted incitement to murder. A wooden staff projects some five feet above the topmost roof peak of the Arrowhead ranch house, and to this staff is affixed a bell of brazen malignity. At five-thirty each morning the cord controlling this engine of discord is jerked madly and forever by Lew Wee, our Chinese chef. It is believed by those compelled to obey the horrid summons that this is Lew Wee's one moment of gladness in a spoiled life. The sound of the noon bell, the caressing call of the night bell--these he must know to be welcome. The morning clangour he must know to be a tragedy of foulest import. It is undeniably rung with a keener relish. There will be some effort at rhythm with the other bells, but that morning bell jangles in a broken frenzy of clangs, ruthlessly prolonged, devilish to the last insulting stroke. Surely one without malice could manage this waking bell more tactfully.

A reckless Chinaman, then, takes his life in his hands each morning at five-thirty. Something like a dozen men are alarmed from deep sleep to half-awakened incredulity, in which they believe the bell to be a dream bell and try to dream on of something noiseless. Ten seconds later these startled men have become demons, with their nice warm feet on the icy floor of the bunk-house, and with prayers of simple fervour that the so-and-so Chink may be struck dead while his hand is still on the rope. This prayer is never answered; so something like a dozen men dress hurriedly and reach the Arrowhead kitchen hurriedly, meaning to perform instantly there a gracious deed which Providence has thus far unaccountably left undone.

That the Arrowhead annals are, as yet, unspiced with a crime of violence is due, I consider, to Lew Wee's superb control of his facial muscles. His expression when he maniacally yanks the bell cord is believed by his victims to be one of hellish glee; so they eagerly seek each morning for one little remaining trace of this. The tiniest hint would suffice. But they encounter only a rather sad-faced, middle-aged Chinaman, with immovable eyes and a strained devotion to delicate tasks, of whom it is impossible to believe that ever a ray of joy gladdened his life.

There is a secondary reason why the spirit of Lew Wee has not long since been disembodied by able hands: His static Gorgon face stays the first murderous impulse; then his genial kitchen aroma overpowers their higher natures and the deed of high justice is weakly postponed. This genial kitchen aroma is warm, and composed cunningly from steaming coffee and frying ham or beef, together with eggs and hot cakes almost as large as the enamelled iron plates from which they are eaten. It is no contemptible combination on a frosty morning. No wonder strong men forget the simple act of manslaughter they come there to achieve and sit sullenly down to be pandered to by him who was erst their torturer.

On a morning in late May, when I had been invited to fare abroad with my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill--who would breakfast in her own apartment--I joined this assemblage of thwarted murderers as they doggedly ate. It is a grim business, that ranch breakfast. Two paling lamps struggle with the dawn, now edging in, and the half light is held low in tone by smoke from the cake griddle, so that no man may see another too plainly. But no man wishes to see another. He stares dully into his own plate and eats with stern aversion. We might be so many strangers in a strange place, aloof, suspicious, bitter, not to say truculent.

No quip or jest will lighten the gloom. Necessary requests for the sugar or the milk or the stewed apples are phrased with a curtly formal civility. We shall be other men at noon or at night, vastly other, sunnier men, with abundance of quip and jest and playful sally with the acid personal tang. But from warm beds of repose! We avoid each other's eyes, and one's subdued "please pass that sirup pitcher!" is but tolerated like some boorish profanation of a church service.

The simple truth, of course, is that this is the one hour of the day when we are face to face with the evil visage of life unmasked; our little rosy illusions of yestereve are stale and crumpled. Not until we are well out in the sun, with the second cigarette going good, shall we again become credulous about life and safe to address. It is no meal to linger over. We grimly rise from the wrecked table and clatter out.

Only one of us--that matchless optimist, Sandy Sawtelle--sounds a flat note in the symphony of disillusion. His humanness rebounds more quickly than ours, who will not fawn upon life for twenty minutes yet. Sandy comes back to the table from the hook whence he had lifted his hat. He holds aloft a solitary hot cake and addresses Lew Wee in his best Anglo-Chinese, and with humorous intent:

"I think take-um hot cake, nail over big knot hole in bunk-house--last damn long time better than sheet iron!"

Swiftly departing pessimists accord no praise or attention to this ill-timed sketch; least of all Lew Wee, who it is meant to insult. His face retains the sad impassivity of a granite cliff as yet beyond the dawn.

Now I am out by the saddle rack under the poplars, where two horses are tied. Ma Pettengill's long-barrelled roan is saddled. My own flea-bitten gray, Dandy Jim, is clad only in the rope by which he was led up from the caviata. I approach him with the respectful attention his reputed character merits and try to ascertain his mood of the moment. He is a middle-aged horse, apparently of sterling character, and in my presence has always conducted himself as a horse should. But the shadow of scandal has been flung athwart him. I have been assured that he has a hideous genius for cinch binding. Listening at first without proper alarm, it has been disclosed to me that a cinch binder ain't any joke, by a darned sight! A cinch binder will stand up straight and lean over backward on me. If I'm there when he hits the ground I'll wish I wasn't--if I am able to wish anything at all and don't simply have to be shipped off to wherever my family wants it to take place.

I am further enlightened: Dandy Jim ain't so likely to start acting if not saddled when too cold. If I saddle him then he will be expecting to have more fun out of it than I have any right to. But if the sun is well up, why, sometimes a baby could handle him. So for three weeks I have saddled Dandy Jim with the utmost circumspection and with the sun well up. Now the sun is not well up. Shall I still survive? I pause to wish that the range of high hills on the east may be instantly levelled. The land will then be worth something and the sun will be farther up. But nothing of a topographical nature ensues. The hills remain to obscure the sun. And the brute has to be saddled. The mood of that grim breakfast, voiceless, tense, high with portent, is still upon me.

I approach and speak harshly to the potential cinch binder, telling him to get over there! He does not; so I let it pass. After all, he is only a horse. Why should I terrorize him? I bridle him with a manner far from harsh. He doesn't like the taste of the bit--not seasoned right, or something. But at last he takes it without biting my fingers off; which shows that the horse has no mind to speak of.

I look him calmly in the eye for a moment; then pull his head about, so that I can look him calmly in the other eye for a moment. This is to show the animal that he has met his master and had better not try any of that cinch-binding stuff if he knows when he's well off. Still, I treat him fairly. I smooth his back of little vegetable bits that cling there, shake out the saddle blanket and tenderly adjust it. Whistling carelessly I swing up the saddle. Dandy Jim flinches pitifully when it rests upon him and reaches swiftly round to bite my arm off. I think this is quite perfunctory on his part. He must have learned long since that he will never really bite any one's arm off. His neck is not enough like a swan's.

I adjust saddle and blanket carefully from both sides, pulling the blanket well up under the horn of the saddle and making sure that it sets comfortably. One should be considerate of the feelings of a dumb beast placed at one's mercy. Then I reach for the cinch, pass it twice through the rings, and delicately draw it up the merest trifle. Dandy Jim shudders and moans pathetically. He wishes to convey the impression that his ribs have been sprung. This, of course, is nonsense. I measureably increase the pressure. Dandy Jim again registers consternation, coughs feebly, and rolls his eyes round appealingly, as if wondering whether the world is to sit, without heart, and watch a poor defenseless horse being slain. He is about to expire.

I now lead him gently about by the bridle. It occurs to me that a horse with this curious mania for binding cinches or cinching binders--or, in other words, a cinch binder--will be as willing to indulge in his favourite sport with the saddle unoccupied as otherwise. He may like it even better with no one up there; and I know I will. Nothing happens, except that Dandy Jim stumbles stiffly and pretends to be lame. The sun is not yet well up; still, it is a lot better. Perhaps danger for the day is over. I again lead the dangerous beast--

"What you humouring that old skate for?"

Ma Pettengill, arrayed in olive-drab shirt and breeches, leather puttees, and the wide-brimmed hat of her calling with the four careful dents in the top, observed me with friendly curiosity as she ties a corduroy coat to the back of her saddle.

Hereupon I explained my tactful handling of the reputed cinch binder. It evoked the first cheerful sound I had heard that day:

Ma Pettengill laughed heartily.

"That old hair trunk never had the jazz to be any cinch binder. Who told you he was?"

I named names--all I could remember. Almost everyone on the ranch had passed me the friendly warning, and never had I saddled the brute without a thrill.

"Sure! Them chuckleheads always got to tell everybody something. It's a wonder they ain't sent you in to the Chink to borrow his meat auger, or out to the blacksmith shop for a left-handed monkey wrench, or something. Come on!"

So that was it! Just another bit of stale ranch humour--alleged humour--as if it could be at all funny to have me saddle this wreck with the tenderest solicitude morning after morning!

"Just one moment!" I said briskly.

I think Dandy Jim realized that everything of a tender nature between us was over. Some curious and quite charming respect I had been wont to show him was now gone out of my manner. He began to do deep breathing exercises before I touched the cinch. I pulled with the strength of a fearless man. Dandy Jim forthwith inflated his chest like a gentleman having his photograph taken in a bathing suit. I waited, apparently foiled. I stepped back, spoke to Ma Pettengill of the day's promise, and seemed carelessly to forget what I was there for. Slowly Dandy Jim deflated himself; and then, on the fair and just instant, I pulled. I pulled hard and long. The game was won. Dandy Jim had now the waist of that matron wearing the Sveltina corset, over in the part of the magazine where the stories die away. I fearlessly bestrode him and the day was on.

I opened something less than a hundred gates, so that we could take our way through the lower fields. Ma Pettengill said she must see this here Tilton and this here Snell, and have that two hundred yards of fence built like they had agreed to, as man to man; and no more of this here nonsense of putting it off from day to day.

She was going to talk straight to them because, come Thursday, she had to turn a herd of beef cattle into that field.

Then I opened a few dozen more gates and we were down on the flats. Here the lady spied a coyote, furtively skirting some willows on our left. So, for a few merry miles, we played the game of coyote. It is a simple game to learn, but requires a trained eye. When one player sees a coyote the other becomes indebted to him in the sum of one dollar.

This sport dispelled the early morning gloom that had beset me. I won a dollar almost immediately. It may have been the same coyote, as my opponent painfully suggested; but it showed at a different breach in the willows, and I was firm.

Then the game went fiercely against me. Ma Pettengill detected coyotes at the far edges of fields--so far that I would have ignored them for jack rabbits had I observed them at all. I claimed an occasional close one; but these were few. The outlook was again not cheering. It was an excellent morning for distant coyotes, and presently I owed Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill seven dollars, she having won two doubleheaders in succession. This ride was costing me too much a mile. Being so utterly outclassed I was resolving to demand a handicap, but was saved from this ignominy by our imminent arrival at the abode of this here Tilton, who presently sauntered out of a feeding corral and chewed a straw at us idly.

We soon took all that out of him. The air went something like this:

* * * * *

MRS. L. J. P.--brightly: Morning, Chester! Say, look here! About that gap in the fence across Stony Creek field--I got to turn a beef herd in there Thursday.

TILTON--crouching luxuriously on one knee still chewing the straw: Well, now, about that little job--I tell you, Mis' Pett'ngill; I been kind o' holdin' off account o' Snell bein' rushed with his final plowin'. He claims--

MRS. L. J. P.--still brightly: Oh, that's all right! Snell will be over there, with his men, to-morrow morning at seven o'clock. He said you'd have to be there, too.

TILTON--alarmed, he rises, takes straw from his mouth, examines the chewed end with dismay and casts it from him; removes his hat, looks at this dubiously, burnishes it with a sleeve, and sighs: To-morrow morning! You don't mean to-morrow--

MRS. L. J. P.--carefully yet rapidly: To-morrow morning at seven o'clock. You don't want to throw Snell down on this; and he's going to be there. How many men can you take?

TILTON--dazed: Now--now lemme see!

MRS. L. J. P.--quickly: You can take Chris and Shorty and Jake and yourself. Any one else?

TILTON--swept over the falls: Why, no'm; I don't guess there's any other I could spare, account of--

MRS. L. J. P.--almost sweetly: All right, then. To-morrow; seven sharp.

TILTON--from the whirlpool, helplessly: Yes'm! Yes'm!

MRS. L. J. P.: Morning!

* * * * *

We ride on. Tilton fades back toward the corral; he has forgotten to replace his hat.

I now decided to make a little conversation rather than have the stupid and ruinous game of coyote for a pastime.

"I thought you hadn't seen Snell yet."

"I haven't; not since he promised his half of the job two weeks ago."

"But you just told Tilton--"

"Well, Snell is going to be there, ain't he?"

"How do you know?"

"I'm going to tell him now."

And the woman did even so. If you wish the scene with Snell go back and read the scene with Tilton, changing the names. Nothing else need you change. Snell was hitching two mules to a wood wagon; but he heard the same speeches and made approximately the same replies. And the deed was done.

"There now!" boomed Mrs. Talleyrand as we rode beyond earshot of the dazed and lingering Snell. "Them two men been trying for two weeks to agree on a day to do this trifling job. They wasn't able; so I agreed on a day myself. Anything wrong with it?"

"You said you were going to talk straight to them."

"Ain't I just talked straight to Snell? Tilton will be there, won't he?"

"How about the way you talked to Tilton before you saw Snell?"

"Well, my lands! How you talk! You got to have a foundation to build on, haven't you?"

I saw it as a feat beyond my prowess to convict this woman in her own eyes of a dubious and considering veracity. So I merely wondered, in tones that would easily reach her, how the gentlemen might relish her diplomacy when they discovered it on the morrow. I preceded the word diplomacy with a slight and very affected cough.

The lady replied that they would never discover her diplomacy, not coughing in the least before the word. She said each of them would be so mad at the other for setting a day that they would talk little. They would simply build fence. She added that a woman in this business had to be looking for the worst of it all the time. She was bound to get the elbow if she didn't use her common sense.

I ignored her casuistry, for she was now rolling a cigarette with an air of insufferable probity. I gave her up and played a new game of smashing horseflies as they settled on my mount. Dandy Jim plays the game ably. When a big fly settles on his nose he holds his head round so I can reach it. He does not flinch at the terrific smash of my hat across his face. If a fly alights on his neck or shoulder, and I do not remark it, he turns his head slightly toward me and winks, so I can stalk and pot it. He is very crafty here. If the fly is on his right side he turns and winks his left eye at me so the insect will not observe him. And yet there are people who say horses don't reason.

I now opened fifty more gates and we left the cool green of the fields for a dusty side road that skirts the base of the mesa. We jogged along in silence, which I presently heard stir with the faint, sweet strain of a violin; an air that rose and wailed and fell again, on a violin played with a certain back-country expertness. The road bent to show us its source. We were abreast of the forlorn little shack of a dry-farmer, weathered and patched, set a dozen yards from the road and surrounded by hard-packed earth. Before the open door basked children and pigs and a few spiritless chickens.

All the children ran to the door when we halted and called to someone within. The fiddle played on with no faltering, but a woman came out--a gaunt and tattered woman who was yet curiously cheerful. The children lurked in her wake as she came to us and peered from beyond her while we did our business.

Our business was that the redskin, Laura, official laundress of the Arrowhead, had lately attended an evening affair in the valley at which the hitherto smart tipple of Jamaica ginger had been supplanted by a novel and potent beverage, Nature's own remedy for chills, dyspepsia, deafness, rheumatism, despair, carbuncles, jaundice, and ennui. Laura had partaken freely and yet again of this delectable brew, and now suffered not only from a sprained wrist but from detention, having suffered arrest on complaint of the tribal sister who had been nearest to her when she sprained her wrist. Therefore, if Mrs. Dave Pickens wanted to come over to-morrow and wash for us, all right; she could bring her oldest girl to help.

Mrs. Dave thereupon turned her head languidly toward the ignoble dwelling and called: "Dave!" Then again, for the fiddle stayed not: "Dave! Oh, Dave!"

The fiddle ceased to moan--complainingly it seemed to me--and Dave framed his graceful figure in the doorway. He was one appealing droop, from his moustache to his moccasin-clad feet. He wore an air of elegant leisure, but was otherwise not fussily arrayed.

"Dave, Mis' Pett'ngill says there's now a day's washin' to do over to her place to-morrow. What think?"

Dave deliberated, then pondered, then thought, then spoke:

"Well, I d'no', Addie; I d'no' as I got any objections if you ain't. I d'no' but it's all the same to me."

Hereupon we meanly put something in Dave's unsuspecting way, too.

"You must want a day's work yourself," called out Ma Pettengill. "You go up to Snell's about six in the morning and he'll need you to help do some fencing on that gap in Stony Creek field. If he don't need you Tilton will. One of 'em is bound to be short a man."

"Fencin'?" said Dave with noticeable disrelish.

"You reckon we better both leave the place at once?" suggested Mrs. Dave.

"That's so," said Dave brightly. "Mebbe I--"

"Nonsense!" boomed Ma Pettengill, dispelling his brightness. "Addie can drop you at Snell's when she comes over to Arrowhead. Now that's settled!"

And we rode off as unvoiced expostulations were gathering. I began to wonder whether it must, throughout a beautiful day, be the stern mission of this woman to put tribulation upon her neighbours. She was becoming a fell destroyer. The sun was well up. I thirsted. Also, breakfast seemed to have been a thing in the remote past.

We now rode three torrid miles up a narrow green slit in the hills for a scant ten minutes of talk with a most uninteresting person, whose sole claim to notice seemed to be that he had gone and fenced the wrong water hole over back of Horsefly Mountain, where we have a summer range. The talk was quick and pointed and buttressed with a blue-print map, and the too-hasty fencer was left helpless after a pitiful essay at quibbling. We rode off saying that he could do just as he liked about sending someone over right away to take that fence down, because we had already took it down the minute we set eyes on it. We was just letting him know so he needn't waste any more wire and posts and time in committing felonious depredations that would get him nothing but high trouble if he was so minded. Another scalp to our belt!

I now briefly recalled to the woman that we had stopped at no peaceful home that morning save to wreck its peace. I said I was getting into the spirit of the ride myself. I suggested that at the next ranch we passed we should stop and set fire to the haystacks, just to crown the day's brutalities with something really splendid. I also said I was starving to death in a land of plenty.

Ma Pettengill gazed aloft at the sun and said it was half-past twelve. I looked at my watch and said the sun was over ten minutes slow, which was probably due to the heavy continuous gunfire on the Western Front. This neat bit went for just nothing. As we rode on I fondly recalled that last cold hot cake which Sandy Sawtelle had sacrificed to his gift for debased whimsy. I also recalled other items of that gloomy repast, wondering how I could so weakly have quit when I did.

We rode now under a sun that retained its old fervour if not its velocity. We traversed an endless lane between fields, in one of which grazed a herd of the Arrowhead cattle. These I was made to contemplate for many valuable moments. I had to be told that I was regarding the swallow-fork herd, pure-breds that for one reason or another--the chief being careless help--had not been registered. The omission was denoted by the swallow fork in the left ear.

The owner looked upon them with fond calculation. She was fondly calculating that they would have been worth about fifty per cent. more to her with ears unmutilated. She grew resentful that their true worth should not be acclaimed by the world. In the sight of heaven they were pure-breds; so why should they suffer through the oversight of a herd boss that hadn't anywhere near such distinguished ancestry? And so on, as the lady says.

We left the lane at last and were on the county road, but headed away from the Arrowhead and food. No doubt there remained other homes for us to wreck. We mounted a rise and the road fell from us in a long, gentle slope. And then a mile beyond, where the slope ended, I beheld a most inviting tiny pleasance in this overwhelming welter of ranch land, with its more or less grim business of cattle.

It was a little homestead fit to adorn an art calendar to be entitled Peace and Plenty--a veritable small farm from some softer little country far to the east. It looked strangely lost amid these bleaker holdings. There was a white little house and it sported nothing less than green blinds. There was a red barn, with toy outbuildings. There was a vegetable garden, an orchard of blossoming fruit trees, and, in front of the glistening little house, a gay garden of flowers. Even now I could detect the yellow of daffodils and the martial--at least it used to be martial--scarlet of tulips. The little place seemed to drowse here in the noontide, dreaming of its lost home and other little farms that once companioned it.

To my pleased surprise this unbelievable little farm proved to be our next stopping place. At its gate Ma Pettengill dismounted, eased the cinch of her saddle and tied her horse to the hitching rack. I did likewise by the one-time cinch binder.

"Now," I wondered, "what devastating bomb shall we hurl into this flower-spiced Arcady? What woe will she put upon its unsuspecting dwellers, even as she has ruined four other homes this day? This should be something really choice." But I said no word and followed where the avenger stalked.

We unlatched the white gate and went up a gravelled walk between the rows of daffodils and tulips and hyacinths. We did not ascend the spotless front porch to assault its innocent white door, but turned aside on a narrow-gauge branch of the gravelled pathway and came to a side porch, shaded by maples. And here, in strict conformity to the soundest behests of tradition, sat two entirely genuine Arcadians in wooden rocking-chairs. The male was a smiling old thing with winter-apple cheeks and white hair, and the female was a smiling old thing with winter-apple cheeks and white hair; both had bright eyes of doll blue, and both wore, among other neat things, loose and lovely carpet slippers and white stockings.

And, of course, the male was named Uncle Henry and the other one was named Aunt Mollie, for I was now presented to them. They shyly greeted me as one returned to them after many years in which they had given me up. And again I wondered what particular iniquity we had come here to do.

Then Ma Pettengill eased my worry. She said in a few simple but affecting words, that we had stopped in for a bite to eat. No self-torturing stylist could have put the thing better. And results were sudden. Uncle Henry, the male one, went to take our horses round to the barn, and the other one said they had et an hour ago; but give her ten minutes and she'd have a couple of them young pullets skinned and on the fire.

Ma Pettengill said, with very questionable taste, I thought: "Oh, no; nothing like that!"--because we didn't want to make the least bit of trouble. The woman is dense at times. What else had we come there for? But Aunt Mollie said, then, how about some prime young pork tenderline? And Ma Pettengill said she guessed that would do, and I said I guessed that would do. And there we were! The ladies went to the kitchen, where they made quick and grateful noises.

Pretty soon Uncle Henry came round a lovely corner and said try a tumbler of this here grape wine, which he poured from a pressed-glass pitcher; so I tried it and gave him a town cigarette, which he tucked between his beautiful white moustache and his beautiful white whiskers. And I hoped he didn't use gasoline to get them so clean, because if he did something might happen when he lighted the cigarette; but nothing did, so probably he didn't. I tried the grape wine again; and dear old Uncle Henry said he was turning out quite a bit of it since the Gov'ment had shet down on regular dram-shops, quite considerable of parties happening along from time to time to barter with him, getting it for dances or colds, or something.

A yellow cat, with blue eyes like Uncle Henry's, came and slept on his lap. A large fussy hen with a litter of chickens--or however a hen designates her assemblage of little ones--clucked her way to our feet. I could see three hives of bees, a grape arbour, and a row of milk pans drying in the sun, each leaning on its neighbour along a white bench. Uncle Henry said drink it up while it was cold. All Nature seemed to smile. The hen found a large and charming bug, and chuckled humorously while her cunning little ones tore it limb from limb. It was idyllic.

Then Aunt Mollie pushed open the screen door and said come in and set up; so I came in and set up quickly, having fried pork tenderloin and fried potatoes, and hot biscuit and pork gravy, and cucumber pickles, and cocoanut cake and pear preserves, peach preserves, apricot preserves, loganberry jelly, crab-apple jelly, and another kind of preserves I was unable to identify, though trying again and again.

Ma Pettengill ate somewhat, but talked also, keeping Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie shiny with smiles. They both have polished white teeth of the most amazing regularity. I ate almost exclusively, affecting to be preoccupied about something. The time was urgent. I formed an entangling alliance with the pork tenderloin, which endured to a point where but one small fragment was left on the platter. I coolly left it there, so that Aunt Mollie might believe she had cooked more than enough.

I have never ceased to regret that hollow bit of chivalry. Was it honest, genuine, open? No! Why will men at critical junctures stoop to such trickery? Aunt Mollie said I might think that tenderline was fresh-killed; but not so--she has fried it last December and put it down in its own juice in a four-gallon crock, and now look how fresh it come out! She seemed as proud as if she had invented something. She had a right to be. It was a charming notion and I could have eaten the rest of the crock--but, no matter. Half a dozen biscuits copiously gummed up with preserves of one kind or another would do as well--almost.

So Aunt Mollie showed me objects of interest in the room, including her new carpet sweeper, a stuffed road runner, a ship built in a bottle, and the coloured crayon portraits of herself and Uncle Henry, wearing blue clothes and gold jewellery and white collars and ecru neckties. Also, the marriage certificate. This was no mere official certificate. It was the kind that costs three dollars flat, over and above what you give to the party that does it for you, being genuine steel-engraved, with a beautiful bridal couple under a floral bell, the groom in severe evening dress, and liberally spotted with cupids and pigeons. It is worth the money and an ornament to any wall, especially in the gilt frame.

Aunt Mollie seemed as proud of this document as she had been with the tenderloin. I scanned it word by word for her pleasure. I noticed especially the date. Aunt Mollie said that her and Henry were now in the fortieth year on this place, and it had changed in looks a whole lot since they came here. I again looked at the date of the certificate.

Ma Pettengill said, well, we must be getting on, and they must both come over to the Arrowhead for a day right soon. And Uncle Henry said here was a quart bottle of his peach brandy, going on eight year old, and would I take it along back with me and try it? Parties had told him it was good; but he didn't know--mebbe so, mebbe not. He'd like to know what I thought. It seemed little enough to do to bring a bit of gladness into this old gentleman's life, and I was not the man to wound him by refusal. It was as if Michelangelo had said "Come on round to the Sistine Chapel this afternoon and look over a little thing I've dashed off." If he had brought two bottles instead of one my answer would have been the same.

So we were out on our refreshed horses and heading home; and I said, without loss of time, that Aunt Mollie might have a good heart and a cunning way with pork interiors, and it was none of my business, anyway; but, nevertheless, she had mentioned forty long years with this amateur saloon keeper, whereas her marriage certificate was dated but one year previous, in figures all too shamefully legible. So what about it? I said I mind observing the underworld from time to time; but I like to be warned in advance, even when its denizens were such a charming, bright-eyed winter-apple-cheeked old couple as the two we were now leaving.

The sun was on our backs, a light breeze fanned us, the horses knew which way they were going, and work for the day was over; so Ma Pettengill spoke, in part, as follows:

"Oh, well, of course everyone knows about that. Simple enough! Aunt Mollie and her first husband trekked in here forty years ago. He was a consumptive and the first winter put him out. They had a hard time; no neighbours to speak of, harsh weather, hard work, poor shelter, and a dying man. Henry Mortimer happened by and stayed to help--nursed the invalid, kept the few head of stock together, nailed up holes in the shack, rustled grub and acted like a friend in need. At the last he nailed a coffin together; did the rest of that job; then stayed on to nurse Aunt Mollie, who was all in herself. After he got her to stepping again he put in a crop for her. Then he stayed to build a barn and do some fencing. Then he harvested the crop. And getting no wages! They was both living off the land. Pretty soon they got fond of each other and decided to marry. It's one of Aunt Mollie's jokes that she owed him two years' wages and had to marry him.

"Marriage was easier said than done. No preacher, or even a justice of the peace, was within ninety miles, which meant a four days' trip over the roads of that day, and four days back, providing high water or some other calamity didn't make it a month; and no one to leave on the place, which meant there wouldn't be a head of stock left when they got back, what with Indians and rustlers. Uncle Henry will tell you how it seemed too bad that just one of 'em wouldn't make the trip down and have the ceremony done, leaving the other to protect the place.