Sandy brought his news to the owner of the Arrowhead as she relaxed in my company on the west veranda of the ranch house and scented the golden dusk with burning tobacco of an inferior but popular brand.  I listened but idly to the minute details of the catastrophe, discovering more entertainment in the solemn wake of light a dulled sun was leaving as it slipped over the sagging rim of Arrowhead Pass.  And yet, through my absorption with the shadows that now played far off among the folded hills, there did come sharply the impression that this Sawtelle person was dwelling too insistently upon the precise number of stitches required by the breach in Jerry’s hide.

“Fourteen—­yes, ma’am; fourteen stitches.  That there Alice mule sure needs handling.  Fourteen regular ones.  I’d certainly show her where to head in at, like now she was my personal property.  Me, I’d abuse her shamefully.  Only eleven I took last time in poor old Jerry; and here now it’s plumb fourteen—­yes, ma’am; fourteen good ones.  Say, you get fourteen of them stitches in your hide, and I bet—­thought, at first, I could make twelve do, but it takes full fourteen, with old Jerry nearly tearing the chute down while I was taking these fourteen—­”

I began to see numbers black against that glowing panorama in the west.  A monstrous 14 repeated itself stubbornly along the gorgeous reach of it.

“Yes, ma’am—­fourteen; you can go out right now and count ’em yourself.  And like mebbe I’ll have to go down to town to-morrow for some more of that King of Pain Liniment, on account of Lazarus and Bryan getting good and lamed in this same mix-up, and me letting fall the last bottle we had on the place and busting her wide open—­”

“Don’t you bother to bust any more!” broke in his employer in a tone that I found crisp with warning.  “There’s a whole new case of King of Pain in the storeroom.”

“Huh!” exclaimed the surgeon, ably conveying disappointment thereby.  “And like now if I did go down I could get the new parts for that there mower—­”

“That’s something for me to worry about exclusively.  I’ll begin when we got something to mow.”  There was finished coldness in this.

“Huh!” The primitive vocable now conveyed a lively resentment, but there was the pleading of a patient sufferer in what followed.  “And like at the same time, having to make the trip anyway for these here supplies and things, I could stop just a minute at Doc Martingale’s and have this old tooth of mine took out, that’s been achin’ like a knife stuck in me fur the last fourteen—­well, fur about a week now—­achin’ night and day—­no sleep at all now fur seven, eight nights; so painful I get regular delirious, let me tell you.  And, of course, all wore out the way I am, I won’t be any good on the place till my agony’s relieved.  Why, what with me suffering so horrible, I just wouldn’t hardly know my own name sometimes if you was to come up and ask me!”