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—­