“That’s it; they always intimate that running a ranch is mere cream puffs compared to a regular business, and they’d like to do the same thing to-morrow if only they was ready to retire from active life.  Mebbe they get the idea from these here back-to-nature stories about a brokendown bookkeeper, sixty-seven years old, with neuritis and gastric complications and bum eyesight, and a wife that ain’t ever seen a well day; so they take every cent of their life savings of eighty-three dollars and settle on an abandoned farm in Connecticut and clear nine thousand dollars the first year raising the Little Giant caper for boiled mutton.  There certainly ought to be a law against such romantic trifling.  In the first place, think of a Connecticut farmer abandoning anything worth money!  Old Timmins comes from Connecticut.  Any time that old leech abandons a thing, bookkeepers and all other parties will do well to ride right along with him.  I tell you now—­”

The second cigarette was under way, and suddenly, without modulation, the performer was again on the theme, Posnett nee Postlethwaite.

“Met her two years ago in Boston, where I was suffering a brief visit with my son-in-law’s aunts.  She was the sole widow of a large woolen mill.  That’s about all I could ever make out—­couldn’t get any line on him to speak of.  The first time I called on her—­she was in pink silk pyjamas, smoking a perfecto cigar, and unpacking a bale of lion and tiger skins she’d shot in Africa, or some place—­she said she believed there would be fewer unhappy marriages in this world if women would only try more earnestly to make a companion of their husbands; she said she’d tried hard to make one of hers, but never could get him interested in her pursuits and pastimes, he preferring to set sullenly at his desk making money.  She said to the day of his death he’d never even had a polo mallet in his hand.  And wasn’t that pitiful!

“And right now she wanted to visit a snappy little volcano she’d heard about in South America—­only she had a grown son and daughter she was trying to make companions of, so they would love and trust her; and they’d begged her to do something nearer home that was less fatiguing; and mebbe she would.  And how did I find ranching now?  Was I awfully keen about it and was it ripping good sport?  I said yes, to an extent.  She said she thought it must be ripping, what with chasing the wild cattle over hill and dale to lasso them, and firing off revolvers in company with lawless cowboys inflamed by drink.  She went on to give me some more details of ranch life, and got so worked up about it that we settled things right there, she being a lady of swift decisions.  She said it wouldn’t be very exciting for her, but it might be fine for son and daughter, and bring them all together in a more sacred companionship.