Chapter VIII: Part 8

Of course Oswald was sunk at last, sunk by a chance shot; and there was no doubt about his being destroyed, quantities of oil marking the surface where he went down. But it seemed like pure chance. Yet, if you believe Oswald and scientific diagnosis, he'd been up against it since the world was first started, twenty million or five hundred million years ago--I don't really know how many; but what's a few million years between scientists? I don't know that I really care. It's never kept me wakeful a night yet. I'd sooner know how to get eighty-five per cent. of calves.

Anyway, it was Oswald's grand new wardrobe trunk that had been predestined from the world's beginning to set him talkative about his little flower with bones and a voice; this same new wardrobe trunk that was the pride of his barren life and his one real worry because he might sometime lose the keys to it.

It's an affecting tale. It begun the night Oswald wanted the extra table put in his room. They'd come in that day with a good haul of the oldest inhabitants round here that had passed to their long rest three million years ago--petrified fishworms and potato bugs, and so forth, and rocks with bird tracks on 'em. Oswald was as near human as I'd seen him, on account of having found a stone caterpillar or something--I know it had a name longer than it was; it seemed to be one like no one else had, and would therefore get him talked about, even if it had passed away three million years before the Oregon Short Line was built.

And Oswald went on to ask if he could have this extra table in his room, because these specimens of the disturbed dead was piling up on him and he wanted to keep 'em in order. He had lighted one of his terrible cigars; so I said I would quickly go and see about a table. I said that with his venomous cigar going I would quickly have to go and see about something or else have my olfactory nerve resected, which was a grand scientific phrase I had brightly picked out and could play with one finger. It means having something done so you can't smell any more.

The Prof laughed heartily, but Oswald only said he hadn't supposed I would feel that way, considering the kind of tobacco my own cigarettes was made of, though he was sorry and would hereafter smoke out of doors. He took a joke like a child taking castor oil. Anyway, I went out and found a spare table in the storeroom, and the Chink took it to Oswald's room.

The fateful moment was at hand for which Nature had been conspiring all these ages. The Chink held the table up against him, with the legs sticking out, and Oswald went ahead to show him where to put it. Close by the door, inside his room, was the lovely, yawning new trunk. Oswald must of been afraid one of the table legs would spear it and mar its fair varnish. He raised one hand to halt the table, then closed the trunk tenderly, snapped the lock, and moved it over into the corner, beyond chance of desecration.

Then he give careful directions for placing the table, which had to be carried round the foot of the bed and past another table, which held marine fossils and other fishbones. It was placed between this table and still another, which held Oswald's compass and microscope and his kill-kare kamp stove and his first-aid kit and his sportsman's belt safe--all neatly arranged in line. I had followed to see if there was anything more he needed, and he said no, thank you. So I come out here to look over my mail that had just come.

Ten minutes later I felt the presence of a human being and looked up to see that Oswald, the oldest living boy scout, was dying on his feet in the doorway there. His face looked like he had been in jail three years. I thought he had seen a ghost or had a heart shock. He looked as if he was going to keel over. He had me scared. Finally he dragged himself over to the table here and says faintly:

"I believe I should like a severe drink of whisky!"

I didn't ask any questions. I saw it must be some private grief; so I got the whisky. It happened I had just one bottle in the house, and that was some perfectly terrible whisky that had been sent me by mistake. It was liquid barbed wire. Even a little drink of it would of been severe. Two drinks would make you climb a tree like a monkey. But the stricken Oswald seemed able to outfight it. He poured out half a tumblerful, drunk it neat and refused water. He strangled some, for he was only human after all. Then he sagged down on the couch and looked up at me with a feeble and pathetic grin and says:

"I'm afraid I've done something. I'm really afraid I have."

He had me in a fine state by this time. The only thing I could think of was that he had killed the Prof by accident. I waited for the horrible details, being too scared to ask questions.

"I'm afraid," he says, "that I've locked the keys of my new trunk inside of it. I'm afraid I really have! And what does one do in such a case?"

I nearly broke down then. I was in grave danger of fatal hysterics. I suffered from the reaction. I couldn't trust myself; so I got over to the door, where my face wouldn't show, and called to the Prof and Lydia. I now heard them out on the porch. Then I edged outside the door, where people wouldn't be quite so scared if I lost control of myself and yelled.

Then these two went in and listened to Oswald's solemn words. The Prof helped me out a lot. He yelled good. He yelled his head off; and under cover of his tumult I managed to get in a few whoops of my own, so that I could once more act something like a lady when I went in.

Lydia, the porch wren, was the only one to take Oswald's bereavement at all decent. The chit was sucking a stick of candy she had shoved down into a lemon. Having run out of town candy, one of the boys had fetched her some of the old-fashioned stick kind, with pink stripes; she would ram one of these down to the bottom of a lemon and suck up the juice through the candy. She looked entirely useless while she was doing this, and yet she was the only one to show any human sympathy.

She asked the stricken man how it happened, and he told the whole horrible story--how he always kept the keys hanging on this little brass hook inside the trunk so he would know where they was, and how he had shut the trunk in a hurry to get it out of the way of the table legs, and the spring lock had snapped. And what did one do now--if anything?

"Why, it's perfectly simple! You open it some other way," says Lydia.

"Ah, but how?" says Oswald. "Those trunks are superbly built. How can one?"

"Oh, it must be easy," says Lydia, still clinging to her candy sour. "I'll open it for you to-morrow if you will remind me."

"Remind you?" says Oswald in low, tragic tones. You could see he was never going to think of anything else the rest of his life.

By this time the Prof and I had controlled our heartless merriment; so we all traipsed in to the scene of this here calamity and looked at the shut trunk. It was shut good; no doubt about that. There was also no doubt about the keys being inside.

"You can hear them rattle!" says the awed Oswald, teetering the trunk on one corner. So each one of us took a turn and teetered the trunk back and forth and heard the imprisoned keys jingle against the side where they was hung.

"But what's to be done?" says Oswald. "Of course something must be done." That seemed to be about where Oswald got off.

"Why, simply open it some other way," says Lydia, which seemed to be about where she got off, too.

"But how?" moans the despairing man. And she again says:

"Oh, it must be too simple!"

At that she was sounding the only note of hope Oswald could hear; and right then I believe he looked at her fair and square for the first time in his life. He was finding a woman his only comforter in his darkest hour.

The Prof took it lightly indeed. He teetered the trunk jauntily and says:

"Your device was admirable; you will always know where those keys are." Then he teetered it again and says, like he was lecturing on a platform: "This is an ideal problem for the metaphysical mind. Here, veritably, is life itself. We pick it up, we shake it, and we hear the tantalizing key to existence rattle plainly just inside. We know the key to be there; we hear it in every manifestation of life. Our problem is to think it out. It is simple, as my child has again and again pointed out. Sit there before your trunk and think effectively, with precision. You will then think the key out. I would take it in hand myself, but I have had a hard day."

Then Lydia releases her candy long enough to say how about finding some other trunk keys that will unlock it. Oswald is both hurt and made hopeful by this. He don't like to think his beautiful trunk could respond to any but its rightful key; it would seem kind of a slur against its integrity. Still, he says it may be tried. Lydia says try it, of course; and if no other key unlocks it she will pick the lock with a hairpin. Oswald is again bruised by this suggestion; but he bears up like a man. And so we dig up all the trunk keys and other small keys we can find and try to fool that trunk. And nothing doing!

"I was confident of it," says Oswald; he's really disappointed, yet proud as Punch because his trunk refuses coldly to recognize these strange keys.

Then Lydia brings a bunch of hairpins and starts to be a burglar. She says in clear tones that it is perfectly simple; and she keeps on saying exactly this after she's bent the whole pack out of shape and not won a trick. Yet she cheered Oswald a lot, in spite of her failures. She never for one instant give in that it wasn't simple to open a trunk without the key.

But it was getting pretty late for one night, so Oswald and Lydia knocked off and set out on the porch a while. Oswald seemed to be awakening to her true woman's character, which comes out clad in glory at times when things happen. She told him she would sure have that trunk opened to-morrow with some more hairpins--or something.

But in the morning she rushed to Oswald and said they would have the blacksmith up to open it. He would be sure to open it in one minute with a few tools; and how stupid of her not to of thought of it before! I liked that way she left Oswald out of any brain work that had to be done. So they sent out to Abner to do the job, telling him what was wanted.

Abner is a simple soul. He come over with a hammer and a cold chisel to cut the lock off. He said there wasn't any other way. Oswald listened with horror to this cold-blooded plan of murder and sent Abner sternly away. Lydia was indignant, too, at the painful suggestion. She said Abner was a shocking old bounder.

Then Oswald had to go out to his field work; but his heart couldn't of been in it that day. I'll bet he could of found the carcass of a petrified zebra with seven legs and not been elated by it. He had only the sweet encouragement of Lydia to brace him. He was depending pathetically on that young woman.

He got back that night to find that Lydia had used up another pack of hairpins and a number of the tools from my sewing machine. All had been black failure, but she still said it was perfectly simple. She never lost the note of hope out of her voice. Oswald was distressed, but he had to regard her more and more like an object of human interest.

She now said it was a simple matter of more keys. So the next day I sent one of the boys down to Red Gap; and he rode a good horse to its finish and come back with about five dozen nice little trunk keys with sawed edges. They looked cheerful and adequate, and we spent a long, jolly evening trying 'em out. Not one come anywhere near getting results.

Oswald's trunk was still haughty, in spite of all these overtures. Oswald was again puffed up with pride, it having been shown that his trunk was no common trunk. He said right out that probably the only two keys in all the world that would open that lock was the two hanging inside. He never passed the trunk without rocking it to hear their sad tinkle.

Lydia again said, nonsense! It was perfectly simple to open a trunk without the right key. Oswald didn't believe her, and yet he couldn't help taking comfort from her. I guess that was this girl's particular genius--not giving up when everyone else could see that she was talking half-witted. Anyway, she was as certain as ever, and I guess Oswald believed her in spite of himself. His ponderous scientific brain told him one thing in plain terms, and yet he was leaning on the words of a chit that wouldn't know a carboniferous vertebra from an Upper Silurian gerumpsus.

The keys had gone back, hairpins was proved to be no good, and scientific analysis had fell down flat. There was the trunk and there was the keys inside; and Oswald was taking on a year in age every day of his life. He was pretty soon going to be as old as the world if something didn't happen. He'd got so that every time he rocked the trunk to hear the keys rattle he'd shake his head like the doctor shakes it at a moving-picture deathbed to show that all is over. He was in a pitch-black cavern miles underground, with one tiny candle beam from a possible rescuer faintly showing from afar, which was the childish certainty of this oldest living débutante that it was perfectly simple for a woman to do something impossible. She was just blue-eyed confidence.

After the men left one morning on their hunt for long-defunct wood ticks and such, Lydia confided to me that she was really going to open that trunk. She was going to put her mind on it. She hadn't done this yet, it seemed, but to-day she would.

"The poor boy has been rudely jarred in his academic serenity," says she. "He can't bear up much longer; he has rats in his wainscoting right now. It makes me perfectly furious to see a man so helpless without a woman. Today I'll open his silly old trunk for him."

"It will be the best day's work you ever done," I says, and she nearly blushed.

"I'm not thinking of that," she says.

The little liar! As if she hadn't seen as well as I had how Oswald was regarding her with new eyes. So I wished her good luck and started out myself, having some field work of my own to do that day in measuring a lot of haystacks down at the lower end of the ranch.

She said there would be no luck in it--nothing but cool determination and a woman's intuition. I let it go at that and went off to see that I didn't get none of the worst of it when this new hay was measured. I had a busy day, forgetting all scientific problems and the uphill fight our sex sometimes has in bringing a man to his just mating sense.

I got back about five that night. Here was Miss Lydia, cool and negligent on the porch, like she'd never had a care in the world; fresh dressed in something white and blue, with her niftiest hammock stockings, and tinkling the ukulele in a bored and petulant manner.

"Did you open it?" I says as I went in.

"Open it?" she says, kind of blank. "Oh, you mean that silly old trunk! Yes, I believe I did. At least I think I did."

It was good stage acting; an audience would of thought she had forgotten. So I took it as calm as she did and went in to change.

By the time I got out the men was just coming in, the Prof being enthusiastic about some clamshells of the year six million B. C. and Oswald bearing his great sorrow with an effort to do it bravely.

Lydia nodded distantly and then ignored the men in a pointed way, breaking out into rapid chatter to me about the lack of society up here--didn't I weary of the solitude, never meeting people of the right sort? It was a new line with her and done for effect, but I couldn't see what effect.

Supper was ready and we hurried in to it; so I guess Oswald must of forgot for one time to shake his trunk and listen to the pretty little keys. And all through the meal Lydia confined her attentions entirely to me. She ignored Oswald mostly, but if she did notice him she patronized him. She was painfully superior to him, and severe and short, like he was a little boy that had been let to come to the table with the grown-ups for this once. She rattled along to me about the club dances at home, and how they was going to have better music this year, and how the assembly hall had been done over in a perfectly dandy colour scheme by the committee she was on, and a lot of girlish babble that took up much room but weighed little.

Oswald would give her side looks of dumb appeal from time to time, for she had not once referred to anything so common as a trunk. He must of felt that her moral support had been withdrawn and he was left to face the dread future alone. He probably figured that she'd had to give up about the trunk and was diverting attention from her surrender. He hardly spoke a word and disappeared with a look of yearning when we left the table. The rest of us went out on the porch. Lydia was teasing the ukulele when Oswald appeared a few minutes later, with great excitement showing in his worn face.

"I can hear the keys no longer," says he; "not a sound of them! Mustn't they have fallen from the hook?"

Lydia went on stripping little chords from the strings while she answered him in lofty accents.

"Keys?" she says. "What keys? What is the man talking of? Oh, you mean that silly old trunk! Are you really still maundering about that? Of course the keys aren't there! I took them out when I opened it to-day. I thought you wanted them taken out. Wasn't that what you wanted the trunk open for--to get the keys? Have I done something stupid? Of course I can put them back and shut it again if you only want to listen to them."

Oswald had been glaring at her with his mouth open like an Upper Triassic catfish. He tried to speak, but couldn't move his face, which seemed to be frozen. Lydia goes on dealing off little tinkles of string music in a tired, bored way and turns confidentially to me to say she supposes there is really almost no society up here in the true sense of the word.

"You opened that trunk?" says Oswald at last in tones like a tragedian at his big scene.

Lydia turned to him quite prettily impatient, as if he was something she'd have to brush off in a minute.

"Dear, dear!" she says. "Of course I opened it. I told you again and again it was perfectly simple. I don't see why you made so much fuss about it."

Oswald turned and galloped off to his room with a glad shout. That showed the male of him, didn't it?--not staying for words of gratitude to his saviour, but beating it straight to the trunk.

Lydia got up and swaggered after him. She had been swaggering all the evening. She acted like a duchess at a slumming party. The Prof and I followed her.

Oswald was teetering the trunk in the old familiar way, with one ear fastened to its shiny side.

"It's true! It's true!" he says in hushed tones. "The keys are gone."

"Naughty, naughty!" says Lydia. "Haven't I told you I took them out?"

Oswald went over and set limply down on his bed, while we stood in the doorway.

"How did you ever do it?" says he with shining eyes.

"It was perfectly simple," says Lydia. "I simply opened it--that's all!"

"I have always suspected that the great secret of life would be almost too simple when once solved," says the Prof.

"It only needed a bit of thought," says the chit.

Then Oswald must of had a sudden pang of fear. He flew over and examined the lock and all the front surface of his treasure. He was looking for signs of rough work, thinking she might of broken into it in some coarse manner. But not a scratch could he find. He looked up at Lydia out of eyes moist with gratitude.

"You wonderful, wonderful woman!" says he, and any one could know he meant it from the heart out.

Lydia was still superior and languid, and covered up a slight yawn. She said she was glad if any little thing she could do had made life pleasanter for him. This has been such a perfectly simple thing--very, very far from wonderful.

Oswald now begun to caper round the room like an Airedale pup, and says let's have the keys and open the trunk up, so he can believe his own eyes.

Then Lydia trifled once more with a human soul. She froze in deep thought a long minute then says:

"Oh, dear! Now what did I do with those wretched old keys?"

Oswald froze, too, with a new agony. Lydia put a hand to her pale forehead and seemed to try to remember. There was an awful silence. Oswald was dashed over the cliff again.

"Can't you think?" says the wounded man. "Can't you remember? Try! Try!"

"Now let me see," says Lydia. "I know I had them out in the living room--"

"Why did you ever take them out there?" demands Oswald in great terror; but the heroine pays no attention whatever to this.

"--and later, I think--I think--I must have carried them into my room. Oh, yes; now I remember I did. And then I emptied my wastebasket into the kitchen stove. Now I wonder if they could have been in with that rubbish I burned! Let me think!" And she thought again deeply.

Oswald give a hollow groan, like some of the very finest chords in his being had been tore asunder. He sunk limp on the bed again.

"Wouldn't it be awkward if they were in that rubbish?" says Lydia. "Do you suppose that fire would destroy the silly things? Let me think again."

The fiend kept this up for three minutes more. It must of seemed longer to Oswald than it takes for a chinch bug to become a carboniferous Jurassic. She was committing sabotage on him in the cruellest way. Then, after watching his death agony with cold eyes and pretending to wonder like a rattled angel, she brightens up and says:

"Oh, goody! Now I remember everything. I placed them right here." And she picked the keys off the table, where they had been hid under some specimens of the dead and gone.

Oswald give one athletic leap and had the precious things out of her feeble grasp in half a second. His fingers trembled horrible, but he had a key in the lock and turned it and threw the sides of the grand old monument wide open. He just hung there a minute in ecstasy, fondling the keys and getting his nerve back. Then he turns again on Lydia the look of a proud man who is ready to surrender his whole future life to her keeping.

Lydia had now become more superior than ever. She swaggered round the room, and when she didn't swagger she strutted. And she says to Oswald:

"I'm going to make one little suggestion, because you seem so utterly helpless: You must get a nice doormat to lay directly in front of your trunk, and you must always keep the key under this mat. Lock the trunk and hide the key there. It's what people always do, and it will be quite safe, because no one would ever think of looking under a doormat for a key. Now isn't that a perfectly darling plan?"

Oswald had looked serious and attentive when she begun this talk, but he finally got suspicious that she was making some silly kind of a joke. He grinned at her very foolish and again says: "You wonderful woman!" It was a caressing tone--if you know what I mean.

Lydia says "Oh, dear, won't he ever stop his silly chatter about his stupid old trunk?" It seems to her that nothing but trunk has been talked of in this house for untold ages. She's tired to death of the very word. Then she links her arm in mine in a sweet girlish fashion and leads me outside, where she becomes a mere twittering porch wren once more.

Oswald followed, you can bet. And every five minutes he'd ask her how did she ever--really now--open the trunk. But whenever he'd ask she would put the loud pedal on the ukulele and burst into some beachy song about You and I Together in the Moonlight, Love. Even the Prof got curious and demanded how she had done what real brains had failed to pull off--and got the same noisy answer. Later he said he had been wrong to ask. He said the answer would prove to be too brutally simple, and he always wanted to keep it in his thought life as a mystery. It looked like he'd have to. I was dying to know myself, but had sense enough not to ask.

The girl hardly spoke to Oswald again that night, merely giving him these cold showers of superiority when he would thrust himself on her notice. And she kept me out there with her till bedtime, not giving the happy trunk owner a chance at her alone. That girl had certainly learned a few things beyond fudge and cheese straws in her time. She knew when she had the game won.

Sure, it was all over with Oswald. He had only one more night when he could call himself a free man; he tried hard enough not to have even that. He looked like he wanted to put a fence round the girl, elk-high and bull-tight. Of course it's possible he was landed by the earnest wish to find out how she had opened his trunk; but she never will tell him that. She discussed it calmly with me after all was over. She said poor Oswald had been the victim of scientific curiosity, but really it was time for her to settle down.

We was in her room at the time and she was looking at the tiny lines round her eyes when she said it. She said, further, that she was about to plan her going-away gown. I asked what it would be, and she said she hadn't decided yet, but it would be something youth-giving. Pretty game, that was! And now Oswald has someone to guard his trunk keys for him--to say nothing of this here new specimen of organic fauna.

* * * * *

Then I talked. I said I was unable to reach the lofty altitude of the Prof when even a fair mystery was concerned. I was more like Oswald with his childish curiosity. How, then, did the young woman open the trunk? Of course, I could guess the answer. She had found she could really do it with a hairpin, and had held off for effect. Still, I wanted to be told.

"Nothing easy like that," said Ma Pettengill. "She'd been honest with the hairpins. She didn't tell me till the day before they were leaving. 'It was a perfectly simple problem, requiring only a bit of thought,' she says. 'It was the simple thing people do when they find their front door locked. They go round to the back of the house and pry up a kitchen window, or something.' She pledged me to secrecy, but I guess you won't let it go any farther.

"Anyway, this is what she done: It was a time for brutal measures, so she'd had Abner wheel that trunk over to the blacksmith shop and take the hinges off. Abner just loves to do any work he don't have to do, and he had entered cordially into the spirit of this adventure. It used up his whole day, for which he was drawing three dollars from me. He took off one side of four pair of hinges, opened the trunk at the back far enough to reach in for the keys, unlocked it and fastened the hinges back on again.

"It was some job. These hinges was riveted on and didn't come loose easy. The rear of that trunk must of been one sad mutilation. It probably won't ever again be the trunk it once was. Abner had to hustle to get through in one day. I wish I could get the old hound to work for me that way. They'd just got the trunk back when I rode in that night. It was nervy, all right! I asked her if she wasn't afraid he would see the many traces of this rough work she had done.

"'Not a chance on earth!' says Lydia. 'I knew he would never look at any place but the front. He has the mind of a true scientist. It wouldn't occur to him in a million years that there is any other way but the front way to get into a trunk. I painted over the rivets and the bruises as well as I could, but I'm sure he will never look there. He may notice it by accident in the years to come, but the poor chap will then have other worries, I hope.'

"Such was the chit. I don't know. Mebbe woman has her place in the great world after all. Anyway, she'll be a help to Oswald. Whatever he ain't she is."

VII

CHANGE OF VENUS

Ma Pettengill and I rode labouring horses up a steep way between two rocky hillsides that doubled the rays of the high sun back upon us and smothered the little breeze that tried to follow us up from the flat lands of the Arrowhead. We breathed the pointed smell of the sage and we breathed the thick, hot dust that hung lazily about us; a dust like powdered chocolate, that cloyed and choked.

As recreation it was blighting; and I said almost as much. Ma Pettengill was deaf to it, her gray head in its broad-brimmed hat sternly bowed in meditation as she wove to her horse's motion. Then I became aware that she talked to another; one who was not there. She said things I was sure he would not have liked to hear. She hung choice insults upon his name and blistered his fair repute with calumnies. She was a geyser of invective, quiet perhaps for fifty yards, then grandly in action.

"Call yourself a cowman, hey? What you ought to be is matron of a foundling asylum. Yes, sir!"

This was among the least fearful of her dusty scornings. And I knew she would be addressing one Homer Gale, temporary riding boss of the Arrowhead. Indeed, Homer's slightly pleading accents were now very colourably imitated by his embittered employer:

"Yes'm, Mis' Pettengill, it's a matter of life and death; no less. I got to git off for two days--a matter of life and death. Yes'm; I just got to!"

On the completion of this a hoarse hoot of scorn boomed through the haze and Homer was told that men like himself often caused perfectly decent people to be tried for murder. And again Homer's rightful job was echoed as "Matron of a foundling asylum!"

I felt the embarrassment of one unwittingly come upon the adjustment of a private grievance. I dropped delicately a few paces behind, unnoticed, I thought; but Ma Pettengill waited for me to overtake her again.

Then, as we pushed through the dust together, she told me that her days were swifter than a weaver's shuttle and spent without hope. If it wasn't one thing it was another. What she'd like--she'd like to wake up in a strange place and find she'd clean forgot her name and address, like these here parties you read about in the papers. And why wouldn't she? A dry year; feed short on the range; water holes dusty that never did go dry before; half a hay crop and winter threatening right spang in the summertime! Think of having to gather cattle off the range in the middle of August when other times you could let 'em run till the middle of October! In fact, this was the kind of a year that cattle raisers had a technical term for. It was known technically as one hell of a year, if I wanted to be told.

And having to do the work with mental defectives and cripples and Bolsheviki, because every able-bodied puncher in the country had gone over to create a disturbance in Europe! Hadn't she combed out the county hospital and poor farm to get a haying crew? Didn't the best cowboy now on the pay roll wear a derby hat and ride a motorcycle by preference? And paying seventy-five dollars to these imitation punchers to fight her gentle saddle horses, no colt, it seemed, having been ridden on the place in the memory of man.

She didn't know; taking one thing with another, sometimes she almost wished that the world was going to stay unsafe for democracy.

Of course this technically described bad year wasn't so bad one way, because the sheepmen would sure get a tasty wallop, sheep being mighty informal about dying with the weather below zero and scant feed. When cattle wasn't hardly feeling annoyed sheep would lie down and quit intruding on honest cattle raisers for all time. Just a little attention from a party with a skinning knife was all they needed after that. And so on, back to Homer Gale, who had gone to Red Gap for two days on a matter of life and death--and of this the less repeated here the better.

Now our narrow way spread to a valley where the sun's rays were more widely diffused and the dust less pervasive. We could see a mile ahead to a vaster cloud of dust. This floated over a band of Arrowhead cattle being driven in from a range no longer sustaining. They were being driven by Bolsheviki, so my informant disclosed.

We halted above the road and waited for the dusty creatures to plod by us down to the pleasant lea where feed was still to be had and water was sweet. Then came the Bolshevik rear guard. It consisted of Silas Atterbury and four immature grandchildren.

Grandpa Atterbury was ninety-three and doing his first labour since he retired, at eighty-five. The grandchildren, two male and two female, should have been playing childish games. And they were Bolsheviki, all because they had refused to bring in this bunch of stock except for the wage customarily paid to trained adults. Even the youngest, known as Sissy Atterbury, aged eight and looking younger, despite her gray coating of powdered alkali, had tenaciously held out for a grown man's pay, which made her something even worse than a Bolshevik; it made her an I.W.W.

But, as Ma Pettengill said, what could a lady do when Fate had a stranglehold on her. There was, indeed, nothing to do but tell Sissy to tell one of her incendiary brothers to get up close to grandpa, and yell good and loud at him, and make him understand he was to get a count on that bunch at the first gate, because it didn't look to us that there was over three hundred head where there ought to be at least five hundred.

And then there was nothing to do but ride ahead of the toiling beasts and again down the narrow way that would bring us to the lowlands of the Arrowhead, where the dust no longer choked and one could see green and smell water. From the last mesa we looked out over the Arrowhead's flat fields, six thousand acres under fence, with the ranch house and outbuildings hazy in the distance.

It was a pleasant prospect and warmed Ma Pettengill from her mood of chill negation. She remarked upon the goodliness of the scene, quite as if the present were not a technical year for cattle raisers. Then, as we jogged the six miles home by peaceful thoroughfares, the lady, being questioned persistently and suitably, spoke with utter freedom of Homer Gale, who had shamefully deserted his job for two days at the busiest end of the season, when a white man wouldn't of thought of leaving, even on a matter of life and death.

Had Homer the shadow of an excuse? We shall see.

Well, then, this here celluloid imitation of a cowman that I been using violent words about come into the valley three years ago and rapidly got a lot of fame by reason of being a confirmed bachelor and hating the young of the human species with bitterness and constancy. I was the one that brought him in; I admit that. First time I seen him he was being a roistering blade in the Fashion Waffle Kitchen down at Red Gap. He was with Sandy Sawtelle and a couple other boys from the ranch here, and Sandy tells me later that he is looking for work, being a good cowhand. I said he looked like something else, being dressed in an uproarious check suit of clothes that would instantly of collected a crowd in most city streets. But Sandy says that's all right; he's a regler cowman and had to wear these startling garments for a disguise to get him safe out of Idaho.

It seems he'd been crowded out of that thriving state by a yearning and determined milliner that had witnesses a-plenty and intended to do something about it. Defendant claimed he hadn't even meant anything of the sort and was just being a good pal; but it looked like the cruel teeth of the law was going to bite right into his savings if this breach-of-promise suit ever come to trial, the lady having letters from him in black and white. So Homer had made a strategic retreat, avoiding contact with the enemy, and here he was. And how about taking him on at the Arrowhead, where he could begin a new life?

Needing another hand just then, I fussed none at all about Homer's scandalous past. I said he could throw in with us; and he did. When he got dressed in a legal manner he looked like he couldn't be anything else but a cowhand. About forty and reliable, he looked. So I sent him to a summer camp over on the Madeline plains, where I had a bunch of cattle on government range. Bert Glasgow lived in a shack with his wife and family there and had general charge, and Homer was to begin his new life by helping Bert.

His new life threatened to be short. He showed up here late the third night after he went over, looking sad and desperate and hunted. He did look that way more or less at all times, having one of these long, sad moustaches and a kind of a bit-into face. This night he looked worse than usual. I thought the hellhounds of the law from Idaho might of took up his winding trail; but no. It was the rosy-cheeked tots of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Glasgow that had sent him out into the night.

"Say," he says, "I wouldn't have you think I was a quitter, but if you want to suicide me just send me back to that horrible place. Children!" he says. "That's all; just children! Dozens of 'em! Running all over the place, into everything, under everything, climbing up on you, sticking their fingers into your eyes--making life unbearable for man and beast. You never once let on to me," he says reproachfully, "that this Bert had children."

"No," I says; "and I never let on to you that he's got a mole on his chin either. What of that?"

Then the poor lollop tries to tell me what of it. I saw he really had been under a nervous strain, all right. Suffering had put its hot iron on him. First, he just naturally loathed children anyway. Hadn't he run away from a good home in Iowa when he was sixteen, account of being the oldest of seven? He said some things in general about children that would of got him no applause at a mothers' meeting. He was simply afraid to look a child in the eye; and, from what he'd like to do to 'em all, it seemed like his real middle name was Molech. Wasn't that the party with hostile views about children? Anyway, you could see that Homer's idea of a real swell festivity would be to hide out by an orphan asylum some night until the little ones had said their prayers and was tucked all peaceful into their trundle beds and then set fire to the edifice in eight places after disconnecting the fire alarm. That was Homer, and he was honest; he just couldn't help it.

And Bert's tikes had drove him mad with their playful antics. He said he'd be set down for a bite of dinner and one of 'em would climb up his back and feel his hair--not saying a word, just taking hold of it; then it would jump down and another would climb up and do the same thing, and him not daring to defend himself. He'd got so worked up he was afraid to stay on the place.

"And you know," he says--"what I can't understand--danged if Bert don't seem to kind of like 'em. You may think I'm a liar, but he waited for one the other morning when it squealed at him and kept a hold of its hand clean down to the hay barn. What do you think of that? And besides these that go round infesting the place outside he's got a short yearling and a long two-year-old that have to be night-herded. I listened to 'em every night. One yelled and strangled all last night, till I s'posed, of course, it was going to perish everlastingly; but here this morning it was acting like nothing at all had happened.

"All I can say is, Bert don't have much luck. And that littlest yeller always unswallowing its meals with no effort whatever! It's horrible! And the mother, with no strength of character--feeble-minded, I reckon--coddles 'em! She never did cuss 'em out proper or act human toward 'em. Kids like them, what they need--upside down and three quick hard ones. I know!"

I was fool enough to argue with him a bit, trying to see if he didn't have a lick of sense. I told him to look how happy Bert was; and how his family had made a man of him, him getting more money and saving more than ever in his past life. Homer said what good would all that money do him? He'd only fool it away on his wife and children.

"He regrets it, all right," says Homer. "I says to myself the other day: 'I bet a cookie he'd like to be carefree and happy like me!'"

Homer was a piker, even when he made bets with himself. And the short of it was I sent a man that didn't hate children over to Bert's and kept Homer on the place here.

He stayed three months and said it was heaven, account of not having them unnecessary evils on the place that would squirm round a man's legs and feel of his hair and hide round corners and peek at him and whisper about him. Then I changed foremen and Scott Humphrey, the new one, brought three towheads with him of an age to cause Homer the anguish of the damned, which they done on the first day they got here by playing that he was a horse and other wild animals, and trying to pull the rest of his hair out.

He come in and cut himself out of my life the day after, shaking his head and saying he couldn't think what the world was coming to. As near as I could make him, his idea was that the world was going to be swamped with young ones if something wasn't done about it, like using squirrel poison or gopher traps.

I felt like I wanted to cuff him up to a peak and knock the peak off; but I merely joked and said it was too bad his own folks hadn't come to think that way while he could still be handled easy. I also warned him it was going to be hard to find a job without more or less children on the outskirts, because ours was a growing state. He said there must be a few sane people left in the world. And, sure enough, he gets a job over to the Mortimers'--Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie being past seventy and having nothing to distress Homer.

Of course the secret of this scoundrel's get-away from Idaho had got round the valley, making him a marked man. It was seen that he was a born flirt, but one who retained his native caution even at the most trying moments. Here and there in the valley was a hard-working widow that the right man could of consoled, and a few singles that would of listened to reason if properly approached; and by them it was said that Homer was a fiend for caution. He would act like one of them that simply won't take no for an answer--up to a certain point. He would seem to be going fur in merry banter, but never to words that the law could put any expensive construction on. He would ride round to different ranches and mingle at dances and picnics, and giggle and conduct himself like one doomed from the cradle to be woman's prey--but that was all.

Funny how he'd escaped through the years, him having apparently the weak and pliant nature that makes the ideal husband, and having reached the time of life when he was putting sheep dip on his hair where the lining shone through on top. But so it was. And his views on children had also become widely known. Mothers used to grab up their youngest ones when he'd go into the post office down at Kulanch or meet one on the road. He made no hit at all with such views among them that had learned better. Still there was hopeful ones that thought he might be made to take a joke sooner or later, and the fact that he was known to save his wages and had a nice little stake laid by didn't work against him any with such parties as might have a chance to be swept off their feet by him in a mad moment.

Then over at the Mortimers' place he meets Mrs. Judson Tolliver, a plausible widow lady who come into the valley every once in a while to do sewing round at different ranches. She was a good-built, impressive person, with a persuading manner; one of these competent ones that can take charge of affairs and conduct them unassisted, and will do so if not stopped. Uncle Henry Mortimer brought her to the house in his light wagon one morning, with her sewing machine in the back. And Homer was there to help her out and help out with the machine and see it was placed right in the sitting room; and then help out with her satchel and ask in a gentlemanly manner if everything was all right--and everything was: Thank you so much, Mr. Gale!

This party was no simpering schoolgirl. She was thirty-five or so and square-jawed, and did her hair plain, and had a managing voice that would go good at club meetings. She read library books and was a good conversationalist. And what did she do the first evening, when Homer was mending one of his shirts by the kitchen lamp, but wrench it away from him roguishly and do the job herself, while she entertained him with conversation. It was bound to be entertaining, for she started in about what trials children was to their tormented parents and how the world would be brighter and better if it consisted entirely of adults.

Any one might of thought she'd been hearing gossip about Homer's likes and dislikes. I know that's what I thought afterward, when he opened his soul to me. She said what a mercy it was that half a dozen yelling demons wasn't in this house at that moment to make life an evil thing for all. And Homer sunned right up and took the talk away from her. While she done his mending he spoke heatedly of little children in his well-known happy vein, relating many incidents in his blasted career that had brought him to these views. The lady listened with deep attention, saying "Ah, yes, Mr. Gale!" from time to time, and letting on there must be a strong bond of sympathy between them because he expressed in choice words what she had so often felt.

Homer must of been kind of swept off his feet at that very moment, and the rapids just below him. I guess he'd already been made mushy sentimental by seeing the ideal romantic marriage between Uncle Henry and his wife--forty years or so together and still able to set down in peace and quiet without having something squirm over you to see what you had in your pockets or ask what made your hair come out that funny way, till you wished a couple she-bears would rush out and devour forty-two of 'em.

It was the first of quite many evenings when Homer and the lady would set with a dish of apples and fried cakes between 'em and denounce the world's posterity. The lady was even suffering grave doubts about marriage. She said having to make her own way after she lost her husband had made her relish her independence too much to think of ever giving it up again lightly. Of course she wouldn't say that possibly at some time in the dim future a congenial mate that thought as she did on vital topics--and so forth--just enough to give Homer a feeling of security that was wholly unwarranted. Wasn't he the heedless Hugo?

He was quite wordy about the lady to me when he come over on an errand one day. He told me all about these delightful talks of theirs, and what an attractive person she was, sound as a nut, and companionable and good-looking without being one of these painted dolls. He said, to see her above her sewing, she was a lovely view that he never tired of gazing at, and to hear her loathe children was music to the ear. He said she was a rare woman. I said she must be and asked him if he had committed himself.

"Well, I don't say I have and I don't say I haven't," he says; "but here I be, standing with reluctant feet at the parting of the ways. And who knows what might happen? I know I've had some darned close shaves from doing a whole lot worse in my time."