Wasn’t that just like the old smarty?  You never know when you got him nailed.  And feeling so good over getting even with the Wales couple that had about a thousand dollars of his money that very minute!

* * * * *

Still from the dimly lighted bunk house came the wail of Sandy Sawtelle to make vibrant the night.  He had returned to his earlier song after intermittent trifling with an extensive repertoire: 

    There’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway,
    A million tears for every gleam, they say. 
    Those lights above you think nothing of you;
    It’s those who love you that have to pay....

It was the wail of one thwarted and perishing.  “Ain’t it the sobbing tenor?” remarked his employer.  “But you can’t blame him after the killing he made before.  Of course he’ll get to town sooner or later and play this fourteen number, being that the new reform administration, with Lon Price as Mayor, is now safely elected and the game has opened up again.  Yes, sir; he’s nutty about stitches in a mule.  I wouldn’t put it past him that he had old Jerry kicked on purpose to-day!”

VII

KATE; OR, UP FROM THE DEPTHS

This day I fared abroad with Ma Pettengill over wide spaces of the Arrowhead Ranch.  Between fields along the river bottom were gates distressingly crude; clumsy, hingeless panels of board fence, which I must dismount and lift about by sheer brawn of shoulder.  Such gates combine the greatest weight with the least possible exercise of man’s inventive faculties, and are named, not too subtly, the Armstrong gate.  This, indeed, is the American beauty of ranch humour, a flower of imperishable fragrance handed to the visitor—­who does the lifting with guarded drollery or triumphant snicker, as may be.  Buck Devine or Sandy Sawtelle will achieve the mot with an aloof austerity that abates no jot unto the hundredth repetition; while Lew Wee, Chinese cook of the Arrowhead, fails not to brighten it with a nervous giggle, impairing its vocal correctness, moreover, by calling it the “Armcatchum” gate.

Ma Pettengill was more versatile this day.  The first gate I struggled with she called Armstrong in a manner dryly descriptive; for the second she managed a humorous leer to illumine the term; for the third, secured with a garland of barbed wire that must be painfully untwisted, she employed a still broader humour.  Even a child would then have known that calling this criminal device the Armstrong gate was a joke of uncommon richness.