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.