The immediate results were fragmentary, serving to pique rather than satisfy; a series of hors d’oeuvres that I began to suspect must form the whole repast.  On the verge of coherence the woman would break off to gloat over a herd of thoroughbred Durhams or a bunch of sportive Hereford calves or a field teeming with the prized fruits of intermarriage between these breeds.  Or she found diversion in stupendous stacks of last summer’s hay, well fenced from pillage; or grounds for criticising the sloth of certain of her henchmen, who had been told as plain as anything that “that there line fance” had to be finished by Saturday; no two ways about it!  She repeated the language in which she had conveyed this decision.  There could have been no grounds for misunderstanding it.

And thus the annals of Broadmoor began to dribble to me, overlaid too frequently for my taste with philosophic reflections at large upon what a lone, defenceless woman could expect in this world—­irrelevant, pointed wonderings as to whether a party letting on he was a good ranch hand really expected to perform any labour for his fifty a month, or just set round smoking his head off and see which could tell the biggest lie; or mebbe make an excuse for some light job like oiling the twenty-two sets of mule harness over again, when they had already been oiled right after haying.  Furthermore, any woman not a born fool would get out of the business the first chance she got, this one often being willing to sell for a mutilated dollar, except for not wishing financial ruin or insanity to other parties.

Yet a few details definitely emerged.  “Her” name was called Posnett, though a party would never guess this if he saw it in print, because it was spelled Postlethwaite.  Yes, sir!  All on account of having gone to England from Boston and found out that was how you said it, though Cousin Egbert Floud had tried to be funny about it when shown the name in the Red Gap Recorder.  The item said the family had taken apartments at Red Gap’s premier hotel de luxe, the American House; and Cousin Egbert, being told a million dollars was bet that he never could guess how the name was pronounced in English, he up and said you couldn’t fool him; that it was pronounced Chumley, which was just like the old smarty—­only he give in that he was surprised when told how it really was pronounced; and he said if a party’s name was Postlethwaite why couldn’t they come out and say so like a man, instead of beating round the bush like that?  All of which was promising enough; but then came the Hereford yearlings to effect a breach of continuity.

These being enough admired, I had next to be told that I wouldn’t believe how many folks was certain she had retired to the country because she was lazy, just keeping a few head of cattle for diversion—­she that had six thousand acres of land under fence, and had made a going concern per diem of it for thirty years, even if parties did make cracks about her gates; but hardly ever getting a good night’s sleep through having a “passel” of men to run it that you couldn’t depend on—­though God only knew where you could find any other sort—­the minute your back was turned.